Primoz Bozic Blog

What experts don’t tell you about starting an online business this year

There’s a lot of outdated advice on starting an online business in the industry these days. Here are some extra tips on how to start an online business.

I’m not just talking about scammy internet marketers that tell you that you can make $104,564 over the next 30 days with this “magical new technique”. You know that a lot of these people are full of crap, and you likely aren’t following any of them.

I’m talking about the top online business experts who have actually built their online businesses successfully. Even they (mostly unintentionally) share bad or outdated advice that doesn’t work as well as advertised anymore. Expert digital marketing Fort Collins offers useful marketing solutions.

There are a few reasons for that:

REASON #1 – The advice they’re sharing worked 10 or 5 years ago, but doesn’t work any more

Most of the online business experts started their online businesses back in 2006 or 2007 (with a few exceptions that started their businesses around 2011 and 2012). At that point, the playing field was completely different than it was today.

Take a look at this graph from WordPress:

In 2006, there were 70,000 blog posts published every day. By 2011, that number was up to 400,000. Today, that number is closer to 2,800,000. This means that today, there’re 40x more blog posts published every day than they were when most online business experts started their own online businesses.

As you can imagine, the game changes dramatically when there’s 40x more competition out there, and the simple techniques (like blogging every day) that used to work just don’t work any more. Even some other techniques that used to work 5 years ago don’t work well any more (more on that later in this post).

Many online programs that teach you how to start your own online business have been developed 3-5 years ago, and weren’t updated properly as the industry evolved. Or even if they were created later, they often rely on the data and strategies from 5+ years ago.
While concepts like copywriting are truly evergreen and last for centuries, these growth strategies just don’t work any more (we’ll dive into why that is below).

REASON #2 – The advice they’re sharing worked for their top clients, but doesn’t work for everyone

In most of the online business courses I’ve joined, I’ve only seen a few % of people succeed with them and get massive results like “earning $45,000 in a month”. The large majority of these people already had successful online businesses before joining the online courses, so they used them to grow their businesses, not start them.

If you’ve joined any of the online courses, you’ll notice that these success stories are usually just the tip of the iceberg (while most people aren’t successful with them).

I call this “The Tip of The Iceberg Effect”:

There’re a lot of reasons for why this happens (we’ll cover those another day), but the issue that’s relevant to us is that the course creators often look at what these star students do, and assume their strategies will work for everyone.

The danger of doing this is that instead of looking at strategies that what will work for everyone, they’re looking at strategies that only worked for a handful of people. This means they’re often talking about people who are the exception to the rule, rather than the rule.

Guest posting is one of those examples. The vast majority of people who try to use guest posting as a strategy miserably fail with it, while the top few % of people get incredible results with it (more on that later).

REASON #3 – They set false expectations in their copywriting

The third reason lies in copywriting. Copywriters that write sales pages for online entrepreneurs often come in on a project, get some data about promises they can make (from the tip of the iceberg students and things that worked for the entrepreneur 5-10 years ago), then blow up these promises to make them even more compelling (and get more sales for the online programs).

By doing this, they create a gap between what’s promised to people, and what’s actually possible for most people. I call this the “Expectations vs Reality Gap”:

They make promises like:

You can successfully start an online business from scratch in 8 weeks (most people can’t)
You can build a business even if you don’t have an idea, you’re not an expert, and have limited time (most people never do)
You can double your revenue or email list in 30 days (almost nobody does)

Combine this with some sexy copywriting and “painting the dream”, and you’ll have an incredibly compelling story that COULD happen, but never really happens for most people.

This kind of copywriting gets people to buy, but also sets up people for disappointment when they don’t achieve the results they were promised in the time-frame that was promised. That’s where the disconnect between the promised effectiveness and the actual effectiveness of growth strategies comes from.

That’s why you’re thinking “why isn’t this working for me even though I’m putting in the work?”. You’re not only seeing the tip of the iceberg results, you’re seeing an amplified version of them. You’re dreaming about building a 6-figure online business in a year, but when you’re actually supposed to build an online business yourself, the reality hits you and you realize that building an online business isn’t as easy as these copywriters make it sound.

The funny thing is that most of these copywriters have never ran online businesses themselves or used the strategies they’re talking about. They just get access to the data of the tip of the iceberg students and then try to sell as many products as possible.

I don’t care much for that type of copywriting. I’d rather focus on things that REALLY work (and eliminating things that don’t), and talking about things as they really are, rather than painting this imaginary dream.

Since I’ve worked closely with over 1,000 online entrepreneurs in the past to help them start and grow their online businesses, I know which strategies actually work for the majority of people, which only work for a few people, and which don’t work at all.

That’s exactly what I’ll talk about in this in this email. We’ll take a closer look at the common strategies for starting and growing your online business, and I’ll share with you what actually works and what doesn’t work as well as advertised.

First, we’ll look at two strategies that are related to finding your profitable business idea, and then we’ll look at 6 more strategies that are related to building an audience for your blog.

Let’s dive in!

STRATEGY #1: Customer research

Every online business course I’ve ever taken starts with customer research. Talk to your customers. Interview them. Email them. Go on Reddit. Google keywords in your industry. Read amazon reviews of popular books in your niche. Go on Quora. You know the drill.

But then, I’ve also seen hundreds of people “stuck” for months in the customer research phase. Either it’s because they don’t know how to find people to talk to, because they don’t feel like they have “enough” research, because they get mixed responses from their customers.

So instead of actually building an online business, they’re running in circles and talking (or thinking of talking) to people about hypothetical ideas. “Would you someday buy an online course around this topic? Would you read about this topic?”, etc.

At the end, they’re no closer to starting an online business than they were a few months ago.

I have a slightly different opinion than most experts have around customer research. I believe customer research should be:

Highly targeted around a specific product or a free resource you’re trying to create, with a clear goal in mind (rather than just general research about your industry)
Done rapidly and intensively, over the course of a week or two (rather than turning into this multiple month process)

That’s because general research doesn’t really help you move forward, you don’t know when you have “enough” of it, and you don’t know what to do with it.

With highly targeted research, you’re always creating something – like a table of contents for your free resource or an outline for your online program – AND you’re getting feedback on your outline as you do this, rather than just talking about hypothetical topics.

The other reason why I’m a big proponent of doing rapid research is that you’ll do your best research with your paid customers once you take them through a 1on1 of group program, and you can actually SEE what’s working and what isn’t for them. You’ll never get the best insights from just talking to random strangers.

So while I do think that customer research is important (especially when you’re developing a paid product or a service), I think it’s usually overemphasized for the beginning stages of an online business. It’s something that becomes much more important and relevant later down the line when you’re already making money.

STRATEGY #2: Finding your niche

A lot of experts tell you that you have to find your unique niche (or positioning) right off the bat. When I ask beginner online entrepreneurs what they do, they usually say something along the lines of:

“I help 25-35 year old male professionals, who are in a relationship but they don’t have kids with…”

This might sound good on paper, but the reality is they’re completely missing the point. They’re talking about this imaginary customer, instead of choosing a simple audience (like lawyers) and talking about the one problem they’re actually helping them solve (get more clients).

Combined with the unnecessarily extensive research, the process of finding “your perfect niche” can extend to months and months of planning, talking to people and looking at your research notes, without making any visible progress on your business.

In reality, most successful online businesses don’t start with the perfect niche. I sure as hell didn’t – my first successful business was as simple as “productivity for online poker players”, and my second successful online business was as simple as “productivity for executives and entrepreneurs”.

These niches were far from perfect, but they were “good enough” for me to get started with building an audience and creating online courses and coaching programs that served my new followers.

It was important for me to start creating content within those niches (to build an audience) and to start offering paid services (to get more feedback to refine my niche over time).

If you’re at the beginning stages of an online business, you don’t need to waste months on finding a super detailed description of your audience demographics. It won’t get you closer to finding your first customers online or growing an audience – it will just needlessly delay that process for months. Even with bad credit business loans you may have financing options.

Instead, you can pick just one simple problem and one simple audience (like the getting more clients for lawyers example), and go out and TEST the demand in that niche it by creating some content around it. This way, you’ll know what people actually connect with and what they don’t, rather than thinking about it at home in a vacuum.

Ok, now let’s move on to other strategies that are actually related to building your email list to a point where you can get your first paying customers from it.

STRATEGY #3: Writing (and promoting) remarkable content on your website

Most of the top online entrepreneurs these days (people like Ramit Sethi, Neil Patel, Noah Kagan and Marie Forleo) started their blogs back in 2006 or 2007. Few of them ever share what they did to build their audiences of tens of thousands of email subscribers, but if you look closely at what they did, it’s simple. They created a TON of content on their blogs.

Since they started out relatively early when “only” 70,000 blog posts were published on a daily basis, they had little to no competition. In those times, even setting up a website to blog on or an email list to capture email subscribers was much more difficult than today, and blogging wasn’t a thing everyone could do yet.

They built their audiences by consistently creating content (some of it was good, some of it wasn’t as they’ll likely admit), and over time they’ve amassed more and more traffic and email subscribers to their website. Since they were one of the few people doing this for a longer amount of time, they soon established themselves as #1 experts in the industry.

Of course they also had other means of building an audience that they used over time – Marie Forleo had her YouTube channel called Marie TV and the targeted marketing done for it was one of the keys for her success. In case you also want to become popular on YT, then make sure to hire the right provider of youtube views for your videos to increase its popularity. Ramit Sethi wrote his book and gained audience, appeared on TV and had a widely popular guest post published for Tim Ferriss, Neil Patel wrote his Ultimate Guides, and so on – but in the beginning, all they did was really just write content.

Over the next 5 years, these entrepreneurs realized it’s becoming harder and harder to build an online business (as more and more people were jumping on the blogging train), and they had to come up with new strategies to grow their audiences. At the same time, more people were starting to build their online businesses, and more and more experts started to make a name out of themselves.

That’s when the experts started talking about guest posting, being on podcasts and creating “remarkable content”, which basically means that instead of creating multiple blog posts every week, you need to create 2-3,000 word pieces of content that are better than the 500 word blog posts, and create them 1-2x/month.

The ideas of “influencer outreach” and “promoting your content” were also born at that time, which basically said that you shouldn’t just spend the time creating new content, and that you should spend as much time if not more promoting it through guest posting, podcasting, reaching out to influencers and asking them to share it, and sharing it in forums and online communities.

These strategies worked great for a while (and still might in untapped industries like a non-English market or an up-and-coming niche), but over time, when more and more people started using them, they lost their effectiveness.

Remember, there’re 2,800,000 blog posts published today every single day, which is 7x more than 5 years ago, and 40x more than 10 years ago. This means that every day, we’re absolutely bombarded with new content.

Every person that writes a new blog post shares it on their social media, and if we were seeing 5 blog posts a day on our Facebook feed 5 years ago, we’re now seeing 35 (or even more, if a lot of our friends are also online entrepreneurs). This means we’re less and less likely to pay attention to any of the content that’s created, and we’re also much less likely to share it with other people.

Because of this, there’s a much smaller chance of our “remarkable” blog posts taking off and going viral, especially if we don’t have a huge following of raving fans yet. If we’re just starting out with our business, we might have an initial spike of new traffic and subscribers when we excitedly release our new website and with the first few blog posts we write, but this slowly dies out.

As far as influencer outreach goes, this strategy used to work in the past when there was less content and less people reaching out to people to share it, but nowadays the major influencers in the industry are bombarded with requests to share their content, and they rarely do it unless it’s really meaningful to them or the content really stands out to them.

They’re also busy sharing and promoting their own content, which has become harder for them than in the past. And since they now have whole teams writing the content for them, they’re producing a lot more content, and they don’t “need” more content from other people for their readers as much as when they published one post every 2 weeks.

And when it comes to sharing your content in online communities, the game is also different than it used to be. In the past, when the communities were smaller and less people were sharing their content (mostly the people that were a part of these communities), you could use the communities to spread the word about your content quickly and effectively.

But today, the communities are fed up with people coming into them and just trying to promote themselves, without actually adding a ton of value to the members of these communities. They see right through it, and often prohibit this from happening.

Bottom line is that just creating “remarkable content” isn’t enough if you’re trying to start an online business, because nowadays everyone is creating “remarkable content”. If you could stand out with it 5 years ago when everyone was still writing 500 word blog posts, you’re now the same as everyone else. And promoting your content not only feels sleazy and spammy, it’s also not as effective as it used to be.

The only exception to the rule is if your content is really drastically unique and different from everything else out there, or if you’ve found a niche where nobody else is creating remarkable content yet. In those cases, the strategies that worked 5 years ago still might work for you (though that doesn’t mean that they’re the BEST strategies to pursue).

But if you’re in an industry that’s evolved past that point, you’ll have to come up with a new, better approach for growing your audience and customer base.

STRATEGY #4: Guest posting

Over the past few years, guest posting has become a widely recommended strategy for starting and growing your online business.
Some experts have seen huge success with it (which is why they recommend it to others), and I have too (my guest post for Growthlab a few months ago has brought me hundreds of high quality email subscribers).

But what experts don’t tell you is that guest posting is the classic example of the “Tip of The Iceberg Effect”.

The reality is that the experiences that people have with guest posting are more along the lines of these comments that I got from my readers:

“Finding guest posting opportunities was a huge struggle in my niche, as there aren’t many blogs in it. My list size barely changed. My list had a total of 67 subscribers from 3 years and 2 months of work. Nothing seemed to work.”
“I did some guest posting but it felt like it’s going nowhere. Sometimes it brought me 14 subscribers, sometimes 0.”
” I was stuck on 124 subscribers for months. During those months, I tried to get guest posts. I got two, but gained no new subscribers from either.”

Here’s what happens to most people that try to use guest posting as a strategy to grow their email list:

Some get stuck with deciding which guest post opportunities to pursue, or finding the contact details for them
Some pitch the guest posts, but never hear back from them
Some get their pitches accepted, but their drafts get rejected
Some get their drafts accepted, but the guest posts never get published (or they get published months later)
Some get their guest posts published, but get 14 email subscribers from them

In most cases, they spend months and months chasing guest post opportunities, putting in a ton of work without any major results – or they have one successful guest post that brings them 100 email subscribers, but aren’t able to replicate that in the future.

So if most people struggle with guest posting, why do some people succeed with it (or even swear by it)?

Well, because guest posting can work well if you can get the guest posts published on the A-list websites. If you can land a guest post with Tim Ferriss, chances are it’ll bring a huge flood of email subscribers to your business.

But to reach these A-listers, you usually need to have an existing relationship with them (and you need to be known as a credible expert in the industry already). These guest posts never happen from cold pitches.

It’s unlikely you’ll get there with your first guest post – it’ll take years to build these relationships and your expertise.

The other option is guest posting for B-list blogs or contributor websites like Huffington Post. This can sometimes work well if you happen to land a guest post with a website that has a highly engaged (but untapped) audience, but can be a hit or miss in a lot of cases.

What about contributor platforms like Huffington Post? Well, it feels sexy to put that Huffington Post logo on your website, but the reality is that when you publish a post on those platforms, you’ll usually have to promote it yourself, unless you’re able to create a really great post that becomes a trending one and the platform promotes it for you.

I’ve seen some people successfully build their audiences through contributor platforms, but for every person that did that, there’s 5 or 10 people that never really got anything out of them.

Overall, guest posting can be a great strategy to grow your online business once people already consider you an expert, you have something unique and meaningful to talk about, you have some incredible content on your website to point your new readers to, and you have the right relationships built.

If you can easily score a guest post opportunity at a major website, you should absolutely try to make the most out of it – but if you’re just starting out with your business, guest posting isn’t the fastest or most reliable strategy. There’re just too many outside factors you have to depend on that are outside of your control, and you’ll spend more time waiting than actually growing your business.

I recommend using guest posting as a secondary strategy for growing your email list rather than a primary strategy. Once you already have an email list of hundreds or thousands of email subscribers and have a consistent stream of new readers coming in, feel free to diversify your strategies into guest posting.

This way, you’ll be able to benefit from the eventual spike of new email subscribers, but you won’t need to rely on it in order to grow your business.

STRATEGY #5: Being a guest on podcasts

The pros and cons of this strategy are very similar to the guest posting strategy. You can quickly build your audience through podcasting if you can get featured on the top podcasts, whereas the smaller podcasts are more hit and miss.

In order to maximize your chances of getting on the top podcasts out there, you’ll also need (1) an existing mutual relationship that can make an introduction to the podcast host, (2) a proven track record of your expertise, and (3) something meaningful to talk about.

I can tell you from personal experience that 90% of my podcast opportunities came from introductions from my close friends or from meeting people in person, and they’ve come to me once I was already considered an expert and people knew and trusted me. This helped me skip the 3-month application processes and land opportunities I’d otherwise need to spend months chasing.

The upside of podcasts over guest posts is that they take considerably less time to put together (a great guest post can take 10-20 hours or more of your time, while you can record a great podcast episode in an hour), which in my mind makes this strategy a bit better, as you can become a guest on more podcasts in far less time.

Still, I wouldn’t recommend this strategy to someone who’s just starting out with their online business. If you haven’t showcased your expertise yet, don’t have the right relationships built or don’t have anything really meaningful and unique to talk about, chances of you getting accepted to great podcasts are relatively low.

STRATEGY #6: Media opportunities

Media opportunities like being profiled in Forbes or Business Insider are also very similar to guest posting and podcasting. They can be a great way to further grow your business, but maybe tricky to implement if you’re just starting out with it.

My biggest media opportunities (being featured on Business Insider, Entrepreneur and Yahoo Finance) came from personal introductions and in person meet ups, and they came to me after I already had an incredibly story to tell and the business results and expertise to back it up. Klear Picture advisory is committed to helping you reach your goals and make your dreams a reality.

I’d recommend pursuing media opportunities once you’ve already established yourself as a credible expert, once you’re already making money with your business, and want to get more paying customers for your existing products and services. I’d also recommend pursuing media opportunities if you’re based in NYC (or travel there frequently), as that’s where most media is – and if you meet them in person, it’s a lot easier for you to work with them.

When you don’t have a paid product or a service yet and when you haven’t established yourself as an expert yet, I wouldn’t recommend chasing media attention to grow your audience. The media loves talking to experts, and if they Google you and they don’t find something that SHOWS them that you’re the #1 expert to talk to, they won’t want to talk to you or write about you.

STRATEGY #7: Search engine optimization (SEO)

Another strategy that some experts preach for building a blog audience is SEO. At it’s core, search engine optimization allows your website and articles to rank higher on Google and other search engines, so that when your customers try to find the solutions to their problems online, they find your website. The rightful implementation of SEO can be observed from http://www.pochologonzales.com/pochologist-talks-public-speaking-sales-pr-professionals/ and be implemented, for the website to gain popularity.

While this strategy does work in the long run, it takes a long time to actually work (even with proper execution).

How long?

Well, per this study from ahrefs, 95% of newly published pages don’t get to the first page of Google within a year. The pages on the first page of Google are on average 2 years old, while the pages that rank in the #1 spot are over 3 years old.

Of course there are always ways to “work around that”, but even the experts admit that the exceptions to the rule happen mostly with large, established websites that already have existing followings and are able to generate a lot of buzz overnight.

What this tells us is that SEO can definitely be a great long-term strategy if executed properly (though most online entrepreneurs hire SEO agencies for that purpose, rather than doing it themselves), but in the short run it isn’t the most effective strategy for building an online business.

Especially since there are more and more blog posts published every single day, it will get tougher and tougher to rank high on Google. As a beginning entrepreneur without a large following, your time would be better spent elsewhere.

STRATEGY #8: Paid advertising

What about Facebook Ads, Google AdWords etc.? Isn’t paid advertising something a lot of experts are using to grow their online businesses?
The short answer is yes – but not in a way that you might expect, and that doesn’t mean that you should use it too if you’re just starting out with your online business.

Even the experts mostly use paid advertising to sell more of their online products, rather than for growing an audience (because they can get an immediate return on their investment that way).

For example, if you ever visited a sales page from an online business expert, you might have noticed that you’ve seen Facebook ads on your Facebook feed for a few weeks until the course enrollment closed. This is called “retargeting”, and helps bring potential customers back to the sales pages and increase sales by reminding them that the product is still available for sale.

In that case, using paid advertising makes a lot of sense. But when it comes to attracting new audiences or selling products to people that have never heard of you, paid advertising is usually less effective, especially if you’re just starting out with your online business and people have never heard of you.

Think about it – how often have you seen an ad from someone on Facebook that you’ve never heard of, clicked on it and subscribed to their email list, or bought their products? Me? Not a single time.

Paid advertising can be a great way to boost your business revenues (granted that you know how to do it properly) once you already have a product or a service to sell, but when you’re just starting out, it’s better to stay away from it.

Ok, we’ve gone through 8 different strategies that aren’t the best fit for growing your email list and getting your first customers if you’re just starting out with your business, so I know you’ll be wondering…

“What can I do to build my online business instead?”

Well, I’m glad you asked – and tomorrow, I’ll be introducing a strategy to you that works a lot better than all of these strategies (and I’ll share with you stories and examples of people who have successfully used it this year to jump-start their online businesses).

But before I do that, I’d love to hear from you:

What has your experience been with the above strategies? Have you had the same results and experiences with them as I talked about, or was your experience different?

I’d love to hear from you – let me know by leaving a comment below!

And make sure you stay tuned for tomorrow’s blog post – you’ll love it.

-Primoz

Why my first two blogs never turned into profitable online businesses

By Primoz Bozic Leave a Comment

I see so many of my readers struggle with growing their online businesses these days. They say things like:

“I’ve spent last 24 months working on my business without earning anything. I tried everything I was “supposed” to do and got my email list to 236 email subscribers, but the progress is too slow. I sometimes get 14 email subscribers from a guest post and sometimes 0. I feel like it will take years to get anywhere with my business.”
“I built a product, launched it, and got ZERO customers. Then I rebuild it from scratch and confidently launched it again. This time results really shocked me – I’ve got zero customers AGAIN! What am I missing?”
“It’s super frustrating to hear success stories from other people of how they grew their email lists and got their first paying customers with their business idea. I wonder, What am I doing wrong?”

I can relate to them, because just a few years ago, I was in the exact same place as them.
Before I was able to build a successful online business, I struggled for months – and today I’ll reveal some of the frustrating details of starting my journey as an online entrepreneur.

My first (and most frustrating) experience with blogging

A few years ago, when I saw how many other people were using their blogs to run successful online businesses, I said to myself “hey, I could do this too!”.

I started my own blog, and called it “Skyrocket Your Productivity”, where I wanted to help people become more productive in their lives.

I shelled out $500 to get a website designed because I thought that’s what would make my blog a success (I was a bit naive at the time):

Then I started writing blog post after blog post to build an audience for my business.

I wrote about books I’ve read:

I wrote about random things that I’ve found interesting:

I even tried writing “daily productivity tips” for 2 weeks:

I put hundreds of hours into creating new content over the course of 6 months, and I really felt like I gave it my all.

There was just one problem – my blog wasn’t going ANYWHERE.
After spending 6 months writing, my email list never grew past 46 email subscribers (and most of them were my friends and family). I thought I was creating valuable content, but nobody really seemed to care about it, and my blog wasn’t rapidly growing like I wanted it to grow, and like I thought it would grow.

I didn’t make any money with my blog either.

I tried to monetize my blog by getting people to buy books that I’ve read through affiliate links, but I never even got enough affiliate revenues to withdraw my money from Amazon (I think you had to earn a minimum of $15 to do that).

I’ve spent hundreds of dollars and hundreds of hours to start my own online business, but the results just weren’t coming in. The worst part was that I didn’t know why, and that frustrated me.

Eventually, after I really felt like I tried everything, I became so discouraged that I shut down my blog and moved on:

My second shot at blogging: Different niche, similar story

Since my blog never took off, I thought the “niche” was the problem.

I decided to go back to a niche that I was already familiar with and making money from (productivity for online poker players), and I started a website called “High Stakes Mindset” with a friend of mine where we aspired to teach online poker players how to develop a better mindset.

Over the next few months we blogged there, and as I was starting to learn more about running a successful online business, we were able to build an email list of around 200 email subscribers. Initially, it seemed like things would work out this time.

But when we tried to launch a group coaching program to that email list, the reality hit us. Nobody joined our program. We were disappointed and discouraged, and started thinking that creating online programs and selling them through an email list wasn’t the best way to serve online poker players.

These poker players often got their walls up the minute they felt they were being sold, and they preferred reading forums to blogs.

That was another problem with out blog – we didn’t know how to continue growing it.

We were able to get the initial spike of email subscribers from an online forum we were both already active in, but we soon felt like we had exhausted that strategy. We couldn’t constantly promote our blog through the forums as the administrators of the forum preferred to have their content on the forum, not outside of it.

We thought doing things like guest posting or being on podcasts, but there were almost no websites in the online poker world where we could do that (most of people read a handful of poker forums and that was it).

Eventually we came to the conclusion that this wasn’t a good idea, and at that time I also became more and more tired of working with poker players. I wanted to work with people who were making an actual difference in the world, rather than people who were just taking money from other people who gambled it away.

Together, we made a decision to discontinue that blog as well.

Third time is the charm

At this point, I decided to give Skyrocket Your Productivity another shot. I took the knowledge I’ve acquired over the past few months and decided to really go all out on it.

Eventually, I’ve found a strategy that worked, and my blog started to grow. Within my first year, I was able to grow it to over 2,200 email subscribers:

And I’ve started making some money with it as well.

3 months after restarting my blog, I successfully launched a 2-hour live productivity workshop for $50 to an email list of 500 email subscribers and made 7 sales ($350) with it. A month later, I turned the workshop into an online course and launched it again – this time to a list of 1,200 email subscribers – and made $1,600.

At this point, I knew that there was something there, and I kept working on my online business. Over the next few years, I was able to attract over 300,000 visitors to my website, and earn more than $300k from my blog over the next few years. This was 10x more than I made with my poker productivity coaching business, and 100x more than I made working for 3 months as a programmer in Slovenia at $7/h.

The most interesting part was that I was able to do this in an industry that was already incredibly saturated – productivity for executives and entrepreneurs – and where nobody knew me and considered me an expert yet. I didn’t have a following or connections to start with.

Even though I was far from the #1 expert on productivity, I was able to make a name out of myself, attract thousands of email subscribers, and create online programs that brought in thousands of dollars in revenues.

But the best part about this wasn’t the money. It was the different lifestyle that building an online business allowed me to live, and the things that it allowed me to do that I couldn’t imagine to do otherwise.

Here’s how building an online business changed my life:

I get to work with my dream clients

In my online courses and coaching programs, I’m able to work with some of the top experts in the world to help them start and grow their online businesses.

A few months ago in Chicago, I held a breakfast for some of my students:

The people around me were just incredible people. There was someone working at the World Bank, a celebrity make up artist, a stylist that sells $15,000 dresses, and a world-class songwriter that’s going for a Grammy next year.

I always watching documentaries and reading books from the people who are the best in the world at what they do, but to meet them in person, and work with them together to create their online businesses, is just something I never imagined I could do.

By working with people on such a high level, I know I’m helping create businesses that will impact millions of people in the world – and I wouldn’t be able to meet them or work with them if I didn’t run an online business.

I get to learn from the best online entrepreneurs

Between 2015 and 2016, I worked with Ramit Sethi (one of the top authorities in the online business space) as the lead coach of his Accelerator program where I coached 800+ online entrepreneurs on starting and growing their online businesses:

The best thing about working with Ramit for 2 years was that I was able to see from behind the scenes how he runs his online business. I could see how he develops a strategic plan for his company. I could see how he developed his online programs. I could see how he grew his audience, and how he ran his company.

This allowed me to learn how building a multi-million dollar online business REALLY works, and what it takes to create one.

I’ve also been fortunate enough to meet and learn from other top online entrepreneurs. For example, Selena Soo hosted a private party earlier this year on a rooftop, 50 floors above Manhattan:

It felt like all the top online entrepreneurs were at that party, and I was able to have incredible conversations about the online business industry that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to have.

If I didn’t build my own online business, I wouldn’t be able to meet and work with such incredible people who are really the best in the world at what they do.

I get to speak at conferences in front of hundreds of people

Last year, I spoke at Ramit Sethi’s Forefront event in front of a crowd of 500 people:

Being able to share my knowledge with hundreds of people who are eager to put it into action is just one of the best feelings in the world. Speaking on a stage, and seeing the whole crowd attentively listen, knowing you’ll be able to make a difference in peoples’ lives just feels awesome.

Even a year after the speech (at the next Forefront event) people came up to me and thanked me for the speech and told me how it helped them. That really meant a lot to me.

I get to make an actual impact on peoples’ lives

One of the things I love the most about having an online business is that I get paid for making peoples’ lives better – in big and small ways. A lot of people talk about making an impact and changing the world, but I get to actually see this on a daily basis as I get emails and messages from my clients and readers about how I’ve helped them.

Messages like this:

While it’s nice to have a successful 5-figure product launch or sell out a coaching program, the real joy comes from actually seeing people transform their lives. In my mind, that’s what building an online business is all about. Creating change, not making a quick buck or taking money away from people.

For me it’s not all about list growth and conversions and making money like some internet marketers would like to have you believe. For me, it’s about helping people, then using the money you earn to be able to help more people (while living a better life yourself).

I get to win gold medals

A few weeks ago, I competed at my first powerlifting competition (the national championships in Slovenia) where I won two gold medals:

This wouldn’t have been possible if I didn’t have the time to work out for 10-15 hours a week. It wouldn’t be possible if I didn’t have my team of 3 coaches that helped me polish my lifting technique and supported me in my journey. It wouldn’t be possible if I didn’t work with my high-performance coach who taught me how to mentally prepare for the competition.

Sure, I’d be able to still train powerlifting, but from my past experiences with sports, I’m pretty sure I’d have mediocre results like I always did when I didn’t have 1on1 coaches to help me along the way.

I get to enjoy life to the fullest.

Last but not least, I’m just able to experience a cool lifestyle without feeling financially limited.

This summer, I went to visit my high-performance coach Allon in Israel to watch a basketball match on a 2-day notice:

I drove a sports car for the first time in my life:

And I even went on a yacht trip for the first time at a business mastermind in Cancun:

Now these things are all cool and flashy, but the truth is I don’t do them all the time. That’s not my day-to-day lifestyle. On a daily basis, I work from a coffee shop and write emails like this.

But when I do take the well-needed time off, I get to actually do whatever I want to do, instead of being limited by money and going to the same vacation spot year after year like I did when I was a kid.

This helps me fully recharge and come back to work at my best, so I can continue to work on making a bigger impact in the world.

Over the next few days, I’ll share more about how I built my business to 6 figures (and how you can too). And before I do that, I’ll also share the mistakes that I’ve made along the way and things that I thought worked for building an online business, but didn’t.

Keep an eye for a blog post about that tomorrow – I know that if you’re frustrated with growing your own online business right now and don’t know what to focus on and what not to focus on, you’ll love it.

But enough about me… I’d love to hear from you.

If you were able to accomplish ANYTHING in your online business in 2018 that would change your life, what would that be?

What’s most important to YOU?

Is it finally growing an email list of 500-1,000 email subscribers? Getting your first few coaching clients? Getting the first 3 incredible case studies? Launching an online program? Something completely different?

I’d love to hear from you – just leave a comment below and let me know!

-Primoz

My Virtual Thanksgiving: The Awesome People I’m Grateful For

By Primoz Bozic 2 Comments

“Thanksgiving Day is traditionally a day for families and friends to get together for a special meal. The meal often includes a turkey, stuffing, potatoes, cranberry sauce, gravy, pumpkin pie, and vegetables. Thanksgiving Day is a time for many people to give thanks for what they have.”

-The first search result on Google

I always loved the idea of Thanksgiving, but since we don’t celebrate it in Europe, I never really celebrated or experienced it.

That sucks mainly because I would LOVE to have some of that turkey, potatoes and cranberry sauce. That just sounds awesome.

It also sucks because I feel like I’m missing out on the “thanks giving”, which I do believe is an important part of my life. I always like thanking people who have supported me and helped me get to where I am today.

Since I hate missing out on things, I thought I’d say “screw it”, cheat a little bit, and host my very own Virtual Thanksgiving in the form of this blog post – where I’ll share the people I’m super grateful for this year.

Let’ dive in!

#1 – My kick ass clients, students and readers

Since I’ve transitioned back to running my own business almost a year ago, I’ve had the chance to work with some incredible top performers that are incredibly good at what they do – and helping them start and grow their businesses has been just so much fun and so gratifying.

I love working with people who are already shaping the world to become a better place (from aerospace start up CEOs to celebrity make up artists to world class songwriters pursuing Grammy awards), as well as people who are going to shape the world in the near future through the amazing work they’re doing today.

Breakfast with my students in Chicago

I want to take this moment to thank all the clients that I’ve worked with this year (I won’t share all of their names because I want to respect their privacy), as well as the silent (and less silent) happy readers of this blog who continue to make their lives and businesses better.

One of the things I’m really blown away by is just how many people successfully wrote one or more Ultimate Guides with my help in the past. It’s a LONG list:

Nick wrote his Ultimate Guides about monetizing Facebook live, Facebook video ads and strategic email marketing for fitness & yoga businesses
Diana wrote her Ultimate Guides about starting a profitable online community and keeping an online community engaged
Frank wrote his Ultimate Guides about finding a virtual assistant and productivity for online entrepreneurs
Peter wrote his Ultimate Guides about summer style, fall style, creating a minimalist wardrobe, buying a leather jacket and style for beginners
Jon wrote his Ultimate Guides about doing a handstand and doing your first backflip
Allon wrote his Ultimate Guide about high performance (and has another one on mental toughness coming out soon)
Chris wrote his Ultimate Guide about a perfect morning routine
Jerome wrote his Ultimate Guide about stopping binge eating at night (and is working on another one on intermittent fasting)
Camille wrote her Ultimate Guide about getting a date without going online
Iris wrote her Ultimate Guide about creating a business casual wardrobe (for women)
Matej wrote his Ultimate Guide about finding more time and energy to start a side business (and is working on the second one about deep, focused work)
Audrey wrote her Ultimate Guide about meal prep
Jonathan wrote his Ultimate Guide about setting up your website yourself (and is working on his second guide about setting up an autoresponder sequence)
Jim wrote his Ultimate Guide about RxJava for Android developers
Maria wrote her Ultimate Guide about stopping binge eating for good
Charles wrote his Ultimate Guide about writing 1,000 words a day
Jesse wrote his Ultimate Guide about switching careers to big data
Tree wrote her Ultimate Guide about surviving emotions for empaths and highly sensitive women
Katsumoto wrote his Ultimate Guide about lens design
Ryan wrote his Ultimate Guide about getting a TED talk this year
Rusty wrote his Ultimate Guide to best animation schools
Eanna wrote his Ultimate Guide about indie photo book publishing
Martin wrote his Ultimate Guide to losing your first 10 pounds (in Slovak language)

Plus, there are tens of other guides in the work from my students and readers (and many that I probably didn’t hear about yet).

Just seeing this makes me so happy. Ultimate Guides aren’t easy to write. Most of them are 10-25,000 words long, and take 50-60 hours or more to create. The fact that so many people are spending so much of their (already limited) time to create such amazing content for their readers makes me so happy, because I know we’re really contributing to the world together by sharing great information in a world of internet noise and crappy content.

I also love that we have Ultimate Guides out in the world from so many different industries… From fitness to programming to animation and indie photobook publishing. It’s not just guides about online marketing.

If you’ve ever written an Ultimate Guide with my help… THANK YOU. It means a lot to me. And if you haven’t let me know about it yet, do let me know (email me or leave a comment below). If you want to learn how to write one, click here to get my free Ultimate Guide to Writing Ultimate Guides.

And even if you haven’t written an Ultimate Guide or aren’t planning on writing one, I want to thank you for being a loyal reader of mine – if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be writing this blog.

It’s true that I love nerding out on Ultimate Guides (because they work), but I also love writing about other aspects of online business and being a business coach for top performers – because I love sharing my advice with people who will become the future online influencers and change lives of millions of people.

So thank you for being here – whether you’re my student, 1on1 client, or a reader. I appreciate you.

#2 – My mentors

There are 4 major mentors whose advice has really shaped my business this year (in no particular order).

Selena Soo

I’ve met Selena through Ramit Sethi’s Zero to Launch program a few years ago, and she’s since become a good friend and mentor of mine. I’ve learned a ton from Selena, but there are a few things that really stand out to me.

Nobody puts the care that she’s putting into everyone who she works with (from clients to business partners) like Selena does. She treats every person as if they were her lifelong friend, and really puts her relationships first. Watching Selena run her business has helped me put a lot more care into how I run my own business, and it’s definitely shown in the relationships I was able to build with my students as well.

Selena has taught me a ton about how to to get more media attention for my business, and I really do consider her the #1 expert on publicity in the online business world. Her program Impacting Millions is hands down one of the best online trainings available, and it’s incredible to see how many success stories she’s able to produce from the students that join it. She’s also helped me connect with some major influencers in the industry through her events (like her business anniversary party), which I really appreciate.

Hanging out with Selena at her business anniversary party in NYC

The one thing that few people see if they don’t know Selena well is her drive to continue improving every aspect of her business. Even though she’s created Impacting Millions a few years ago, she’s still regularly working on improving it and making it an even better program. I admire that determination to continue to improve her program until she really can’t make it any better, and because of her approach I’ve adapted a similar mentality in my Ultimate Guide System as well.

Selena has made a huge impact on my business this year, and I’m so grateful to have her as one of my close friends.

Ramit Sethi

Talking to Ramit at his Forefront event in Chicago

Ok, you knew this one was coming. Ramit has had a huge influence on my business over the past few years, and if it wasn’t for him, I don’t think I would have created my own online business. I’ve also worked with his company to develop his Accelerator program between 2015 and 2016, which has helped me experience through my own eyes what building a multi-million dollar business looks like.

The most impactful thing I’ve learned from Ramit this year came from his Forefront event (see my lessons from Forefront here).

Going into Forefront, I wasn’t exactly sure what I should focus on in my business next, and I decided to have a quick conversation with Ramit about it. We had a conversation about changing my writers voice (since I knew that my voice became very similar to his over time as I followed him), and he helped me understand how to develop my own writers voice and run my own business in a way that I want to, and not necessarily the way he would want to.

That lifted a huge weight off my shoulders, and I’ve definitely started running my business in a different way now. I’m no longer worried about what one of my mentors might think when I write something or create a product, and instead focus on the things I want to write about and create, as well as the things that my audience wants me to create.

This has been extremely liberating, and made running my own business a lot more fun. As Ramit likes to say, “I’m the CEO of my own business”, and I was able to go from knowing that to living that.

Derek Halpern

Hanging out with Derek at Selena Soo’s party in NYC

If I had to name one person that has helped me improve my business skills this year, it’s definitely Derek.

Derek’s online courses (I wrote about his Sales Page That Converts on my blog) have been hands down some of the most deep and detailed courses on the internet, and include a wealth of phenomenal information. Since I’m very self-driven, it’s not a problem for me to go through tens of hours of videos and hundreds of pages of worksheets on my own.

His Sales Page That Converts has taught me how to write better sales pages, his Blog That Converts has opened my eyes in terms of long-term strategy for building a blog audience and writing viral content, and his Yes Engines is helping me learn how to create better sales funnels for my online programs. Every single course I’ve taken from Derek to date has been exceptional. I’ve also used his Zippy Courses platform to host all of my online programs, which has been of huge help.

Since I loved Derek’s courses so much, I recently joined his high-end mastermind, where I got to experience how he runs his online business and learned how to work on some of my biggest weaknesses that will help me take my business to the next level.

I don’t think Derek necessarily gets the credit for being a brilliant business mind (as he’s often known for his hilarious YouTube videos), but from taking his courses I know that for the super self-driven people, he’s a great guy to turn to for business advice.

The other thing that people might not know about Derek is that he has a huge heart – he really deeply cares about people. Whenever I reached out to him for help, he was there for me, and I really deeply appreciate that.

Allon Khakshouri

While I’ve learned from Ramit, Selena and Derek over the past few years, this year I’ve found a new mentor that has made a huge difference in how I approach my business and life.

Hanging out with Allon and his wife Naomi in Israel

His name is Allon Khakshouri. Allon is one of the best tennis managers in the world (he’s managed three of the world’s #1 tennis players, including Novak Djokovic), and he is an incredible high-performance expert. As Allon got the idea to teach high performance to business owners, I immediately raised my hand and told him I wanted to work with him.

I knew that I wanted to become the best in the world at what I do, and I turned to Allon because I knew he could help me do that. At that point I didn’t know just how life changing working with Allon would be. I can say that he’s been hands down the most influential person in my life this year, and helped me become a better business owner, athlete and a person.

Allon has taught me how to perform on a higher level and show up as the best version of myself – both on a day to day basis when I work on my business, and on huge days like my powerlifting competition.

He taught me how to get more work done, focus on the right things in my business, constantly learn and improve my skill sets, develop confidence, grit and mental toughness, recover better, improve my relationships with my family and even how I handle my finances.

One of the highlights of my year was visiting Allon in Israel for a few days where we went to see a friendly basketball match between Slovenia and Israel, where I got to explore Israel and it’s beaches, and where we had some incredible conversations about business and life.

I know that Allon is teaching the skills that will help me become the best in my industry, and I know he’ll be one of the major online influencers in the high-performance world in the very near future.

#3 – My best friends

I consider Marc and Diana two of my closest friends, even though our friendship is mostly virtual.

Hanging with Marc and Diana at Forefront in Chicago

Marc and Diana were my teammates while I was working at Ramit Sethi’s Accelerator program, and since that we still chat on a daily basis. I really consider them two of my closest friends, and I turn to them for all the day to day ups and downs, as well as reach out to them for help when I get stuck.

The thing I love the most about Marc and Diana is that they’re two of the hardest working people I know, and they’re both working on their own amazing projects behind the scenes that will be HUGE for them next year – and it’s just so awesome to be a part of their journey.

Of course I love them for selfish reasons as well. Building an online business on your own is hard, and having friends to support you day in and day out through the good and the bad times just makes it a ton easier (and more fun).

Marc and Diana, if you’re reading this, I really appreciate having you in my life – and stay awesome in the future as well!

#4 – My powerlifting trainers

The moment when I was the most proud of myself this year was winning two gold medals at my first powerlifting competition.

This was a crazy experience where I pushed through injuries, losing 30lbs over a few months, tens of hours of workouts each week, and hundreds of hours of mental training. It was one of the hardest and most gratifying moments of my life.

I know this wouldn’t have happened without all 3 of my trainers that support me day in day out. They help me get better at lifting, improve my mentality, push myself beyond my limits, and keep going when things get tough. They’re also there for me all the time when I need their help, which I appreciate.

Having them in my life is not only helping me become a better athlete, it’s also helping me apply what I learn in lifting to other areas of my life, and make me more mentally tough when I work on my business. They often don’t get the credit for the behind the scenes work they do, but they’re a huge part of my life.

#5 – My family

My girlfriend Aida is the person who needs to put up with my shit day in and day out (like going to basketball matches):

She’s also always there for me when I need her and helps me out when things get really tough. She’s also a kick ass photographer and takes care of most of the photos and design for my website, e-books and courses. Most importantly, she’s the one person that never takes my BS and reads right through it, which helps me be a better person.

And, she makes sure I don’t just work 24/7 and actually spend time on things that matter to me beyond just business.

I’ve also gotten a lot closer with my family this year (hugely thanks to Allon’s advice):

Fun fact: my family name translates to “Christmas” so we like to dress up as Santa Clauses for Christmas

It was so awesome to have my whole family be there for me when I won my powerlifting competition, and it’s great to have them in my life where they support me when I need their support, even if they don’t necessarily understand what this online business thing or powerlifting thing is all about :).

Bottom line is – I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it wasn’t for all of these awesome people – from friends, family members, to mentors, readers and everyone else who’s reading this.

Today, I really just want to say thank you for being a part of my journey. I appreciate you.

What about you? Who are you grateful for today?

How to be Confident

By Primoz Bozic 22 Comments

When I was in high school, I was always the quiet, why, and not very confident kid. I was often the kid that sat by himself in the back row because nobody wanted to sit next to me.

I would only admire my schoolmates who were more confident and likable, while I would wonder “how can I do that too?”.

Today I’m a completely different person than I was in high school. I’ve pursued all the things I really wanted to pursue in my life (from running my own 6-figure online business to having a hot girlfriend to winning 2 gold medals at my first powerlifting championship).

Now I’m no longer the person that hides in the shadows, and love being in the spotlight and confidently speaking in front of hundreds of people:

In order to get to where I am today, I NEEDED to develop the unshakable confidence that would allow me to take massive action towards my goals and dreams. Today I’m going to show you how I did it, and how you can become more confident in your business and personal life as well.

Let’s dive in!

Without confidence, it’s next to impossible to build an online business

Let’s face it, building an online business is hard.

It requires a TON of putting yourself out there.

From writing articles and releasing them to the world, to creating online programs and charging thousands of dollars for them, to pursuing big media opportunities and even hiring a team – all of these decisions require confidence.

Without confidence, you’ll always get stuck in the thinking phase and progress slower than a snail with your business. Think about it – have you ever met a super successful person that WASN’T confident in their abilities? It’s unlikely, because they probably wouldn’t have taken the action that would allow them to become successful.

With confidence, you’ll be equipped with a jetpack that will allow you to fly over the hurdles and challenges in your way of building your own online business. You’ll be able to escape the endless overthinking loop, confidently take action and even wonder what’s taking others so long to build their own businesses.

But developing confidence isn’t easy, especially since most of the advice on confidence is not all that helpful.

Why conventional advice on confidence building is wrong

If you ever googled “how to become more confident”, you’ve likely ran into one of the article with “25 tips to become more confident”.

Usually they talk about something like this:

Dress better!
Do power poses!
Groom yourself!
Exercise!
Think positively!
…
…
…
Buy a unicorn!

When I read those articles, they always make me roll my eyes because I know they make people FEEL good, but they don’t actually help you become more confident. Which makes sense to me, since these articles aren’t really written to help people, they’re written to attract more views to different blogs and media outlets. It’s sexier to say “do these 25 sexy and easy things” than “do this one hard and boring thing”.

If you’re reading this post about confidence and you’ve read some of these articles, this likely means that those articles didn’t help you a whole lot.

Why is that?

Well, because things like dressing better, grooming yourself or putting on cologne CAN help you feel more confident in the moment… But you’ll likely forget them in a few days and won’t turn them into a habit. Or, they’re things like “exercise more!” which people won’t start magically doing after reading an article about 25 tips on confidence.

They also don’t address the root issue behind why you’re not confident, which we’ll address today.

The real reason why you lack confidence

You don’t lack confidence because you don’t dress well, don’t clean your desk or don’t do power poses. I know plenty of people who are super confident and don’t do any of those things. I also know people who are super confident even though they don’t exercise frequently, volunteer regularly, or have a pet unicorn.

Now here’s the deal – the reason why most people won’t tell you why you’re not confident is that it’s not sexy, it might hurt your feelings, and it can’t be fixed in a few minutes by putting on a nice blazer and a pocket square.

Most people these days will give you “quick solutions”, because they say that “nobody wants to do the hard work”.

Well, I’m not like that. I know you’re reading this blog because you’re a top performer (or you want to become one), and you’re not afraid to put in the work. In fact, you WANT to put in the work, you just need someone to tell you what ACTUALLY works so you know what to do without wasting your time on things that don’t.

Ok, so the real reason for why you’re not confident is…

*drum roll*

You’re not doing the things you said you were going to do.

Yep.

The real reason why you’re not confident about building a business is because you said you were going to write that blog post last week and you didn’t.

The real reason why you’re not confident in putting on 20lbs of muscle and getting a six pack (or a flat stomach and a toned butt for the ladies) is because you said you’d go to the gym regularly and stop snacking, but you didn’t do any of those things.

The real reason why you’re not confident about your speaking skills is because you’ve said to yourself that you’ll go to a public speaking class that you never went to.

I know this might sound harsh, but it’s the truth. And I know you’d rather hear the truth than some feel good motivational tactics.

When I lacked confidence in high school, it was because I never acted on the things I really wanted to pursue. I wished I was more social and that I could make more friends, but I never picked up a book about social skills or even googled how to become more social (until I was a few years in college).

I dreamed of being a world-class athlete but I never actually pursued the sports I wanted to pursue, put in the work or took the initiative to get the right coaches to help me learn a new sport well. Instead I spent hours and hours playing video games at home – no wonder I didn’t have many friends.

Everything changed once I learned how to run my own business, which is when I first experienced what I call Exponential Confidence.

How to develop true confidence with the Exponential Confidence Technique

If we said that you lack confidence because you’re not doing the things you said you were going to do, then how can you become more confident?

It’s simple – you actually do more of the things you said you were going to do, and you’ll become exponentially more confident over time.

Here’s what I mean:

If you look at The Exponential Confidence Graph above, you’ll see that the more you follow through with your goals, the more confident you’ll become.

For example, if you say you’ll write and publish a blog post this week, you’ll become slightly more confident in your ability to create regular blog posts. If you do this for 4 weeks in a row, you’ll really feel like you can do this. And if you create weekly blog posts for a YEAR, it will be really hard for you to NOT be confident in your ability to create regular blog posts.

The same applies to anything in life – from going to the gym, to improving your social skills, to getting better at sports, public speaking, dating… You name it.

The more you consistently do what you said you were going to do, the more confident you’ll become over time. That’s why successful entrepreneurs are confident in their abilities – because they’ve put in so much work it would be hard for them NOT to be confident. That’s why top athletes are confident in their abilities – because they’ve spent their whole lives training to become the best in the world in their sports.

I call this phenomenon Exponential Confidence.

Exponential Confidence means intentionally following through with your goals for a longer period of time in order to become exponentially more confident.

The key here is to acknowledge that while you WILL get a confidence boost after the first few weeks of following through with your goals, the unshakable confidence that you’re seeking will develop over time as a result of this process, rather than magically happen overnight. And that’s exactly why most of the “confidence hacks” don’t work, as the initial boost you get from them quickly drops off

Now here’s the interesting thing about the Exponential Confidence concept.

If you consistently fail to follow through with your goals, then your confidence will get gradually lower and lower over time.

This is what I see in most people who get “stuck” with running their online businesses. They set big goals for themselves, they don’t follow through with them, then get discouraged. They get ideas in their head, stop themselves from pursuing them, and get even more discouraged. Within a few months, they go from feeling excited about their business to feeling like they can’t really do this, and often “move on to something else” or say that “life came in-between”.

The same thing happens with going to the gym. If you’ve ever said yourself that you’ll go to the gym regularly but then didn’t go as many times as you wanted to, you became less and less confident about your ability to go to the gym regularly, and you eventually stopped going, just like every year beforehand.

Eventually, we lose all of our confidence and move on to new pursuits in our life.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Even if your confidence levels are pretty low right now, you CAN build them back up relatively quickly with every consistent action you take towards your goals and ideas. In other words, every time you successfully do what you said you were going to do (to yourself or to others), your confidence will grow.

I see this happen all the time to myself, my clients and my friends.

The Exponential Confidence Case Study: How Diana Started Kicking Ass

One such example is my close friend Diana Tower, who has been absolutely kicking ass lately in her business. She’s close to finishing her second Ultimate Guide this year, she’s written some amazing posts recently (like this one about her experience at the Forefront event), and she’s recording a new, exciting podcast behind the scenes that’s unlike anything that the industry has ever seen.

As she started putting herself out there more and more, people actually started reaching out to her to hire her as a consultant or a coach, which is something that didn’t happen to her before. Now Diana is the most confident in her business that I’ve ever seen her, and she’s also the happiest she’s ever been.

Why is that?

Because she started acting on her ideas.

I know she had this idea of a podcast for a while, but she kept putting it off. As I was supposed to be one of the first guests on her podcast, I annoyed her (like a good friend does) to send me that scheduling link so we could record the episode.

As soon as she sent me the link, she put the wheels into motion. She came up with some awesome podcast questions, scheduled interviews with over 20 people in her network, and has already recorded quite a few of them. As she started working on these podcasts, she also started writing new content that she was excited about, and more and more people started to hear about her over time. And as more and more people heard about her, people started reaching out to work with her.

All because she actually acted on her ideas and followed through with them.

Becoming more confident really is that simple. You don’t need hacks or techniques or to spend hours and hours talking to a coach about confidence. You really need to just do what you said you wanted to do and follow through with it, and the confidence will come.

Now let’s talk about how YOU can apply the Exceptional Confidence Technique to your life and business as well, so you too can become more confident in your skills, abilities and yourself.

From Theory to Action: How to Apply the Exponential Confidence Technique to Your Business (and Life)

You already know how the Exceptional Confidence Technique works, and at this point there’s only one thing left to do: to put it into action.

On a meta level, this is a great opportunity for you to become more confident in yourself as well – you spent 5 or 10 minutes reading this article with the intention to become more confident. Now you have a choice, either you can read it and forget about it (which will make you less confident that you can actually take action on the advice you learn), OR you can take action on it, and take that first step to becoming more confident.

So to put this technique into action, all you need to do is three things:

1. Set yourself a small goal for next week related to your business or personal life that will help you build up your confidence (writing a blog post, going to the gym 3 times this week, or sending out one guest post pitch)
2. Follow through with it
3. EVEN if everything in your life goes wrong (your car breaks down, your girlfriend dumps you or you get stick), STILL follow through with it

The task doesn’t need to be executed perfectly. It’s more important for your confidence to get it done, than to not get it done because you’re trying to make it perfect.

You’ll be amazed at what this does to your confidence, ESPECIALLY if following through with the goal won’t be easy. Because if that’s the case, and you follow through with it anyway, you’ll also develop mental toughness along the way which helps you confidently conquer bigger and bigger challenges in your business and life.

After the first week, the rules are simple.

First and foremost, make sure you always follow through with what you said you were going to do, even if that means just committing to doing LESS. It’s better to commit to doing less, build up your confidence and momentum than to commit to doing too much and lower your confidence while killing your momentum.

Second, you can use your newly found confidence to gradually pursue bigger and better goals and ideas, which will in turn give you even more confidence once you accomplish them. Soon you’ll be taking advantage of the Exponential Confidence principles and you’ll wonder how come you even struggled with confidence in the first place.

And what if you don’t manage to follow through with your goal that you set for yourself? Ask yourself WHY you didn’t follow through with your goal, and if time or energy was the issue, set yourself a smaller goal for next week.

If something else was the issue, address the issue – but make sure things like “my car broke down” don’t take your focus away from your goals. When things aren’t perfect, these are perfect opportunities to train your mental toughness by following through with your goals anyway.

That’s it! You know what to do – write down that one thing you want to work on next week, then make it happen no matter what.

So tell me – what’s the one goal you can take action on next week to build up your confidence?

P.S. You might have noticed some incredible 10/10 art doodles in this post – I drew these myself. I know they’re super random, but I’d love to know what you think of them. Do you love them? Hate them? Should I make more of them?

7 things that are wrong with online courses (and why you don’t need to buy more of them)

By Primoz Bozic 7 Comments

I used to absolutely love online courses, and when I first started learning about building my own online business, they opened my eyes in terms of how building an online business actually works.

They took me behind the scenes of what building an online business looks like, and taught me how to do everything from finding a profitable business idea to creating online products, selling coaching services, writing copy for my business… And for a long time, the majority of my education came from going through online courses.

I especially loved when top influencers in the industry would create new courses that I could join as one of their first students, as I knew they would pay extra attention and do anything in their power to help me succeed with them. When the courses were still pretty small and had private, intimate communities where everyone knew each other, they were also amazing for meeting other cool people and getting great feedback for your business.

Unfortunately, the industry has long evolved since I first joined online courses. As it’s easier than ever to create online courses nowadays, even people who aren’t real experts can create courses and sell them. The courses that I’ve joined years ago that had communities of 500 people now have communities of 10,000 people.

Because of this the quality of online courses and their communities dropped dramatically. They weren’t these amazing opportunities to get help with your business any more, and instead became huge knowledge banks that most people never go through (more on that in a sec).

With the evolution of the online course industry, something interesting began to happen. Many people reported their sales of online courses dropping over the last year, which resulted in revenue losses and even layoffs at certain companies.

It almost seems like the online courses industry is crashing and burning.

Is that really true? And if yes, why?

Here’s what experts say about the downfall of online courses

The experts I’ve talked to around this topic are in unison – what used to work isn’t working any more. The course sales are dropping. The email open rates are dropping. The influencer marketing (getting influencers to share your content) isn’t working as well any more, which makes it harder to drive traffic to your website.

Many of them blame the industry for becoming saturated, and the consumers becoming more and more immune to marketing and online courses. I think there’s truth to that, and I do think that the market is evolving, like any market evolves.

It was probably easier to sell Coca Cola when it was the only drink of it’s kind or when it just had one major competitor than it is today when every supermarket sells it’s own brand of coke and diet coke.

Still, I think most experts are missing on HUGE thing…

And that one thing is the REAL issue that few people talk about and address.

The ones that do see their businesses grow and flourish like never before. The ones that don’t see their business attract less customers day by day.

Here’s what I think the issue is.

The success rate of many online courses is catastrophic.

I’ve seen online courses that have tens of thousands of students in them with only a hundred or so successful students. I’ve seen online courses from new online entrepreneurs that had 20 people start the course and only one person finish them. I even created courses myself that most of my students would start but never finish.

Now just to be clear, when I’m referring to “online courses”, I mean the recorded online courses where you get access to online materials and then you’re supposed to go through them on your own (or you have a HUGE Facebook group with them).

The problem with these courses is that they’re huge piles of information that most people just don’t work through on their own. It’s like trying to complete a major at a university without actually having access to live classes and by just self-studying and watching the recordings.

Are SOME people capable of self-studying through online courses? Sure. But how many?

I know I’m one of them. I’m super self-driven, and don’t have a problem with going through online courses on my own (though this is becoming with the limited support these days, even for me).

I’ve finished most courses I’ve started and even wrote about that in my Ultimate Guide to Becoming a Star Student in Online Business Courses.

But here’s where I’ll be honest – I was the exception, and not the rule.

I also didn’t just go through the courses on my own, I often reached out to peers and mentors to help me be successful with my business. I often had that advantage of being one of the first students that joined the course and getting extra treatment.

So for a while, as I saw other people around me complain about online courses, I shrugged it off. I thought the problem was in THEM, not in the COURSES. I hate to admit this, but I had my eyes and ears shut for years. I thought “well, people are just lazy and not putting in the work – or trusting the process”.

But then, as I started building my courses, I realized I was wrong. I worked with other people who were top performers like me, and I realized that even though they knew all the information, they still needed extra help from an expert to keep them moving – just like I do. I know that taking online courses isn’t enough for me, which is why I joined an elite mastermind this year and have my own coaches who I talk to every week to further grow my business. OCH blog may be a great help in this respect.

And what happens when people don’t get the right support? They start online courses, work through a few modules, get stuck / fall off track and never finish them. They might even say “it’s just not the right time for me”.

It’s not that they’re not top performers. They just aren’t getting the support they need.

Which then results in a 1-2% completion rate of online courses.

So what makes me angry about all of this is… Almost nobody is talking about it or addressing it.

It feels like everyone just sweeps the success rate of online courses under the rug and hopes that nobody will ever find out about it. They accept it as a given fact and move on to building more courses.

They might also blame their customers for their low completion rate. They say that their students just aren’t serious enough. They aren’t trusting the process. It’s not the courses’ fault, it’s the customers fault. They never think about how to actually improve their courses. Instead, they accept that a 1-2% completion rate is normal and “focus on things that will help them move the needle for their business”.

Another huge problem is the “evergreen funnels” that funnel people into the online courses. Evergreen funnels are automated processes that you never see in the background which artificially tell you that the course is open and closed within certain dates and create fake urgency (the opening and closing of the course is triggered based on when you subscribe to their email lists).

Why do people do this? Because it essentially means that they sell their courses automatically and make money while they sleep. It’s every entrepreneur’s dream, and “the holy grail of online business” – passive income.

I was guilty of this in the past as well, because I was taught that that was how things were supposed to be done. I sold my own online courses on autopilot and made thousands of dollars each month without moving a finger.

Until I had enough of it.

This year, I stopped selling my online courses in the background and sacrificed thousands of dollars in monthly revenues.

Do you want to know why I did that?

Because it didn’t feel right to me. It wasn’t in line with what I believed in.

It didn’t feel right to be selling online courses to people, then seeing them never finish them. Why would I want to take money from someone without really doing my BEST to help them out and helping them get their money worth?

When I asked others in the industry about how they deal with this, a lot of them would say “Yeah, the completion rate of evergreen funnels is way lower. That’s just how business works”.

I disagree. I think we all have a choice that we make.

We can all close our eyes and pretend that we’re building an amazing business, claiming that it helps millions of people of all over the world… Or we can create products and services that actually deliver on the promise.

This is the non-sexy part of starting and growing an online business – making sure your products and services really deliver the result that they promise. But even though some people SAY they do that, they don’t really do it, because this takes a lot of time and has no clear direct ROI. They would rather use the time, energy and money to do things that do have a clear ROI.

I’m sure we’ve all gone through courses where we’ve seen 90% of people stuck on a part of the course – and that problem was never really addressed.

It’s like a hole in a ship that never gets fixed. At first, you can ignore it. Maybe you can even ignore it for a long time. Until, at one point, the ship sinks. And this is exactly what I think is happening to the online course industry – people are creating courses full of holes, people find out about that, and their ships start to sink.

The REAL reasons why you aren’t finishing (or getting the most out of) online courses

Let’s look at these “holes” in more detail, because they’re the exact reasons why you might not be seeing the results that were promised to you from them.

I’m doing this not to say all courses are bad (they’re not), but to show you that that the problem why your business isn’t growing as fast as you would want it to grow isn’t necessarily in you, but in the way these online courses are designed.

Later on in this post, I’m also going to show you two better ways to learn about growing your business, that I’ve found much more effective than online courses.

Let’s dig in.

Reason #1 – The “sticking points” are never removed from the courses

Every course I’ve ever taken has one or more sticking points where the customers get stuck.

Maybe that sticking point is customer research. Maybe it’s doing an audit of your business to see where you can make potential improvements to it. Maybe it’s finding the right niche for your business. Maybe it’s sending out pitches for guest posts and podcast interviews. Maybe it’s hiring your first team member.

These are all places where I got stuck in online courses in the past, and I’ve seen thousands of others people get stuck as well.

It’s natural for your course to have sticking points in the beginning, and it’s natural that it takes some iterations to really remove these sticking points from the course. It’s like that with everything – if you flew an airplane when they first invented it you had more chances of dying than surviving. Through years and years of gradual improvement, flights are now the safest way to travel.

The problem occurs when sticking points in the courses are never removed – for years at a time. The problem occurs when online entrepreneurs create courses from which they never remove the sticking points, keep selling those courses, and move on to creating new courses.

For you as a customer, that sucks because you’ll likely get stuck without any way of getting un-stuck. Which means you’ll spend $2,000 on a course you’ll only complete 10% of – and even worse, feel guilty about not completing.

Which brings me to the next point.

Reason #2 – The communities of online courses are mostly useless for getting help and feedback

While there are some bright exceptions, most of the online communities these days are either:

A ghost-town where nobody ever posts anything
Full of other people who are stuck at the same point as you (so they can’t really help you out with your problems)
Not the best way to get great feedback from the course authors (as they rarely answer questions or give detailed, useful feedback)

I’m sure that you’ve seen a course community like this before where the group has 10,000 or 20,000 members, and every time you ask for help you either hear crickets or get a bunch of contradicting advice from people you’re not sure you can trust, a couple of “feel good” comments or just plain bad advice.

Even with the course authors that have the best intentions, it’s hard to really get great feedback from them once the group grows to thousands of people. If they wanted to answer all the questions from their students (and answer them well), they would have no time for growing their own business.

So the reality is that the course authors aren’t really active in the community, they pop in quickly after each major launch to answer a few questions and make it seem like the community is active, or just consistently refer you to the course materials. In the best case scenario, they hire coaches or student mentors to help you out, but those cases are rare (because they often don’t see the value in it, and the cost of offering extra coaching can be hundreds of thousands of dollars a year).

So if you join an online course, you’re on your own most of the time, unless you’re really proactive in building relationships with other top students from the course (which is what I did in the past) or hiring a coach to help you out.

Reason #3 – The top students in the courses aren’t taken care of

Whenever I go to my favorite restaurant, I get treated insanely well. Every request I have gets taken care of, I’m made feel at home, and the chefs or waiters even throw in a special surprise on the house for me once in a while.

That’s how I feel like every business should treat their best customers – but the sad reality is that many online entrepreneurs don’t take care of their best students that way. I’ve seen many top students go way above and beyond in helping the entrepreneurs, from helping out their fellow students to referring new students to their programs… Only to not feel very appreciated in return.

The feedback they send to the course authors doesn’t get implemented, they don’t get their questions answered once in a blue moon when they do have them, and then they wonder why they’re even trying so hard to bring more customers to another person’s business.

What happens next?

These top performing students slowly leave, stop spending time in the communities, and the communities lose the most valuable members from them, which then removes even the 1-2% of the people who can give great advice in these communities from them.

Again, there are bright exceptions, and I’ve seen some people like Selena Soo go WAY above and beyond for their best customers by bringing them media opportunities, inviting them for private dinners etc. – but these exceptions are rare.

If more people treated their best students like the restaurants treat their best customers, I’m sure they’d have much better and stronger communities. And if they listened to the feedback from their top students, they’d be able to fix the

Reason #4 – They make promises they can’t deliver on just to attract more customers

It’s much easier to write amazing sales copy that promises that everyone can grow or build their online business than to create an online course that actually delivers on that.

Building an online business is hard, and I don’t think that it’s for everyone. From what I’ve seen, people who tend to be very scattered and overwhelmed in their lives pretty much never successfully finish online courses (because they have other problems in their lives preventing them to do that). I’ve also seen that people who have “no business idea” are far less likely to be successful with a course than people who already know what they want.

It’s no coincidence that the students who are usually the most successful with online courses usually have clear ideas of what they want, and usually have some kind of background and experience with running a business in the past.

The problem in my opinion lies in the fast that the copywriters who write copy that sells online courses want to write the best possible copy, make HUGE promises, and do everything they can to get more sales of the course (which is their job, so that make sense in a way). As they do this, they usually try to address all the concerns from their audience to let them join the course.

No business idea? No problem. Feeling overwhelmed? No problem. Not sure what kind of a business you want to build? No problem.

But is there REALLY no problem?

I think there is a problem. I believe it’s misleading to try to convince people that you can help them and sell a course to them when you look at the data and see that almost nobody in the course that you’ve built has finished it successfully that was overwhelmed in the beginning, didn’t have a business idea, and didn’t know what kind of a business they wanted to build.

This is one of the reasons why the course success rates are so low – because many people, sometimes even unintentionally, make promises they can’t deliver on in the copy. The other negative side-effect of this is that if you feel your community with overwhelmed, scattered people, that’s bad for the whole community – as the quality of questions and the advice in the group will drop, and make it less attractive for your best customers who won’t be able to resonate with these new people.

Of course I understand why people do this – to bring in more revenue. It’s easier to write copy for the course and let more people in than it is to justify spending time improving the course or limiting it only to the top customers. In the short run, this might even hurt your revenues. But in the long run, I’ve seen that people in the industry who are killing it right now do just that – they select amazing clients, which brings in more amazing clients over time.

As a potential customer, you’ll actually be better off joining courses that make smaller promises and only let the right people in, than trying to join courses that are massively appealing and have let in tens of thousands of people.

Reason #5 – Completing courses usually takes WAY longer than expected

Have you ever taken a 4-week or an 8-week course that took you months or even YEARS to complete?

I know I have. I appreciate the fact that the courses are broken down (and not delivered all at once), but from what I’ve seen they aren’t broken down ENOUGH. If a course really takes a year to complete, and you position it as an 8-week course with a 60-day refund period, you’re setting the wrong expectations for your students and setting them up for failure.

If you do this, you’ll give people the IDEA that the course is supposed to be completed in 8 weeks, and when they don’t complete it, they’ll feel like they’re falling behind, and eventually give up (which again leads to the low completion rates).

It’s amazing how much of a difference in success rate you can see by breaking the course down to a REALISTIC time frame, making it as long as it needs to be for people to finish it, and setting the expectations for them right.

This is what we do in my premium program called Ultimate Guide System – I clearly tell my students that even though I can write an Ultimate Guide in 1-2 weeks, most students who have full time jobs and families will take around 14 weeks or slightly more to successfully finish their first guide – because that’s the average I’ve seen my students take in the past. We even break the coursework down to 14 weeks rather than 4 or 8 weeks for that reason, so that the students get the exact information they can actually take action on each week.

This is one of the major reasons why Ultimate Guide System has a 50% success rate, a super engaged community, and actually brings my students results – because I refuse to make promises I can’t deliver on, and tell my students things as they are and what to expect.

Unfortunately most people don’t do this, which is why you’ll feel like you’re falling behind the course pace, when really you’re just falling behind an imaginary course pace that is realistic for 0.5% of the students (if not less) who usually run their businesses full time anyway.

Reason #6 – Many online courses are losing the depth that they used to have

I recently joined an online course that I was really disappointed by, and it’s the first online course I ever refunded.

The course was supposed to cover a specific part of running an online business in great detail, but in reality it was just a few short videos without any specific information on HOW to actually execute on it.

As I went through this course, I was puzzled, and thought to myself, “is this really it?” and “what’s going on?”. It didn’t make sense to me why a premium online course would lack the depth and stick to such surface level concepts. I know I wasn’t the only person feeling this way either as I’ve seen other people have the exact same experience with it.

To me, in the moment, this made no sense. Why would someone build a premium course and NOT make it super detailed and useful for someone like me?

Then it hit me. I realized that this was an attempt to make the online courses more manageable and digestible for the people that are overwhelmed with them – so they could consume it easier.

While I see how that could work in theory, the problem with this approach is that while more people might be able to digest the course, they won’t take a whole lot of value away from it. The mistake I believe people are making here is that they are trying to make the course materials more digestible to fit the masses, rather than expanding the course, keeping the awesome materials in, and serving their best clients better.

Since I’m a customer that craves depth, great information and is willing to put in the work, this was actually offputting for me – and just reassured the idea that I really don’t need to buy more online courses. I don’t need to finish courses to feel good and like I’ve learned something new, I want to finish courses so I can get the results they promise.

Reason #7 – Evergreen funnels make customers feel like they’re late to a wedding

I’ve introduced the idea of “evergreen” funnels before and explained that these are sales funnels that are automatically triggered when someone signs up to an email list and allow people to join courses even when they’re not officially open.

Evergreen funnels were a big thing in the industry over the past few years, and a lot of people started using them to better leverage their time. I mean why wouldn’t you want to automatically bring in more sales to your business if you can?

Now I don’t think evergreen funnels are always bad – I think they’re perfect for smaller, easily digestible courses, e-books, etc. that don’t really need a huge time commitment. But when you try to sell a premium online course on autopilot your customers feel like they’re “late to a wedding”, which makes it harder for them to be a part of the communities and decreases the chances of them following through the courses.

I’ve spoken with people who sell premium courses this way and the verdict was clear – way less people who join the courses through evergreen funnels actually finish them than the people who join during the live launches where they at least get the feeling of doing the course together with other people.

Does this mean that this is the end of the era of online courses?

Well, the bad news is that the data really does show that the course sales are going down, which will be bad news for people who will just try to build more courses without taking a look at how they can increase the success rate of their customers.

This is also bad news for you as a consumer, as you might see that a lot of people will try to churn out more and more courses to make up from the lost revenues that weren’t on the level that they used to be (because developing great premium courses takes a ton of time).

On the other hand, the people who will learn how to adapt to this state of the market will be able to continue to grow their businesses – but they’ll have to start rethinking the way in which they currently create their courses.

The good news is that there is good news as well – both if you’re trying to create and sell online programs and if you want to take advantage of them to grow your business.

What we can do as online entrepreneurs to build better businesses

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve stopped using evergreen funnels to sell my online courses. I also stopped selling a few online courses which weren’t on the level I would have wanted them to be, had too many holes, ghost town communities and didn’t get my students the results I wanted to get them.

Instead I’m focusing on programs that DO work and DO get my students incredible results.

One example is Ultimate Guide System – my one year program on creating Ultimate Guides. Ultimate Guide System is different from the online courses these days in the sense that it includes a 14-week intensive training plus one year of support through additional live coaching calls. It has a small but incredible community of top performers that can actually give other students great feedback on their work.

The course is done LIVE (we have weekly 60-90 minute live coaching calls), and I’m also very active in the community and constantly available to help my students out when they need my help. I also make it a priority to frequently check in with and take care of my top students. And beyond that, I constantly keep an eye for “sticking points” in it and strive to improve it to a point where there’s no sticking points. This is the non sexy part of running an online business.

The fact that the majority of my students are loving the course, finishing it, seeing results with it and recommending it to other people is not an accident. It’s all well thought out, and I strongly believe that this is the most effective way to build an online business that makes a big impact nowadays.

We have to stop building recorded, passive income courses and start building incredible live programs that actually get our students results.

Yes, this will take considerably more time than whipping something together, selling it and forgetting it. Creating incredible programs takes months, or even years of planning, research, testing, talking to customers, and refining courses. And it takes a lot of personal involvement from the author, at least initially (until you can actually guarantee results without your involvement).

We need to stop SAYING we are putting the success of our customers first and actually DO IT.

I believe that if we manage to do that, we might suffer revenue losses in the short run (like I did when I stopped selling some of my courses). But after we go through this dip, we’ll build a foundation for a business that we can run for years or even decades, where we’ll be able to establish ourselves as the top experts in the industry.

We’ll need to adapt to what our customers actually want, be willing to ask for and listen to their feedback, and take care of our best customers like we would take care of our best friends.

If we manage to do this, our business will slowly but steadily grow. If we fail to do this, we can keep trying to release new products and services, but if we just try to increase the amount of courses we create, the quality will drop. And when the quality drops, we lose the trust of our customers. And that can ruin our business.

We have a choice to make. Either we ignore this situation and blame the market… OR we can take a deep, honest look at ourselves and see what WE as online entrepreneurs can do better.

Now, to answer the question: Do you really need more online courses?

I do think recorded online courses can be valuable, especially if you are super self-driven or if the courses are short and around small topics that you can really learn and implement over a few weeks.

But if you’re trying to build an online business and want to get deep expertise around topics like copywriting, growing your email list and creating great content, you might be better off with joining a live program (similar to an online course, but delivered live with Q & A sessions, feedback sessions, etc.) like Ultimate Guide System, by getting a coach to work on your business with you 1on1, or joining a group coaching program.

I know I’m doing the same thing myself – I’ve stopped investing in online courses and am instead focusing on getting 1on1 coaches that are insanely good at what they do and joining the masterminds where I actually get personal access to top online entrepreneurs.

That’s it for today – I know this was a bit of a controversial post, but I also think we need to start having this kind of conversations and starting to build better businesses. I hope you’ll take some things away from this post that will help you invest in yourself more wisely in the future and if you’re building your own online business, build a much better online business that actually changes lives of millions of people.

What about you? Do you agree with me or disagree with my stance on online courses today?

Let me know by leaving a comment below. I’m really curious what you think.

-Primoz

P.S. Everything that we talked about today applies to creating amazing free content for your customers as well. If you want to learn more about building a kick ass business, download my free e-book on growing your business by creating the best free content in your industry (through the box below).

My Hero’s Journey: How I Won 2 Gold Medals at my First National Powerlifting Championship

By Primoz Bozic 11 Comments

This Saturday I attempted my first powerlifting competition – the Slovenian National IPF Powerlifting Championships.

I walked away from the competition with two gold medals in the Open 93kg category – in Bench Press, and Overall Powerlifting (Squat, Bench Press, Deadlift).

This was one of the most amazing, stressful, and emotional days for me (yes, all at once), which is why I decided to write up this post about it where I’ll take you through my journey of becoming a powerlifting champion.

I won’t bore you with all the details about the training and nutrition for my competition – I’ll rather focus on my mental preparation and the game day performance, so you can see what goes through the mind of a professional athlete.

So even if you’re not into powerlifting, this post will show you a whole new side of me that you might not have known about, and give you ideas on how you can perform better in high-pressure situations that you face in your work, personal life or business.

Let’s dive in!

The REAL reason why I became a national powerlifting champion

In sports, we often think that the most talented (or even hardest working) people win. I don’t think that’s 100% the case.

I’m definitely not talented as I was never good at sports. When I started training I could barely bench press 40kg. I don’t think I trained or ate harder or smarter to win my competition.

In fact, while preparing for the nationals I probably made every mistake in the book I could’ve possibly made:

I picked a world record powerlifter from the US to write my workout plan, not knowing he would put minimal effort into my workout plan and slow down my progress for months.
After that I wrote my own workouts for a few months and often randomly changed them, further sabotaging my own progress.
I gained 15kg of weight in spring (mostly fat) due to my binge eating habits that I had to get rid of during the summer to fit back into my weight class, which wasn’t smart or fun.

I also faced various obstacles in the months coming up to the competition:

I injured my knee 4 weeks before the competition, which lost me more than a week of hard workouts.
I traveled to Chicago for the Forefront Conference just 3 weeks before the competition, because of which I missed a few workouts and wasn’t in my best form.
I caught a pretty bad cold 4 days before the competition which didn’t go away until after the competition, destroyed my sleep patterns and drained my energy.

Almost everything that could have gone wrong before the competition went wrong. But I did have one key advantage over my competitors:

My mental training.

I’m fortunate enough to be coached and mentored by Allon Khakshouri, a former manager of Novak Djokovic and two other #1 tennis players.

With Allon’s help, I’ve been preparing for the competition for months in advance. I’ve gone through the competition day hundreds of times in my mind. I visualized my lifts. I prepared a match day routine. I even approached my training days in the same way I would approach the game day.

By the time I came to the competition, I knew how to put myself into the zone, calm myself down and trigger myself to perform at my best.

I know that other competitors might have trainer harder than me for the competition, but I don’t think anyone spent nearly as much time preparing themselves mentally as I did. One of the most important things is to get rid of distractions such as long hair and beard. They do look good, but I could not afford even a slight diversion at that point. Check out the various safety razors available on the Instash website and choose the right razor for you.

I did 3 things on a regular basis in my preparation:

#1 – I visualized the competition in my mind hundreds of times

You might have heard the story about Michael Phelps, the 18-time Olympic Gold Medal winner and his visualizations:

“For months before a race Michael gets into a relaxed state. He mentally rehearses for two hours a day in the pool. He sees himself winning. He smells the air, tastes the water, hears the sounds, sees the clock.”

“Phelps take visualization one step further. He sees himself from the outside, as a spectator in the stands. He sees himself overcoming obstacles, too. For example, what would he do if he fell further behind in a race than he intended? Phelps practices all potential scenarios.”

I knew that if visualizations worked for Michael Phelps, they would work for me too.

So every day, after I woke up I went through my morning routine which included visualizing myself winning my competition.

I relaxed myself, and envisioned myself performing the competition lifts. I tried to feel how hard the weights were and how I pushed through them. I tried to hear the supporters screaming at me. I envisioned winning the competition, high-fiving my trainers and hugging my girlfriend, my family and my friends. I tried to feel the joy I would feel as I won and the pride and joy that my family and friends would feel for me.

I went through the whole competition in my head, over and over again. I focused on making my visualizations as intense as possible and really activating all of my senses – what I heard, how I felt, what I saw, and what I smelled.

Allon told me that the longer and the more intense visualizations, the better. I tried to get at least one 5-10 minute visualization in every morning, and then when I went to the spa on a weekly basis I would spend as much as 60-90 minutes visualizing the whole competition in my head – from arriving to the venue to warm ups, competing and celebrating.

By the time I got to the competition, I felt like I’ve already competed hundreds of times in my head – which is likely why I was able to perform as well as I did in it.

#2 – I learned how to “get in the zone” for important lifts

I once had dinner with Todd Herman (he’s an online entrepreneur and also the psychology coach for Real Madrid, a famous football team), and he told me that the best sportsmen “aren’t really themselves” on the pitches. They have these alternate personalities that they tap into that allow them to perform at their best.

I talked to Allon about this and he said this was called a “pre-match routine” that helps you get into the peak performance state during important matches. I did my research to find out as much as I could about this phenomenon and found a few ways in which world-class weight lifters have applied this to their own competitions.

The idea that resonated with me the most was visualizing the FEELING you get when you complete a successful lift and trying to bring back that feeling during an important competition. I combined this with listening to some of my favorite music to develop my own “pre-lift routine” that I would use to get in the zone before each of my lifts.

To develop the routine, I tested it out during my regular training sessions. As I did that, the results really blew me away. I noticed that when I wasn’t using my routine and I just messed around on my phone before I lift I was much more prone to make a mistake than if I put my headphones on, listened to music and visualized the lift in my mind. I could literally notice the difference between one lift and another within the same practice session.

Creating this pre-lift routine helped me get back into the zone during my competition, even when things weren’t necessarily going my way (more on that shortly).

#3 – I learned how to dig deep and perform at my best when it mattered most

In the upcoming weeks before the competition I tried to read as many books as possible about sports performance in order to make sure I was doing everything I could to perform at my best.

The one book that really stood out to me was Bounce: The Talent Myth by Matthew Syed. In the book, the author writes about “the curse of choking”, which happens when extremely skilled sportsmen seemingly forget how to use their skills in big matches and crash and burn.

This happens when individuals try to explicitly monitor skills that would be better executed automatically (this is why professional golfers often miss super short putts that they would make 100/100 times in training).

I knew that I might get nervous during my competition and to avoid choking, I began learning the technique that’s called “doublethink”, which helps you avoid the choking phenomenon.

Doublethink is a technique where you relieve yourself of the pressure by telling yourself that the career-defining moment doesn’t really matter. In my world, that meant saying to myself “it’s just bench press”.

I practiced putting myself in a pressure-free state during my training sessions whenever I lifted really heavy weights, in order to prepare myself for a similar high pressure situation at the competition.

I believe that these three techniques gave me an unfair advantage over my competition, even though I was competing in powerlifting for the first time.

The Game Day: The biggest rollercoaster of my life

Since I was still fighting a cold on the day of the competition, I didn’t get as much sleep as I would have wanted to. I woke up around 23 times during the night and got about 6 hours of sleep at most. At 8am I was laying in bed with my eyes wide open, just waiting for the time to pass (my turn to compete was at 4pm).

Eventually I got bored of doing nothing and woke myself up. Since my weight was well below my required weigh in weight I decided to make myself a warm breakfast that was similar to my last night’s dinner – grits with sugar. Within a few minutes of eating my breakfast I realized that eating sugary grits first thing in the morning was a big mistake.

All of a sudden I felt sick in my stomach and wanted to puke, and all I could really do was lay back in my bed and try not to die for half an hour. I knew that my body needed the food and that after puking I wouldn’t have an appetite, so I just laid there and waited for the sickness to pass. I also knew that the sickness could just be psychological, which was yet another reason to fight through it rather than give into it.

After about an hour of helplessly laying in bed I finally started feeling better, so I put on some music, got dressed and slowly made it to the competition venue. I spent the next few hours watching some of my lifting friends compete and cheering for them, and anxiously waiting for my turn.

At 2pm it was time for me to weigh in, and the scale showed 90.3kg, which was 2.7kg below my required weight. That was good news in terms of making weight, but it was also bad news because I lost more weight than I wanted to, and I knew I had to eat and drink more to get my body ready for the heavy lifting.

For the next hour I sipped gatorades and ate peanut butter & jelly sandwiches and tried to find the sweet spot between “I’m so hungry” and “I’m so full I feel sick”. Combined with the game day anxiety, this hour wasn’t the most fun.

At 3pm I changed into my competition suit and started the general warm up. Now things were getting serious. The warm up was long and easy, and I found some time to listen to the music to just try and relax in-between. At 3.30pm my friends and family arrived so I quickly said hi to them before starting the warm up for the first lift – the squat.

Primoz vs. Squat: Let the games begin!

The game plan for the competition was simple. I knew I likely had an advantage over my competitors in my first two lifts (squat and bench press), and I knew that I was behind my competition on the last lift (deadlift). This meant I had to build as big of a lead as possible on the first two lifts and then just keep it until the end.

Apart from the knee issues that I hoped were now gone, my squats have been going really well during the last few weeks of training sessions. I hit a 210kg squat in training 10 days before the competition, which was more than I thought my competition was capable of.

The warm ups for the squats felt great and moved quickly, and I was confident that I would smoke my attempts, hit a new personal record and build a safe lead. I did get a bit nervous before my opening lift as it was my first lift of the competition, so I focused on staying as calm as possible and just making sure I got the lift in. I’ve also completed the weight (192.5kg) tens of times before the competition so I knew I could easily lift it.

I got on the stage and took my first attempt at 192.5kg:

I absolutely smoked it.

As soon as I made the first lift I felt like a huge rock fell off my shoulders. My first ever competition lift was a success. Because the weight moved insanely fast I was confident in smoking my second attempt at 205kg as well.

I spent the next 10 minutes waiting, listening to music and talking to my girlfriend. I felt confident that I’ll keep building my lead with my next attempt, so I didn’t overthink it. I just waited and was ready to lift again.

This is my second attempt at 205kg:

As you can see, this attempt was A LOT harder than the first one. In hindsight, I know why – I didn’t really go through my pre-lift routine as rigorously I should have, and I messed up the technique (I didn’t push my hips and elbows forward like I should have). Still, because the strength was there I made the lift.

Because the second attempt didn’t move as quickly as I wanted it to, we decided to not try and set a new record on the third attempt, and rather just go for a 210kg squat which I had completed in training 10 days before the competition.

At this point, I wasn’t in a great mental state. I was thinking about why my second squat all of a suddenly felt so heavy and what I messed up. I also noticed that one of my competitors also successfully lifted 205kg which meant that I wasn’t building the lead I thought I was building.

As I waited for my last squat attempt I talked to my trainers about what to do better on the last attempt, listened to the music to get my mind off of things and got hyped up for the last attempt.

This is my last attempt at 210kg:

As you can see, I got stuck halfway through the attempt and didn’t manage to grind it out. This was my first ever failed attempt at the competition.

I then had the time to look at the scoreboard and saw that all but one of my competitors had made their last squat attempts (including the guy that had the same second attempt as me).

This meant that the standings after the first lift were as follows:

1st place: 212.5kg
2nd place (me): 205kg
3rd place: 202.5kg
4th place: 200kg
5th place: 195kg

This wasn’t great news, as my plan of building a lead was starting to fall apart. Instead of coming out of the squats first I was in second place, trailing by 7.5kg and with only a few kg lead in front of my other competitors.

At this point, I was a bit devastated and annoyed, because I failed a lift that I had successfully completed before, but the strength just wasn’t there. I was afraid that my cold was getting the better of me.

As I ate some more food and waited a few minutes before my warm ups, my sister came backstage and talked to me, which was really nice since my sister and I generally don’t have the best relationship. I could feel that she cared about me, and she tried to make me feel better by telling me that not everything is lost. I told her that I’ll still win my two gold medals.

Then it was start to warming up for bench press, which was my strongest lift and where I really didn’t feel anyone could catch me.

Primoz vs. Bench Press: When sh*t hits the fan

As I started warming up for the bench press, I had just one thing on my mind: I’m going to show my competitors what I’m made of and get my lead back. I was a man on a mission.

The bench press is the lift that I was the most comfortable with and where I felt like I could easily beat my competitors by 10-15kg and take the lead. I had some issues with the technique in the few weeks before the competition, but I felt like I was still so far ahead that it wouldn’t matter.

The warm ups for the bench press went just okay. The weight felt a little bit harder than expected, and I recall really messing up my last warm up, which in hindsights I should have repeated afterwards.

Because I had some of the highest weight attempts in my group, I was among the last lifters to lift, which would mean that I could see them lift before it was my turn. Even better.

The attempts of my competitors flew by, and it was time for my first attempt at 142.5kg, a weight that I have lifted countless times in training with relative ease.

Here’s how my first attempt went:

In other words, not great. I completely messed up the technique and almost failed the lift, but somehow managed to save it.

After the lift I got a bit mad at myself and talked to my trainers about what I did wrong (I didn’t push the bar backwards like I should have). The good news was that I did at least make the lift, so I at least didn’t have to worry about not making the lift at all.

There wasn’t much to do at this point apart from getting ready for the next lift, and making sure I lift it like I know how to lift it. My next attempt would be at 147.5kg, a weight that was 2.5kg below my previous personal record that was heavy but doable for sure.

I focused myself, hyped myself up and went in for the second attempt:

As you can see, my second attempt was… interesting.

I fought the bar for what seemed like an eternity and wouldn’t give up. After 5 seconds or so I lifted my ass off the bench which meant that the lift wouldn’t count even if I got it up, and managed to somehow hit the rack and waste extra energy for re-racking the bar.

Failing the second attempt in this manner was devastating and the low point of my competition.

After failing my last squat attempt and now my second bench attempt, my world was falling apart. I could feel my gold medals slipping out of my hands. I was in a dark mood for a few minutes where I was mad at myself, mad at the cold, mad at the world. I even thought to myself that maybe the cold will beat me after all.

I knew that because I put up such a fight on the second attempt I was tiring myself out, and that the last attempt would be much harder if not impossible to make. I wasn’t sure if I could do it any more.

To make things worse, all of my competitors made their second bench press attempts and were now trailing up to me. One of them lifted 142.5kg to match my first attempt, and two others lifted 137.5kg which was not far behind me.

Luckily my girlfriend came up to me and managed to lift me out of the downward spiral. She hugged me, talked to me, made me laugh and cheered me up. I could see that she was in this together with me and how badly she wanted me to succeed, and that helped me regain my composure.

With a few minutes to spare before my last attempt (I would repeat the same weight at 147.5kg), I did the only smart thing I could do – I sat down, turned on the Radioactive from Imagine Dragons (???) and went through my pre-lift routine to put myself in the zone.

When I opened my eyes I picked up my equipment, got in line for my next lift and finally remembered to use the double think technique. While I was walking up to the bench, I kept repeating to myself over and over again: “It’s just bench press”. This helped me relieve the pressure and get back into my calm zone that I was in in the beginning of the competition.

As I got up to the bench, one of the spotters (the people who make sure that the weight doesn’t kill you) started talking to me. He told me that I was messing up my attempts because I was positioning myself far too much towards the back of the bench, which meant that I would hit the rack if I executed the lift properly.

He told me to instead go further up front and that he’ll hand me the weight. As I positioned myself he urged me to position myself even further towards the front, and I just trusted him and listened. He also told me to just focus on getting the bar backwards on the way up and that I’ll easily make the lift that way. I knew that was good advice because it was the exact advice my trainer gave me in training.

Then, it was time to lift:

During the whole way up, the spotter (the guy in the white with a beard) kept screaming “back! back! back!” (you can see that in the video), and I successfully made the lift and screamed in the end.

I ran towards the backstage to high five my trainers and hug and kiss my girlfriend and celebrated making the lift. It was the first time in the competition that I really felt true joy, and I got really emotional and couldn’t speak for a few seconds.

I was just so happy that I managed to get myself out of the downward spiral, refocus myself and avoid choking. I felt like I had completed something impossible, something that I had never really done in this way in my life – I got back on my feet and crushed it.

In that moment, I really felt like I was the hero of my own story. I was in the same space as a team that is trailing in a basketball game and then makes a huge comeback. I finally showed to myself and everyone else that I had true character.

After a few moments of extreme joy I checked the scoresheet, and a few other things sank in:

All of my competitors have failed their last lifts, which meant that I was finally making a comeback
I wasn’t just making a comeback, my successful attempt actually put me in the lead in the overall competition
I also realized that because I had the highest successful bench press, I also won the bench press gold medal.

I HAD JUST WON MY FIRST GOLD MEDAL.

When that sank in, I ran to my parents and friends and told them the great news. I don’t think they really knew what was going on or understood how the competition worked, but they congratulated me and were clearly super happy for me.

These were the standings after the squat and bench press:

1st place (me): 352.5kg
2nd place: 350kg
3rd place: 342.5kg
4th place: 335kg
5th place: 330kg

After celebrating for a quick minute, it was time to get back to the warm up room to warm up for my last lift – the deadlift.

Primoz vs. Deadlift: Rising up from the ashes

The Deadlift was my nemesis. It was my worst lift compared to my competitors. It wasn’t going well in training as I couldn’t even get near the personal records that I had set months ago. My technique for it was totally wrong. And with my squat and bench press not going the way I wanted them to go, I wasn’t sure how much energy I would have to pull hundreds of kilos from the floor.

I knew that keeping my lead would be tough. The guy in the second place would lift 5kg heavier than me on the first attempt and the guy in the 4th place would lift 25kg heavier than me on the first attempt, which meant that I’d immediately be trailing behind in third place after the first attempt.

But even though the odds were against me, the math wasn’t working for me and I didn’t know how I would win this competition, I knew one thing for sure. I was a man on a mission. My mood during the warm ups was a mix of this:

and this:

I was tearing the weights off the floor like nobody’s business and getting hyped up for every lift that I made. I wanted to make the warm ups feel EASY and then chase that feeling throughout my attempts, just as I knew great weightlifters do.

The warm ups breezed by and the feeling was pretty good. The weight didn’t feel that heavy and my trainers said that I looked confident in moving it around. Soon it was time for my first attempt at 210kg.

Since I was one of the weakest deadlifters that meant that I wouldn’t be lifting towards the end of the group but any more. I would be second in line and all of my competitors could see what I did and adjust their lifts to my results. They had the advantage.

I unfortunately don’t have the video of the first attempt, but it was really just a routine lift. I hyped myself up, chased the feeling from warm ups and the 210kg felt exactly the same as my last 195kg warm up – light.

After the successful first attempt I went back to my routine. Sipping on gatorade, talking to my girlfriend and trainers and then getting into my chair, listening to music and visualizing the feeling and the ease of my next lift.

For the second attempt I chose 225kg, which was 2.5kg more than the 222.5kg I had planned to attempt originally. I knew that if I wanted to win I had to go beyond my limits and lift more than what I thought I was capable of.

If I lifted 225kg and my competitors made their lifts I’d still be in third place, but at least I’d be closing the gap and positioning myself for a third successful lift (which I had no idea how heavy it would have to be at that point).

When it was time to go on stage, I was already going crazy. I was hyped up, my trainers were screaming, my friends were screaming, I was screaming… I was ready to rip that weight off the floor like it’s nothing.

I got on the stage and attempted the 225kg deadlift, which was just 5kg below my personal best:

The lift felt as light and as fast as the last attempt, and after a brief look to see if the lift was valid (it was, since I got 3 white lights) I raised my hand in the air and went back to the backstage.

I quickly analyzed the video of my lift that my girlfriend took, and since it looked easy I decided to choose 235kg as my last attempt, which was 5kg over my personal record. I knew I could lift that.

Over the next few minutes I watched my competitors all successfully make their second attempts, one after the other. I kept an eye on how hard they looked for them and thought about how much more they were capable of lifting.

Now in case you’re not familiar with powerlifting, the last deadlift attempt (also the last lift of the competition) is where many competitions are usually won and lost. Because of that, there’s also a unique rule that lets you change your last deadlift attempt even after you’ve announced, so you can adjust to the strategies of your competitors.

At this point, it’s not just all about strength, it’s also about strategy and maths. Here’s what the standings looked like before the last lift:

1st place: 580kg
2nd place: 580kg
3rd place (me): 577.5kg
4th place: 565kg
5th place: 562.5kg

I already knew I had a medal since the competitors in the 4th and 5th place only increased their last attempts by 5kg, which means that they couldn’t catch me any more. This meant that at this point I had nothing to lose. It was time to go all in.

After my competitors picked their final deadlift attempts I saw that if they made them they’d still be ahead of me by 2.5kg, which meant that I had to raise my attempt – so I raised it to 237.5kg. That was the highest weight I was still kind of confident in pulling, even though I knew it was a stretch. It was 7.5kg over my last personal best.

As I updated my weight one of the competitors updated his by 2.5kg so he could beat me if he had successfully made his attempt. But since his previous attempt looked pretty hard already, I just didn’t think he’d be capable of making a 12.5kg jump on his third attempt. I was fairly confident that if I made my lift I would beat him, but I wasn’t sure about my other competitor who still had some room in the tank.

I didn’t have a ton of time to think about it as I was soon up for my last attempt. I hyped myself up for one last time, heard all of my supporters cheering me on, and screamed loudly as I went up on the stage while ACDC was playing Thunderstruck.

Then I attempted my first ever 237.5kg deadlift:

I gave it every single atom of energy I had left and the bar flew up, not much slower than during my last attempt. I put the bar down, looked at the judges and saw that the lift was good. I raised my hands, made a funny face, screamed and walked towards the backstage where I screamed some more and loudly celebrated by running around and hugging and high fiving my girlfriend and my coaches.

I had just improved my deadlift personal best by 7.5kg with room to spare, while I was sick. I was excited and happy, but also nervous as my competitors still had to attempt their lifts and could beat me with their last attempt.

The first competitor was the one that raised his attempt so he could beat me by a successful attempt. He went on stage, pulled the bar and quickly got it over his knees. My heart dropped into my stomach for a second as the time slowed down… and so did his bar. After putting up a fight he just couldn’t get it to his hips, and he failed his attempt.

When he got off stage I saw he was devastated and I talked to him briefly to try and console him before watching the last attempt.

The last attempt was from the guy who was 15kg behind me before the deadlifts but had a huge deadlift, and based on his last attempt I felt like he was perfectly capable of lifting the 255kg he set for himself to match my weight.

There was only problem – the rules of powerlifting in my federation state that if two lifters lift the same total weight, the lifter with the lower bodyweight wins. I expected him to change his attempt to 2.5kg more, but for whatever reason he didn’t – I think he just wasn’t aware of the rules. This meant that regardless of whether he pulled the lift or not, I knew I had won the second gold medal.

He ended up pulling a majestic 255kg deadlift and unfortunately tore his biceps in the process (this is one of the rare injuries that sometimes happens in events like this). It wasn’t fun to see his disappointment when he found out that he “just” got in the second place, but that’s sport. It’s not enough to just be strong, you also need to get the tactics right.

Here were the final results from the competition:

1st place (me): 590kg, lower bodyweight than 2nd place
2nd place: 590kg
3rd place: 580kg
4th place: 570kg
5th place: 567.5kg

Once I was certain that I had indeed won the overall competition, I waited for all of the remaining lifters to finish their lifts, cheered them on as they broke some personal records and then ran to my family and friends to hug them and tell them the news (I don’t think they were aware at that time that I had won yet).

It was definitely an emotional few minutes for me and I might have shed a tear or two. Well, to be completely honest I was emotional for the whole evening and the day after as I was so proud of myself and happy to have achieved something amazing in such a dramatic way and overcome all the obstacles in my way. All the hundreds of hours in the gym were worth it because of that one moment.

The best part of the competition for me was having my family and friends there. I know I haven’t had the best relationship with my family in the past and seeing them all there with me for 4+ hours even though they didn’t really understand how things worked meant a ton to me. Their support and cheering that helped me win my first competition was something that I’ll have with me forever.

To be honest, I don’t think I would have pulled this off had it not been for all the amazing people supporting me. Winning this competition wasn’t a one man thing. I have to thank:

My girlfriend who was always there for me, both during the training and the competition
My three coaches that made sure everything went as smoothly as it could have during the training and the competition, and helped me work around my crazy travel schedules
My family and friends who have supported me at the competition, even though they didn’t really know how it worked (I guess they’ll have to learn over time)
My mentor Allon who helped me mentally prepare for this competition like a true champion and get through the mental slumps
All the lifting friends that worked out together with me and helped me get through tough workouts and cheered me up when the things weren’t going the way I wanted them to go
All of my online business friends, readers, clients, students and mentors who knew I was competing and wished me luck and believed that I can achieve anything I put my mind to

On that stage, I wasn’t lifting by myself or for myself. I lifted with hundreds of people behind my back – and it’s pretty damn hard to not win that way.

So what did I take away from this competition?

I could probably write another whole post about that (and I might in the future), but there’s 3 key lessons from this competition that I’m taking away and applying to my life and business.

LESSON #1: You really CAN achieve anything you set your mind to. I know that I could go from “never being good at sports” to becoming a national champion in a sport, there’s really nothing that I CAN’T achieve if I put my mind to it and work for it.
LESSON #2: Mindset is half the battle, hard work is the other. I wouldn’t have won the competition if I didn’t train hard for 10-15 hours in the gym, and I wouldn’t have won it had I not spent hours and hours mentally preparing myself.
LESSON #3: Find the right people to support you in your crazy goals. When you have people around you who believe that you CAN achieve all the crazy goals you set for yourself, these goals all of a sudden become doable, and can even turn into reality.

I know that I’ll be applying all of these lessons to my business and pursuing bigger and crazier goals there as well. And to make sure I achieve them I’ll continue to build my own circle of kick ass people that will support me in them, and work on my mental toughness to help me show up when it matters most.

What’s my next crazy goal?

Well, at least lifting wise it’s pretty simple. In March there’s another national powerlifting competition just like this one, and my goal is simple – to hit the norm for the European Championships that take place next December.

The norm for that is 657kg so I have plenty of work to do if I want to lift 66kg more in my next competition, just 5 months after this one. But that’s the beauty of it – I love setting crazy goals and making them happen. And I know I’ll have a ton of fun making this one happen too.

What’s one thing that you’ve found interesting or fascinating about my story? What’s something that you took away from it? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below!

-Primoz

How I Started a 5-Figure Coaching Business With Ultimate Guides

By Primoz Bozic 1 Comment

In my first year of running an online business, I made $38k from scratch.

I had no former business education.

No rich parents or connections.

Not even a website.

All I did to do is used ONE key strategy that I’ll reveal in this post (and I’ll show you EXACTLY how I used it to get my business off the ground).

Let’s dive in!

I went through 2 failed business ideas until I found a great one

A few years ago, I was studying computer science at the university and working in a cubicle as a software developer.

I was sick of working for someone else and loved the idea of becoming my own boss, so I invested $1,000 into Ramit Sethi’s Earn1k course that taught me how to start a freelance business.

Unfortunately, things weren’t as easy as they might sound when you take an online course. It took me 7 months to actually find a great business idea since purchasing the course.

Even though I went through the course and put it into action, my first two business ideas didn’t work out.

My first business idea was to create websites for companies in Slovenia, which I spent quite a few months on.

There were two problems with that idea.

The first problem was that I was working on it with a team that wasn’t as motivated as I was, so while I would do the work, they wouldn’t and would find countless excuses to not make anything happen.

The second problem was that I just wasn’t very good at making websites, so it was hard for me to pursue this idea on my own.

After a few months I moved to another idea, which I hoped would be more promising.

Since I read a lot of books about productivity, I had an idea to work with companies and help their employees become more productive.

I spent another month on that idea and came close to making my first sale with it, but then a few days before we were supposed to start working together, the company let me know that they couldn’t hire me.

I was discouraged that another one of my ideas bit the dust, and for the next few months or so I didn’t really focus on starting a business.

The crazy idea that turned into my first successful online business

Then, one morning, I woke up at 6am morning and had this crazy idea that I could teach online poker players how to be more productive.

I used to play online poker myself and was pretty active in a community, and since I stopped playing it I learned how to become a lot more productive myself.

I connected the dots, and realized that if I could help poker players become more productive and focused, they could make more money while playing poker, and pay me to help them do that.

That’s how the idea about productivity coaching for online poker players was born.

I wasn’t sure if my idea was going to work out. I was afraid that people would make fun of me.

Like, “who is this guy? He’s never made millions with poker, so how can he teach me about productivity? And I don’t need anyone to teach me how to be more productive… That’s for losers”.

Still, I decided to give it a shot. So in my dark room in my parent’s apartment, at 6am in the morning, I decided to write an article and publish it on the poker forum that I’ve been active in in the past. I gathered all the information I could from various sites, like Six of the best, to make my article as authentic as possible.

I called it “The Quick Guide to Skyrocketing Your Poker and Life Productivity”:

How a “short article” accidentally turned into a 26,000+ word Ultimate Guide

I wrote just a few paragraphs about how important it is to have a clear vision and goals if you want to be successful, and went back to sleep as I was finished at 7:10am:

At 11:38am, I woke up and immediately checked my post to see that there were 3 encouraging responses to it:

This wasn’t much, but it was enough for me to gain some momentum and confidence to keep writing more (at least my worst nightmare of people hating my content didn’t come true).

After that, I consistently kept writing more and more chapters for the guide, every 1-3 days:

Some of these chapters were shorter, others were longer. I kept writing about what I felt was important, and also addressed the questions I would get along the way in the comments that I got on the guide (here’s a comment that made me write a whole chapter on sleep):

With every chapter, the “short article” grew bigger and bigger… And eventually it became a 26,000 word Ultimate Guide – the most detailed and comprehensive piece of content about productivity for online poker players.

Writing the guide wasn’t always easy.

In fact, it took me more than 6 months to finish the guide.

For the first two months, I was able to get a new chapter of the guide out every 1-3 days. Then, as other opportunities came to me because of writing the guide (more on that shortly), I got distracted and fell off track.

It was harder and harder for me to get back on track, so it took me a week to write the next chapter, then two weeks, then a whole month… Until I finally finished the guide in November (I began writing it in April).

The important thing is that I finished it though (the final version of the guide had over 26,000 words), so it wasn’t this thing that would keep nagging me in the back of my mind any more.

How my guide went viral and got 223,000+ views

Because of a combination of reasons, the guide was getting more and more attention in the poker community:

There was nobody else talking to poker players about productivity. I was the only serious person doing it, and I created content that was 1000x better than anything else out there. And I kept creating more and more of it.
Because I posted the guide in an online forum that was visited by thousands of people each day, there was plenty of new traffic coming to the guide as long as it was on the front page of the sub-forum it was in.
I made sure I frequently updated the guide and responded to the questions in the guide. This helped me build the relationships with the readers, add more value to them, but also bumped up the guide frequently so it was constantly on the first page.
Because the guide was so much better than any of the other content out there and there was a real need and demand for it, it was featured in the news section of the forum, and a lot of people kept linking to it from their forum posts, sharing it with others, etc.

Over time, the guide got more and more views. I was excited when it hit 1,000 views. Then 10,000 views. Then 100,000 views. The guide was more popular than I ever imagined it being.

Ultimately, the guide got over 223,000 views and over 452 comments:

When your guide is incredible, people will go out of their way to share it

Because the forum I posted the guide in had multiple non-english communities (German, Hungarian, Spanish, Portuguese…) who were very engaged, certain members of these communities voluntarily translated the guide into 7 different languages because they liked it so much.

This allowed the guide to reach even more people – for example, the German version of the guide got over 37,000 views and 129 comments:

And to this day it’s by far the most detailed and known piece of content on the internet about productivity for online poker players.

All of the 6 months that I spent on the guide were paying off. When you put in the work to create something incredible that nobody has put together before, people notice. And they talk about it and spread the word about it for you, without you even asking them to do it.

Together with all of the translations, my Ultimate Guide was seen by over 300,000 people. That’s 1.5 times the population of the capital of Slovenia where I live in!

How I made my first sale with my Ultimate Guide

Because the guide was so popular, a couple of interesting things happened.

The first thing that happened as I wrote the guide was that a few poker players reached out to me to work with me 1on1 on helping them become more productive, which is how I made my first 50EUR online (around $50):

Shortly after that, the owners of the poker forum that I wrote the guide on got in touch with me and asked me if I wanted to create monthly educational videos and host weekly live coaching classes where I would work continue to build on the concepts that I shared in my guide:

I made a total of 40 videos, and each of them got between 5,000 and 10,000 views (sometimes more). This means that all of my videos were seen about 300,000 times.

I also had regular 2 hour long live coaching calls, which had around 50-100 people on the call each week.

Helping so many people make a difference in their life at such a young age (I was around 22-24 at the time I did this) felt incredible. It also helped that I was able to create these videos on a recurring basis and have a reliable, sustainable source of income.

I got paid around $50/hour for my live coaching calls and around $200/video, which took me a few hours to create:

I wasn’t making crazy money in the beginning, but earning $500-$1,000/month doing something I loved on a consistent basis was a lot of money for me since I was still living with my parents and had no real expenses besides renting the office that I worked from.

To me, it was more important to see that I CAN do this. That I can be my own boss. Work on my own terms. Make peoples’ lives better.

That I didn’t need to rely on my boss while programming in a cubicle to decide what I’d get paid, that I could work from home, when I wanted to, on what I wanted to.

Knowing this allowed me to keep consistently making progress in my business and ultimately get me to where I am today.

From $50/hour to $38k in a year

Since I was able to record more and more videos and have more and more live coaching calls, the consistent revenue from my freelance work quickly added up.

40 videos at $200 each brought in around $8,000 in revenue. A similar amount of live coaching calls over time brought in another $4,000, bringing the total revenues from my guide to $12,000.

The videos and the live coaching calls were a nice, consistent stream of income, but they weren’t the biggest source of income for me.

As so many people saw my guide, the live coaching calls and the videos, more and more people wanted to start working with me. I went from charging $50/h for 1on1 coaching to up to $400/h.

This meant that the $50 invoices turned into $5,000 invoices:

The number of coaching clients varied – one month I would get 5 new clients, and the other month I’d get none – but as I gradually increased my rates from $50/h to $75/h to $100/h, $125/h, $250/h and finally $400/h, the revenues added up.

Within the first year of starting my business, I brought in an additional $20,000 in coaching revenues, bringing the total revenues from my guide to $32,000.

As I got more and more coaching clients, I was working with 13 different clients ad one point, which was great money-wise, but I was slowly starting to burn out.

I wanted to help more people while investing less time, so I started a month-long group coaching program together with another poker mindset coach.

40+ people signed up for the program and we each got $150 per client, so this program brought in additional $6,000 in a month – bringing the final revenues to $38,000 in a year.

All of this was the result of just ONE Ultimate Guide that I wrote.

BONUS: How I got 278,958+ website visitors, 6,150+ email subscribers and made $300k+ in revenue

Writing my first Ultimate Guide was just the beginning of my online business.

Since that point, I’ve written multiple Ultimate Guides that have helped bring 278,958+ website visitors, 6,150+ email subscribers and $300k+ in revenue to my online business.

Want to know EXACTLY how I did it (and how you can too)?

I’ll tell you ALL about it in my FREE 13,000+ word Ultimate Guide Checklist.

All you need to do is enter your name and email below, and I’ll send it straight to your inbox!

I’ll see you on the other side :).

-Primoz

5 Reasons Why Warren Buffet Became the Greatest Investor of All Time

By Primoz Bozic 10 Comments

Have you ever wondered why Warren Buffet became the greatest investor of all time and the richest man on earth?

Was it because of his natural ability to trade stocks?

Was it a series of lucky breaks?

Was he just way smarter than everyone else?

I’d argue that the answer is none of the above.

I recently watched the documentary about Warren’s life called “Becoming Warren Buffet” on my flight to Chicago (it’s a great documentary and I highly recommend watching it), and it all made sense.

It was definitely not that he was lucky, super smart, or a “natural”. He really just worked harder and smarter than everyone else.

In this post, I’ll share 5 reasons that I believe made Warren Buffet the greatest investor of all time.

#1 – He dedicated his life to one thing

Most of us live our lives in a distracted world where we jump from one thing to another. We spend a few years working in one job, then we switch careers. We take on one hobby, get bored of it, and jump to another one. We learn about one subject, read a few books on it, and then explore other subjects.

Warren Buffet did the opposite of what we do. He dedicated his life to learning about and doing just one thing – making great investments. He didn’t “just” spend 10,000 hours (which usually takes roughly 10 years) to be come an expert. He likely spent more than 100,000 hours learning about and practicing the art of investing, to achieve a true level of mastery.

You can see a similar trend in other people who dedicate their life to one thing without worrying about being good at everything – they just practice more than everyone else. You can see the same pattern in people like Kobe Bryant who wouldn’t leave practice until he made 400 shots each day, Gary Kasparov who spent endless hours each day studying the patterns of old chess games to improve his own game, and world’s best copywriters that wrote hundreds of headlines a day to get better at writing great headlines.

Sticking with just one thing in your life is something that few people do, but the ones that do usually make it further than everyone else.

How to apply this lesson to your life:

If you want to become incredibly good at what you do, according to the studies pointed at on peoplebynetworth.com, the first thing you need to do is pick ONE thing you want to be great at, rather than 5 or 20 different things – and then dedicate your life to it.

To get started on your journey, you can decide to learn about just one thing for the next month. This might mean practicing your copywriting skills for a month, reading books only related to copywriting or connecting just with people who are incredible copywriters.

Then, if you want to get better at it, spend another month on it. And another. And another. It’s only a matter of time until you’ll get amazing at it.

#2 – He started learning about investing early on

While I don’t believe that Warren Buffet necessarily had “lucky breaks”, it’s true that he did have certain advantages over other people that allowed him to get to where he is today. One of those advantages was that his dad had a library full of books about investing.

When he was a young kid, he spent hours and hours reading those books and expanding his knowledge, when most other kids were just busy with playing around. This allowed him to clock in thousands of hours of learning and accumulate knowledge that made him look like a prodigy later on when most of his peers just started to learn about investing.

The same is true for most other “prodigies”. People like Tiger Woods and Mozart who are incredibly good at what they do usually started practicing when they were 3 or 4 years old, getting a head start on most people around them.

How to apply this lesson to your life:

Invent a time machine, go back in time, and start building expertise when you’re just 3 or 4 years old. Just kidding.

While you might not be able to go back in time, you can stop waiting for the “right moment” to get good at something. If there’s something you always wanted to learn about, get started with it today. Take that kickboxing class you are thinking about. Read that book about songwriting that’s on your wishlist. Bake that chocolate shuffle you always wanted to learn how to bake.

The other thing you can do if you have kids is to give them the ability to start learning something – either a sport, an art form or a skill – early on in their life, when they’re just a few years old. This will give them a fighting chance at becoming the best in the world at what they do.

#3 – He reads for 5-6 hours a day

Most of the days of Warren Buffet are pretty boring. He spends 5-6 hours a day secluded in his study, either reading about the stock market or thinking about investments he wants to make or the solutions to his problems. He has been doing that for years on end.

I noticed a similar trend in my mentor Allon who is a high-performance coach that managed world’s best tennis players like Novak Djokovic and Marat Safin. He spends hours and hours each day immersed in books, speeches, podcasts and online courses related to what he does. That’s why he seemingly knows everything there is to know about high performance – he’s been doing that for 20+ years.

Derek Halpern, a leading authority in the online business world is another example of this in action. In his early podcast interviews, he admitted that he reads 2-3 books a week because he heard that Warren Buffet did a similar thing. It’s no accident that he has amassed a wealth of knowledge that he shares in his YouTube videos and blog posts that get viewed thousands of times.

How to apply this lesson to your life:

Pick a subject that you want to learn about and buy and read EVERY book you can find about it. Even if you just read for 1 hour a day (for 30 minutes when you wake up, and 30 minutes before bed) you’ll be able to read a book or so a week. After you read 10 books about a certain subject, you’ll know the subject pretty damn well.

If you want to kick things up a notch, make the time to read more. Instead of spending time on Facebook , read. Instead of browsing the internet while you’re on the toilet or waiting at the doctor’s appointment, read. Instead of watching Netflix in the evening, read. As an added bonus, you can also listen to audiobooks on Audible while you’re committing or buying groceries, which can easily help you work through another book or two a week.

#4 – He stayed in his circle of competence

The school system nowadays encourages us to master every subject – from biology to psychology to art and maths. The society expects us to get good at cleaning, cooking and mowing the lawn. The online business world expects us to practice writing, speaking, podcasting, copywriting, Facebook ads, designing our websites…

Warren Buffet was different than most people in the fact that he was conscious of the things he was competent in and stuck with them. He never bothered learning about cooking or art – he stuck with investing. Even within the investing world he only made investments that he knew would work out, and wouldn’t take big, uncalculated risks. He stuck with the things he was good at.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic, one of the best football players in the world did a similar thing – he knew he was incredibly good at dribbling and attacking, so he practiced that. During the football matches, he would often stay up front and not help the defenders, so he could conserve his energy for when he needed it most – scoring goals. It’s no wonder that he still scores tens of goals each season at the age of 36.

How to apply this lesson to your life:

Don’t spend your time doing things that you’re not good at. Instead hire people that are just as good as you or better than you at designing your website, cleaning your apartment or making dinner. Then use the time you have available to progress further in developing your skill sets.

Instead of trying to get good at every skill of building an online business (writing, podcasting, speaking, etc.) start by spending your time on just ONE skill you’re good at. If you love writing, write. If you love speaking, speak on podcasts, create YouTube videos or speak at events. If you love writing stories, write a lot of stories. If you prefer writing about systems or tactics, write about that.

You don’t need to do everything that people tell you to do. Instead, you can be more like Warren Buffet and do what you’re competent in doing, and take full advantage of it.

#5 – He lives a very simple life

One of the reasons why Warren Buffet is able to get so much reading done is that he lives a very simple lifestyle. He doesn’t have a computer or a smartphone, so he doesn’t spend any of his time on needless distractions like Facebook, email or surfing the web. By living a simple life, he can dedicate most of his time to one thing that matters most in his life – reading about investing and investing.

Cal Newport writes about the importance of living a simple life in his book called Deep Work, where he shares countless examples of people who are able to create incredible amounts of work because they spend minimal time on distractions like email. He himself is a testament of that philosophy by not being on social media. Over the past few years he has published tens of academic papers, written multiple books and hundreds of blog posts, and read hundreds of books – all while having plenty of time for his family.

I’ve had a similar experience as I quit Facebook a month ago. It’s no coincidence that I’ve read 10 books over the past month, written tens of thousands of words and clocked in 40 hours of coaching calls, all while spending 10-15 hours a week in the gym and having plenty of time for my girlfriend, family and friends.

How to apply this lesson to your life:

If you want to become the best in the world at what you do, or even grow your business faster than you’re growing it right now, you’ll want to mercilessly cut out all the distractions that unnecessarily complicate your life. There’s no real other way around it. If you’re serious about doing this, I highly recommend Cal Newport’s Deep Work, it’s a great read.

So why did Warren Buffet REALLY become the greatest investor of all time?

In my mind, it’s simple. He just put in more effort, learning and deliberate practice than anyone else in this world. While most people are checking emails, he’s reading. While they’re browsing the news and spending time on Facebook, he’s working on new investments. He’s not smarter than them or luckier. He’s just more hardworking and more focused.

We can all learn from Warren Buffet and his habits. We can all dedicate our life to one thing, constantly read and improve our skill sets, stick with our strengths and minimize our distractions to live a simpler life. The only thing we don’t have an effect on is starting as early as Warren Buffet – but we can get started today.

Which was your favorite lesson from Warren Buffet and why?

3 Personal Lessons From Ramit Sethi’s Forefront Conference

By Primoz Bozic 15 Comments

I’m on the plane flying back home from Chicago where I attended Ramit Sethi’s Forefront conference.

So how was Forefront?

Well, the weather was great. For the last month or so Slovenia was cold and rainy, and I almost forgot what sunshine looked like. When I arrived to Chicago, it felt like arriving into a whole new world. The sun was shining, the weather was sweet, and it wasn’t windy at all.

The people were incredible. It was so much fun to see my Ultimate Guide System students, Accelerator students, the friends I’ve met through Ramit’s communities, and the IWT staff that I worked with for two years. It felt like being around my family of weirdos that got me and accepted me for who I am.

The speeches were fun as well. My favorite speech was from Shawn Achor, the author of The Happiness Advantage. You might have seen his TED talk before about happiness that got over 1.9 million views.

What I loved about the speech the most was the level of mastery that Shawn has shown. He was insanely well prepared, had perfectly timed and hilarious jokes, and great, actionable takeaways. It’s no surprise he got a standing ovation in the end, since he must have spend hundreds of hours practicing that speech.

In this post, I’ll share 3 personal lessons that I took away from Forefront, that will change the way I run my online business and live my life in the future.

Let’s dive in!

Lesson #1: I’m more than just Ramit’s star student

In his opening keynote, Ramit did something he has never done before. He got really personal and vulnerable on stage.

He shared both the behind the scenes of his engagement story, as well as a story about downsizing his company, sleepless nights and personal challenges he had to overcome to save his company.

I could see that the attendees were both shocked and grateful that he shared a part of his life with them, rather than just talking about different business tactics that he usually talks about. I was surprised as well as I didn’t see that coming, and proud that he has made the decision to be more transparent about his life. I know it will help his readers connect with him better.

He shared those lessons in the context of his speech, which was called “Rewrite your story”. We all have stories about ourselves that tell ourselves and believe in, which might have helped us get to where we are today. But in order to achieve the next level of personal growth and success, we need to rewrite them.

The story that I told myself for the past few years was the story of being Ramit’s star student. I learned everything I knew about running an online business from him. I took all of his online courses, passed them with flying colors and went from earning $7/h as a programmer in Slovenia to building a 6-figure online business. I even worked with him for 2 years to develop his 7-figure online business coaching program called Accelerator.

That story helped me get to where I am today. It was even apparent in Forefront, where I couldn’t make 2 steps before someone approached me and told me that they saw me in Ramit’s courses.

But over the past few months, I realized that I didn’t want that to be my WHOLE story any more. I wanted it to become a small part of my much bigger story. I no longer wanted to be known as just Ramit’s student, I wanted to become known for who I am, for the work that I do and for the difference that I make in the world. Not just in Ramit’s community, but in many other places of the internet as well.

Moving forward, I’ll still follow Ramit and learn from him when it makes sense, but I will no longer spend most of my time in his communities, helping his students and talking about how he has helped me.

Instead of that, I’ll focus more on telling my own stories of what I learn in my own life. I’ll spend the majority of time talking to my students, figuring out what THEY want, and building lasting relationships with them – which is what I’ve done a lot of at Forefront.

When I talked to Ramit about what he thinks is most important for me right now, he told me that quitting Facebook was the best decision I could have ever made, because that will really help me focus on pulling from other parts of my life. He encouraged me to spend more time learning about the things I’m interested in (like competing in powerlifting and learning about sports psychology) and sharing that with the world.

He also encouraged me to do stop thinking about the products that he would create and the blog posts that he would write, and to instead do the things that I want to do and create the things that my customers want me to create.

As you’re reading this, this is probably obvious to you as an outsider, but it wasn’t obvious for me. I know that in the back of my mind, I always worried what Ramit would think when I wrote a new blog post or created a new product.

Just hearing that from him changed something inside me. It felt like I got permission to truly by myself and let myself live the life I want to live, not someone else’s life. It felt like a huge rock fell off my shoulders.

I know that the next few months will be challenging as I “reinvent myself”, but I’m also excited for the future. There’s just SO much more that I want to share with you.

How to apply this lesson to your life:

As you’re reading this, I challenge you to think about YOUR story. Is there a story you’re telling yourself that isn’t serving well? What if that story wasn’t true? What’s another story that you could tell yourself that would stop slowing you down, and actually speed up your process by getting you excited about your business? Think about it – and make a conscious decision to rewrite your story.

Lesson #2: I have hundreds of happy, quiet readers that I didn’t know about

During Forefront, I focus on spending as much quality time as possible with my Ultimate Guide System students and 1on1 coaching clients. I organized a breakfast for my students, I sat next to them in the audience, I talked to them during breaks, grabbed lunch with them, and even went shopping with them.

It was amazing to see them face to face and to get to know them and their stories better. They’re some of the most fun, interesting and hard working people I know.

One of my students hosted another student in their AirBnB. Another one drove for 5 hours one way just to grab breakfast with the other students, even though they weren’t a Forefront attendee. Another one, Kate, printed out all THREE of my Ultimate Guides and brought them with her to the conference:

I was so proud when I saw how many of them read my Ultimate Guide to Attending Conferences , took the advice from it and prepared incredible questions for the speakers. You could see that they were putting in the work that nobody else was putting in, and I know this will pay off for them big time in the future.

I was also shocked to see that over 50 people that I didn’t know yet came up to me during the conference and told me that they read my guide and loved it. I had NO idea that so many people took the time to go through it. I expected perhaps 10 or 20 of my students to do it, but 50+ people at just one conference I was going to? That’s amazing.

I realized that what Derek Halpern says about most of your happy readers being quiet couldn’t be more true. I know that I sometimes get discouraged when I send out an email and don’t get hundreds of responses back – that doesn’t mean that nobody is reading the emails, or that the content in them isn’t valuable. it just means that they might not take the time to respond back to me, which is fine.

How to apply this lesson to your life:

If you’re running an online business and sometimes get hard on yourself because you don’t get as many responses or comments on your blog post, remember that there might be a lot of people reading the post and benefitting from it, even though they might be silent.

See how that makes you feel differently about what you’ve written, and switch your focus to creating more great content – without necessarily looking to find a flood of comments.

Lesson #3: I need to get better at LISTENING to people and meeting them where there are

On the last day of Forefront, I participated in an on-stage “teardown” with Ramit, where we chatted about a burning question that I had for 15 minutes.

My question was about how you can change your mindset about money to go from earning 6 figures to earning 7, 8 or 9 figures. But deep down, I knew that wasn’t the actual question I wanted to ask. I knew there was something deeper going on, I just didn’t know what.

First we talked about how I feel like people around me in Slovenia don’t really get the idea of making more money because they all say things like “I hope you’re not doing this just for the money”, “money won’t make you happy”, and “if you make a lot of money, you must be doing something illegal”.

But within minutes, our conversation took a sharp turn.

We went from talking about how to improve my mindset to how to improve my relationship with my parents (the #1 thing I avoid talking about). And that happened on stage, in front of 500 people. FUCK.

As soon as Ramit asked me about why I feel guilty when I spend a lot of money on things I enjoy (like flying business class), I got a bit nervous. I knew where we were going.

I explained that I felt guilty because I knew that my parents would rather have me put the money in my savings account. They didn’t “get” the philosophy of living a rich life.
As I expected, my conversation took a sharp turn within the first few minutes.

When Ramit asked me if I know why my parents don’t approve of my lifestyle, things got worse. My mind blanked. It was one of those moments when the situation was obvious to everyone on the stage but me.

Fortunately the awkward silence didn’t last long, and after an honest “I have no idea”, Ramit walked me through the situation. You see, I was talking to my parents about all the things that I thought were important like having an amazing business class flight or eating at a michelin star restaurant, rather than talking about things that they care about like how I’m spending quality time with my sister or how I’ve helped one of my clients change their lives.

As I heard this, it all started to make sense. It was right in front of me all a long. Then, as I was walking down the stage into the backstage area, I had a lightbulb moment. I realized that my parents weren’t the only people whose language I wasn’t speaking. I was doing the same thing with my clients.

After the teardown I spent 10 minutes making 5 pages of notes with ideas of how I can better serve my clients and speak their language, rather than my language. I realized that they were telling me a lot of things that I completely missed and ignored.

For example, my best clients told me that they weren’t interested in making a quick buck as they weren’t strapped for money. They didn’t care about things moving as fast as possible. They just wanted to get really good at building an online business, and didn’t care how long it took. They wanted to learn how to create high quality work they were proud of that would capture their expertise well.

Armed with this insight, I’m already rethinking how I can change the way I run my business, write copy, and listen to what my customer are saying. I know this will be HUGE for me.

It’s funny how this one moment changed everything for me. Talking about something I always avoided talking about (my relationship with my parents) lead me to a big business breakthrough that I NEEDED to hear.

How to apply this lesson to your life:

Do you ever find it hard for you to connect with someone (it could be your parents, your clients, your friends, your significant other…)? If yes, what do you think they might be telling you that you aren’t paying attention to? Is it possible that you’re talking about things that YOU care about, rather than what THEY care about? If yes, what can you do differently next time you talk to them?

Was flying to Forefront worth it?

Just these 3 insights alone made Forefront WELL worth the money. And I didn’t even mention the amazing party at the museum of science, the eye-opening conversation I had with a friend for breakfast, or the double date over dinner where I laughed so hard I almost cried.

I also didn’t mention all the amazing copywriting and business strategy lessons I got from the speeches at the conference. That’s because some things that happen at Forefront need to stay at Forefront – and I hope I’ll see you there next year.

What about you? If you’ve attended Forefront this year, what were YOUR favorite takeaways, moments or lessons from the conference?

Let me know in the comments below!

P.S. If you’re attending a conference in the near future, you’ll LOVE my FREE 90-page Ultimate Guide to Attending Conferences. It will teach you everything that you need to do before, during and after the conference to at least double your investment from it. You can grab your free copy below!

-Primoz

The Ultimate Guide to Attending Conferences

By Primoz Bozic 14 Comments

26th of July 2013, 8am.

I just woke up on a couch in a stranger’s apartment in Chinatown in Manhattan. No, this isn’t some weird love story – I was couchsurfing as that was the only accommodation in NYC I could afford at a time. I had just spent all of my savings to secure my spot at my first conference, hosted by an entrepreneur that has taught me everything I knew about running an online business at the time.

As I was driving through the New York morning traffic in a suspiciously smelly cab, my hands were shaking, my heart was beating at a million beats per hour and my palms got sweatier every minute. To say I was nervous would be an understatement.

I dropped out of university just a few months ago to focus full time on my business and had spent all of my savings on this conference. What if I didn’t get anything out of it? What if people there would think I’m boring and wouldn’t want to talk to me? What if it was all just a huge waste of time and money? Thoughts like that were making their way into my head one by one, faster than I could dismiss them.

I took a few deep breaths to try to get myself to relax. I told myself “It’s just a conference Primoz, you’ve got this. This is what you’ve been preparing for for the past few weeks. Now is your time to shine.”. I could slowly feel my hands shaking less and my heart beat drop. I repeated the words in my mind. “It’s just a conference”.

Then it all sank in.

I was in New York. NEW YORK! This is what I’ve always dreamed of while working on my business from my small office with one window in Slovenia. I dreamed of traveling the world, meeting ultra-successful entrepreneurs and living a better life on my own terms. Now all of my dreams were coming true.

As Michael Jackson would say, this was it.

Looking back, this conference was one of the pivotal moments in my business where everything changed. This conference was where I first met Ramit Sethi in person and who later became one of my business mentors. It was the conference where I first started building relationships with other 6 figure entrepreneurs through late night Korean BBQs and Korean Karaoke. And it was after this conference that my business began to rapidly grow.

Attending the “Hack the Met tour” as part of the 100k Summit conference

Within a month of attending this conference, my monthly revenue in my business doubled. Within two months, it tripled. None of this was a coincidence, and similar things happened with every conference I attended in the future. I’ve found countless new mentors, clients, partners and friends through different conferences that helped me further grow my online business.

I never felt like I “wasted my money” by going to a conference because my investment always paid off many times over. Today, I’m going to share with you HOW I did it – it was all a part of a system that I’ve created for myself to get the most out of every conference I attended.

Introduction

But first, let’s address the elephant in the room:

Who the hell am I (and why should you trust me)?

In case you’re new to my site, you’ll probably wonder who the hell I am, why you should trust me, and why you should keep reading about my Korean Karaoke experiences.

In that case, hi – I’m Primoz:

I help new and established online entrepreneurs grow their audiences by creating high quality premium content – like this 27,000+ word Ultimate Guide. I also love creating the most detailed and comprehensive pieces of content on the internet myself around various topics, which is why I’ve written this guide.

Over the past few years I went from earning $7/h as a programmer in Slovenia to running a 6-figure online business where I sell premium online courses, coach ultra-ambitious online entrepreneurs, and strive to create the best free content online about different parts of starting and growing your online business.

I’ve been featured in publications like Business Insider, Entrepreneur.com and Yahoo Finance, and I’ve been featured as a case study in programs from top online business experts like Selena Soo, Ramit Sethi and Derek Halpern. I’ve also worked with Ramit Sethi for 2 years as a manager and a coach of his 7-figure program called Accelerator, where I coached 800+ online entrepreneurs from all over the world on how to start and grow their online businesses.

I’ve also attended various conferences as an attendee as well as a speaker, ranging from as few as 25 to as many as 500 attendees, and I’ve made the investment from every single conference back many times over.

Speaking at Selena Soo’s Get Known, Get Clients LIVE event in front of 200+ people

Speaking at Ramit Sethi’s Forefront event in front of 500+ people

Hosting a 50+ people event with Ramit Sethi for his Accelerator program

What’s included in this guide (Table of Contents)

Below you’ll find a table of contents with everything that’s included in this 27,000+ word guide. You can either go through it step by step (I highly recommend this) or skip to the part that’s the most interesting to you if you have limited time.

Here’s what you’ll learn from this guide:

PART 1: How to decide if a conference is worth your money

CHAPTER 1.1: “Does size of the conference matter?”

PART 2: How to prepare for the conference (and 10x your investment)

CHAPTER 2.1: Take the time to “do your homework”

CHAPTER 2.2: Who do you want to connect with?

CHAPTER 2.3: Which business challenges are you trying to solve?

CHAPTER 2.4: How to become the most prepared person at the conference

CHAPTER 2.5: How to prepare great questions

CHAPTER 2.6: How to get on the radar of speakers and attendees before the event

CHAPTER 2.7: How to use the conference’s Facebook community

CHAPTER 2.8: Crafting your perfect introduction

CHAPTER 2.9: How to never run out of things to talk about

CHAPTER 2.10: On-stage hot seats & teardowns

CHAPTER 2.11: Your “conference within a conference”

CHAPTER 2.12: Should you “dress to impress” at the conference?

CHAPTER 2.13: What about business cards?

PART 3: The ins and outs of attending a conference

CHAPTER 3.1: Connecting with speakers

CHAPTER 3.2: Connecting with fellow attendees

CHAPTER 3.3: Connecting with staff members

CHAPTER 3.4: 8 best networking opportunities at any conference

CHAPTER 3.5: Speeches and Q & A sessions

CHAPTER 3.6: Become a “conference commando”

CHAPTER 3.7: The conference “hall of shame”

PART 4: What to do after the conference ends

CHAPTER 4.1: The subtle art of following up

CHAPTER 4.2: How to turn your conference notes into business breakthroughs

BONUS: Your Conference Battle Plan

Download the PDF version of this 27,000+ word guide

As you can see, this guide is HUGE – it has over 27,000 words. To make it easier for you to read and put into action, I’ve created the PDF version of this guide for you – you can download it, you can download it, save it on your computer, send it to your Kindle, or print it our and read it on your flight to the conference.

I also know that there’s A LOT of information in this guide, and I wanted to make it as easy as possible for you to put it into action. That’s why I’ve created a free BONUS that goes together with this guide – I call it Your Conference Battle Plan.

Your Conference Battle Plan consists of 3 parts:

The 12-Step Conference Prep Checklist: This checklist includes all 12 steps that you need to take to prepare for the conference as best as possible, in as little as 24-48 hours.
The Conference Cheat Sheet: This cheat sheet will help you remember all the things you should be doing at the conference in order to get the most out of it. You can even print it out and bring it with you!
The Perfect Post-Conference Flight: My 2-step system for making sure that I build the right relationships and create massive business breakthroughs after the conference, that you can go through on your flight home (AND have plenty of spare time to watch a movie or two)

In order to get the PDF version of this guide AND Your Conference Battle Plan delivered to your inbox, just enter your name and email address below. Enjoy!

Why I wrote this guide

I’ve first written about my experiences with attending conferences in my Quick Guide to Surrounding Yourself With Successful People, which has been referenced many times as a great resource for attending conferences:

Since writing that guide back in 2014, I’ve attended many more conferences and spoke at a few of them, which helped me further refine my system for getting the most out of them. I’ve also noticed that there’s no one incredible resource on the internet that would really cover EVERYTHING you need to know to make the most out of the conference in great details and actionable steps, and would be incredibly easy to put into action.

So I decided to write one.

I made it my mission to write the most comprehensive and detailed free resource online for attending conferences, by a large margin. I wanted to create the ONLY resource you’ll ever need to read to get the most out of a conference and make your investment back many times over through new friendships, clients, partners and business breakthroughs you’ll find through it.

Who this guide is for

It’s pretty simple. If you’re attending a conference in the next few weeks or months (or even tomorrow), you’ll be able to benefit from this guide. You’ll also be able to benefit from this guide if you have another type of an event coming up in the near future, like a meet up or an in-person mastermind.

It doesn’t matter how large the event is – whether there’s 5 or 5,000 people at it, you’ll be able to use the same principles and tailor them to the size of the conference.

The only thing I ask from you when you read this guide is to commit to putting at least part of it into action, to get the most out of your next conference. Getting the most out of the conference does require work, and the more work you put in, the more you’ll get out of it.

Having said that, getting the most out of the conference isn’t particularly complicated or hard – it’s all about following the simple steps outlined in this guide.

What you can expect to get out of reading this guide

After reading this guide, you’ll never come home from a conference or event feeling like it wasn’t worth your money or your time. You’ll always come home from it feeling like it was worth it 10 times over, AND that feeling won’t go away after the initial excitement and inspiration fades away.

You’ll learn how to optimally prepare for the conference in the days or weeks leading up to it, how to start building the right relationships at the conference, as well as what to do after the conference to stay in touch with the people you loved meeting without it becoming a chore or another thing that you “should do”. No more staring at that stack of business cards without knowing what to do next.

You’ll walk away from the conference with new friends, business partners, mentors, potential clients and business breakthroughs that will make the conference fee, accommodation, flights and the bottle service at the Korean Karaoke bar well worth it.

After you implement what you learn in this guide at your next conference, attending a conference will never feel the same again. Instead of feeling nervous or even overwhelmed by the idea of meeting 500 new people you’ll feel like the conference is your playground. You’ll know exactly how to navigate through it to make sure you’ll get what you want out of it so you can maximally grow your online business.

PART 1: How to decide if a conference is worth your money

Nowadays there’s more conferences out there than ever. You can attend smaller private masterminds, medium-sized conferences with top experts in your field, or even massive events with thousands of people like the yearly Traffic & Conversion summit.

The question is: How do you decide which conference is actually worth the investment?

I use the following 3 questions to help me make this decision:

Can I expect to find major business breakthroughs at this conference?
Are experts that I want to connect with speaking at the conference?
Are there people I want to connect with attending the conference?

These questions help me figure out whether the conference can bring me the business breakthroughs or new business relationships that will make the investment “worth it”.

If the answer to one or more of these questions is YES, I’ll likely attend the conference or event (I attend a few of them every year). If the answer is NO, I usually don’t bother going there. There’re plenty of other events I can spend my money on.

When I attended Ramit Sethi’s 100k Summit event back in 2013, I ran a 5-figure coaching business. I invested $5,000 in the event fee (plus flights and food) because I knew that the topics covered at the event would make the investment well worth it. By acquiring the skill sets that would allow me to become a 6-figure coach, I would be able to make the investment back in no time.

I also knew that the event would be pretty small, with only 20-25 people. At a 3-day event, this would give me plenty of time to build a relationship with Ramit, as well as other attendees which were 5- and 6-figure freelancers and consultants just like me. All of this made the event a no-brainer for me, and it was even worth staying on a stranger’s couch in Chinatown to make it happen.

A different example is this year’s Forefront event that I’m attending. Forefront is a 500-person event that’s also ran by Ramit Sethi, and includes speakers like Ramit, Gretchen Rubin and Shawn Achor. The event also includes different “tracks” where attendees will be able to learn about different topics (like “Million dollar networking” or “Your first 50k”). My track is called “Beyond 6 figures”, which suits my current business really well.

Interestingly enough, I’m not really attending this event to get major business breakthroughs (though some will inevitably happen there) or to connect with speakers (though I might have a chance to do that). At a large event like this, I know that the speakers will be swarmed with everyone trying to talk to them, so I’m not making connecting with them a priority.

The #1 thing I’m looking to do at Forefront is to connect with fellow attendees. I know a lot of the attendees already from my past work with Ramit, and there will be some major influencers on the attendee list like Selena Soo that I want to strengthen relationships with. I also know I’ll likely meet other ultra-ambitious entrepreneurs that I might be able to collaborate with in the future.

When you’re deciding whether you should attend a conference or not, keep things simple. Ask yourself the 3 questions above, and if your answer to one or more of them is a confident YES, then attend it (and then make sure you get the most out of it by preparing well for it). If not, don’t sweat it. There’re plenty of other events you can attend.

CHAPTER 1.1: “Does size of the conference matter?”

Both small and large conferences have their pros and cons. At larger conferences, you can learn about a larger variety of different topics, and meet more people. You can also “be seen” by more people by either speaking at the event or participating in the Q & A sessions and hot seats.

I personally prefer smaller events to bigger ones though. Smaller events are usually more intimate, give you more access to speakers, and allow you to take the time to really build lasting business relationships (vs. talking to a different person every 10min, and walking away from an event with a stack of business cards and no new relationships at all).

Having said that, the size of the event won’t “make or break” the event for me. If the event is about a topic that I’m interested in and there’re speakers or attendees that I want to connect with at the event, I’ll attend it regardless of whether there are 20, 200 or 1,000 people at the event. The 3 questions above matter more than the size.

In short, size doesn’t matter as much as you think. You’re welcome.

PART 2: How to prepare for the conference (and 10x your investment)

My goal with attending conferences isn’t just to “make my money back” with them. I’m always looking for ways to 5x, or even 10x my investment.

In order to make that happen, I realized I need to get 3 things right:

I need to “do my homework” and prepare for the conference in advance
At the conference, I need to be at my best and get the most out of my time there
After the conference, I need to turn the acquaintances into lasting relationships, and the business breakthroughs into actual revenue

Today, we’re covering all of those, and we’re starting with the first step: “doing your homework”.

CHAPTER 2.1: Take the time to “do your homework”

The worst thing you can do at the conference is to “just wing it”. I remember doing that at last year’s Forefront event. At that time, I was still working with IWT (the company that hosted Forefront), and I was attending the event as a staff member. In my mind, I thought “ok, I just need to show up”.

That was a huge mistake. Yes, I did show up, and yes, I did have fun at the event and had a lot of conversations with our students. But as I came home from the event, I had a bitter taste in my mouth. Deep down I knew that I could have gotten more out of it had I prepared for it in advance. I could have connected with the influencers speaking at the event, and asked questions that would allow me to have new personal and business breakthroughs.

Lesson learned: ALWAYS do your homework before the event, no matter the circumstances – because doing your homework is the 90% to getting the most out of it.

Whether you have 2 weeks to prepare for a conference, 1-2 days, or even a 3-hour flight, there are things you can do to make sure that the conference is a huge success. Today we’re going to explore how to make that happen. We’ll talk about all the things that you need to prepare in advance, and how to actually prepare them.

By the time you’ll make it to the event, you’ll know you’ll be ready. You will have done the hard work, and the conference won’t be this intimidating group of 500 people and a maze of different presentations – it will be your playground instead.

So take as much time as you can to prepare for the conference in advance, and use the exercises below to create your very own “Conference Battle Plan”.

CHAPTER 2.2: Who do you want to connect with?

Besides the delicious food and open bar, there are two main benefits from attending conferences:

You can build new (and strengthen old) business relationships
You can solve major business & personal growth challenges through new breakthroughs

You’ll be able to connect with new friends, business partners, potential clients, mentors, and perhaps even romantic partners at conferences. Most of these relationships will form outside of the actual conference (more on that in Chapter 3.4). You’ll also be able to get new business breakthroughs either through talking to other attendees, participating in Q & A sessions and hot seats or listening to the presentations.

If you’re attending a conference that’s teaching you a skill set that you’re not familiar with, then the major business breakthroughs will likely be a priority for you. If you’re attending a conference as a speaker or if you’re one of the more experienced people in the room, you might benefit from the relationships more than from the actual content of the presentations.

But regardless of how experienced you are, it’s always a good idea to take some time in advance and get crystal clear on what exactly you’re looking to get out of the conference.

First, you can think about the RELATIONSHIPS that you want to build at the conference.

Before we dig into that, I to give you a word of warning: Trying to connect with EVERYONE at the conference will likely lead to FEW OR NO great, deep relationships.

I’ve learned this the hard way when I went to the 100k Summit conference from Ramit Sethi – at that conference, I wanted to meet anyone and everyone that would talk to me. I spent 10 minutes talking to one person, then 10 minutes to another. At the end of the conference, I felt excited to have met so many new people… But then soon realized that I haven’t really built any lasting relationships with the attendees.

I did a much better job connecting with the staff members (more on that below), whom I did take plenty of time to talk to – which lead to lasting relationships – and some of those people I’m still in touch with to this day.

What we won’t do today is create a list of 50 people to build relationships with, as that won’t help you build QUALITY relationships. Instead we’ll pick a handful of people that you would really love to connect with, and not worry about connecting with everyone you run into like everyone else might.

Here are a few specific questions you can ask yourself to come up with a list of people that you want to connect with at the conference:

#1 – Which types of relationships am I looking to build?

Before creating a list of specific people that you want to connect with, it’s a good idea to think about what kind of relationships you’re looking to build.

Are you trying to find…

Business mentors
Affiliate partners
Guest post opportunities
Podcast opportunities
Coaching clients
Clients for your online courses
Investors
…or someone else?

Take a few minutes to think about it – and try to get as specific as possible during this step. Instead of saying “I want to find more clients”, say “This conference would be totally worth it if I found 3 new potential clients for my 1on1 coaching program”.

Instead of saying “I want to find a mentor”, you can say “I’d love to connect with someone who runs a 7-figure business and is really great at managing their team, because that’s something I struggle with myself”.

The more specific you are in what you’re looking for, the easier it will be for you to find the specific people to connect with in the next few steps.

#2 – Which speakers do I want to connect with?

Especially at bigger conferences, you don’t have to connect with EVERY speaker that’s speaking at the conference, but there might be 1-3 speakers that you REALLY want to connect with.

To get the best idea of who you want to connect with, you can look at the event page / schedule and go over the list of speakers. This is what that would look like for the Forefront event I’m attending soon:

Here we can see that there are 9 speakers at the event.

If some of these speakers look like someone you want to connect with and build a relationships with, write their names down (we’ll cover how to actually prepare for speaking to them in the following chapters).

#3 – Which attendees do I want to connect with?

The next thing you want to do is find out who is coming to the event as an attendee (that you want to build a relationship with). The old-school way of getting a list of attendees would be to email the organizer, specify who you’re looking to connect with and ask them if there’s anyone you should pay attention to from the attendees.

The much easier way of doing this nowadays is through online communities that are built around conferences. For example, the Forefront event I’m attending has a Facebook group with all of the attendees of the event:

And in every community like this, there are either threads where everyone introduces themselves.

And if there’s no such thread, you’ll likely see people freely introducing themselves in the community:

When it comes to connecting with fellow attendees, I’ve found that quality always trumps quantity. Even if there are 500 people at the event, I recommend you to pick just 3-5 people that you REALLY want to connect with.

#4 – Which staff members do I want to connect with?

Connecting with staff members is one of the MOST valuable things you can do at the conference, and yet almost nobody knows it (or talks about it).

I’ve learned about the importance of connecting with staff members when I first attended Ramit Sethi’s conference called 100k Summit. At that conference I made it a point to connect with Ramit’s team. I connected with some of his product developers and a product manager, and when I applied to work with Ramit’s company, those relationships made it a lot easier for me to secure the interviews and land the position.

Staff members are usually ignored at conferences, and yet they have a wealth of knowledge, so they’re great people for you to connect with.

If you can, make a list of any staff members that you’d love to connect with at the event. You’re most likely to see the staff members of the influencer or company that’s organizing the event (rather than staff members of speakers).

In the upcoming Forefront event, the organizer (Ramit) let us know that he’ll be flying some of his staff to the event, including the head copywriter.

In this case, you could find out who these team members are by going on LinkedIn and searching for “I Will Teach You to Be Rich” (Ramit’s company) to find a list of people who work there.

With a little bit of digging, you could also see that a few staff members are speaking at the event (Will Green, IWT’s copywriter is hosting a presentation about copywriting):

Then, as you find a list of the staff members that are coming to the event, you can think about who it would be the most beneficial to connect with and why:

You could connect with product developers to find out how the company develops it’s products.
You could connect with copywriters to get feedback on your copy (or learn about resources you can use to improve your copy).
You could connect with their assistant to learn about the productivity system that the influencer uses to perform at their best.
You could connect with their affiliate manager if you want to become an affiliate for them.
You could connect with their editor if you wanted to land a guest post opportunity with them.

This is where the step #1 from this chapter (thinking about the types of relationships that you want to build) will come in handy.

Once you’ve found 3 staff members that you want to connect with at the conference, add them to your list of people that you want to connect with.

At the end of this step, you should have a list of around 5-10 people (depending on how much prep time you have available), including:

1-3 speakers
3-5 attendees
1-3 staff members

I usually wouldn’t make a list of more than 5-10 people, as it’s unlikely you’ll build more than 3-5 DEEP relationships at the event that’s 1-3 days long anyway, plus doing your research (and remembering it) on more than 10 people will likely take weeks – so if your conference is coming up within a week or two, go for quality over quality.

Now if you do end up with a list of 10+ people, one thing you can do is to separate the list into “top 5” or “top 10” people you REALLY want to connect with (and do deep research on them), and into a list of “nice to connect with”, which you can do some light research on.

NOTE: If the event is longer than 1-3 days (like a week or so), you might be able to build deep relationships with more than a handful of people – in that case, it’s totally ok to make your list a bit longer and spend more time preparing for the conference.

CHAPTER 2.3: Which business challenges are you trying to solve?

Now that you have a list of people that you want to connect with at the conference, it’s also a good idea to come up with a list of personal & business challenges that you want to solve (that can lead to major breakthroughs).

The way that you can come up with these is fairly simple. Simply ask yourself:

What are 1-3 specific business challenges I’m facing right now?
What are 1-3 personal growth challenges I’m facing right now?

Business challenges might be things like refining your business idea, getting more traffic to your website, writing great sales copy, hiring a team, or creating a sales funnel. Personal growth challenges might be things like procrastination, staying focused and concentrated while working, developing confidence and self-esteem, getting better at public speaking, and so on.

The key here is to be as specific as possible. Instead of just saying “I struggle with getting more traffic to my website”, try to find the root of the issue.

Ask yourself “what’s so hard about getting traffic to my website?”. The answer to that might be “I create a lot of content, but nobody finds or reads it”. Then you can ask yourself “Why is it that way?”, and the answer to that might be that your content either isn’t good enough, OR you’re not sure how to spread the word about it.

Now we have a REAL challenge that you can tackle at the conference. You can try to get to the root of the issue, then think about the things you’ve tried so far to solve the challenge, things that worked, and things that didn’t, and make notes of all of that.

All of a sudden, you no longer have a vague challenge like “getting more traffic to my website”, but a specific challenge that you can solve when you run into someone who’s amazing at generating traffic to their website with the strategies you’re currently using.

Thinking about these challenges in advance will already help you come up with a few specific questions and talking points for the people that you want to talk to – and make the next steps much easier.

CHAPTER 2.4: How to become the most prepared person at the conference

The one thing I was shocked by at the 100k Summit conference was how little most people actually prepared for it. I was in a crowd of 25 people who each spent $5,000 or more on this event, and yet very few actually seemed to deeply prepare for it – most just seemed like they were winging it.

This showed as most people never (or rarely) participated in the Q & A sessions. They didn’t go up to Ramit or other speakers to ask further questions. And when they did ask the questions, a lot of them felt pretty vague, generic and not well researched (like, you could google the answer to the question in 5 minutes).

Now of course this wasn’t true for everyone – there were a few people that were really prepared – but still, with every conference that I’ve ever attended, there was only a small percentage of people who looked really prepared for it.

The must surprising thing at the 100k Summit for me was that before the conference, Ramit told every attendee to track how much time we’re spending on different parts of our business (on research, sales, marketing, etc.). I expected everyone to do this exercise… And yet when I brought my notes to Ramit, he seemed really surprised that I did it – as most people didn’t.

Taking the time to do little things like this can really help you stand out from everyone else at the conference. Being the most prepared person today was a huge part of me making a great first impression on Ramit Sethi and building a relationship with him. And today I’m excited to share with you my “Ultimate Conference Prep Routine”, so you too can stand out from all the other attendees at the conference you’ll attend.

We’ll talk about how to effectively do your research on the people you want to connect with, prepare great questions for them, and leave a lasting first impression on them that will lead to new business opportunities for you down the line.

Introducing “The Ultimate Conference Prep Routine”

I like to joke around that this part of preparing for a conference is the one time it DOES make sense to be a stalker. When you’re trying to connect with speakers, attendees or staff members at a conference, you can’t leave the things to chance because the more you put into preparing for these conversations, the more you’ll get out of them.

The “Ultimate Conference Prep Routine” consists of two parts:

The light research
The deep research

The light research will help you “do your homework” and get an overview of who the person is, what they do and their interests, and generate talking points for you when you run into them. The end result of the light research phase will be a “one page bio” that you can look over to instantly learn or remember more about the person you’d like to connect with.

The deep research will help you craft incredible questions for them that will blow them away, leave a lasting first impression on them and likely lead to further conversations and an amazing, lasting relationship. (I know, I’m talking so much about these lasting relationships that I almost feel like a dating coach).

STEP #1: The light research

The light research is the easier part of preparing for a conference. It’s doing your “due diligence”. Surprisingly enough, most people don’t even do the light research and really just “wing it”, even though this phase doesn’t take that much time.

I encourage you to do the light research for each of the attendees that you’re looking to connect with at the conference from the list of people you created in Chapter 2.2.

The goals of light research are simple:

You don’t want to look like a dummy who doesn’t know the basic information about the speakers
You can make an amazing first impression on a fellow attendee (that’s not super well known) by doing it
It creates potential talking points that can lead to great conversations

The light research will allow you to blow away fellow attendees that you connect with (because you’ll actually take the time to look up who they are, what they do and what their interests are), and to always have something to say and talk about when you “bump into” someone that you want to connect with.

Here’re a list of things you can do as light research:

Check their Facebook profile (personal and business), to see what they’re posting about
Check their crbdirect.org.uk profile, to learn more about their background
Check their Twitter, to see if they still live in the ice age
Check their website about page, to learn about what they do, who their audience is, if they sell any products or services, etc.
Check their last few pieces of content they created, to see what they love talking about nowadays
Google them, because you might find some interesting stuff you wouldn’t find otherwise

As you do this, take notes of whatever is interesting to you, or you could talk to them about. I encourage you to focus both on their business life (what they do, who they work with, etc.), and their personal life (what their interests and hobbies are, what they love talking about, what they’re passionate about, etc.).

For example, if you find out that someone went to the same university as you, that’s a great talking point. If they share the same passion for going to the gym or riding horses, that’s another great talking point. If they offer a service that you might be interested in (like copywriting coaching), that’s an even better talking point.

This research shouldn’t take super long – anywhere between 10-30 minutes per attendee MAX (depending on how much time you have available before the conference). You don’t need to read every article they have on their website or listen to their interviews, at least not at this stage.

By the end of the light research phase, you should have a one-page bio with notes / bullets for each of the people that you want to connect with at the conference available.

You can print these bios out, put them in a folder and take them with you to the event, to easily refresh your memory when you see someone you want to connect with. I swear doing that is not creepy – when people did this to me I wasn’t creeped out, but rather super impressed that they took the time to look me up!

Now, let’s move on to the fun part.

#2 – The deep research phase

This is the thing that 99% of the conference attendees skip on – because they don’t know how to do it, because they don’t make the time for it, and because some of them are just too lazy.

Because of this, doing the deep research is the #1 thing that will help you stand out from everyone else at the conference – you’ll simply outwork them to make a much better impression than them, and make it 10x or 100x easier to get noticed and build relationships with people you’re dying to connect with.

So how does the deep research phase work? Well, it’s a lot of research (which is why you don’t need to perform it for all the 10 people you want to connect with). I like to look at this phase as my unfair advantage over other attendees. Since you’re reading this guide and you’re 5,000+ words into it, I know you’re not a lazy person (the lazy people stopped reading 100 words into it). I also know you love challenges and hard work – so this phase will be perfect for you.

The idea behind the deep research phase is to get a deep understanding of what someone’s business and life look like, get become familiar with their story and area of expertise, and to be able to ask highly thought-out questions that will result in great business breakthroughs and an impressed look on the face of the person you’ll be speaking to.

By doing more research than 99% of the people in the room, you’ll be able to show the speakers, influencers and other attendees that you’re the serious and the person to look out for. You won’t just talk about how great you are, you’ll SHOW them that they’re the type of person they want to be around (top performers like being among other top performers, no matter how much more or less experienced they are).

By doing deep research, I was able to connect with major influencers at the Behaviorcon conference I attended – I came to the event with a ton of notes and notecards with well thought out questions that I continued to ask during Q & A sessions and breaks.

When I saw one of the speakers at the end of the event, they were so impressed with me that they gave me their personal email address to email them about how I’ll implement their advice. I did (multiple times), and over time the person became one of my most valuable mentors.

So let’s talk about HOW to perform deep research. There are a few things you can do as a part of it:

You can read the books they wrote
You can listen to their podcast interviews
You can go through their online courses
You can sign up to their e-mail list and read their free e-books
You can read 5-10 of their most popular blog articles

For example, when I went to Behaviorcon, I read through the books from a few speakers. With the speakers that haven’t written any books, I listened to their podcast interviews (more or less anyone noteworthy either has their own podcast or has spoken on podcasts before). If I purchased online courses from them in the past, I revisited them.

And what about when someone that you really want to connect with isn’t super well known and doesn’t have their own book or an online course, or do podcast interviews? Well, in that case, you can still think about how you can go above and beyond in learning as much about them as possible. You can read their blog, sign up to their email list and read the free e-books they’ve written – if you put in the effort, you can usually find a way to find out plenty about them.

How much deep research you’ll do (and how many people you want to do the research on) depends on how badly you want to connect with people at the conference and how much time you have available.

If you have a few days to prepare for a conference, you can usually do deep research on 1-3 people (if you have more than that, then 3-5 is possible as well). The deep research usually does take at least a few hours per person, but it’s well worth the time and will help you dramatically with asking great questions and getting amazing business breakthroughs.

I like to do some of the deep research on my flights to conferences, as that’s where I usually have plenty of uninterrupted time to listen to podcast interviews and read books, as well as get into the right mindset for the conference. So even if you only have a day or two before the conference (but are spending 5 or more hours on the plane to get there), you can still get plenty of deep research in.

The end goal of this phase is to know 1-5 people REALLY well, and have the ability to ask them some amazing questions as well as have plenty of talking points when you run into them.

Now let’s talk about how you can use deep research to come up with great questions!

CHAPTER 2.5: How to prepare great questions

Before I went to the 100k Summit conference from Ramit Sethi, I asked my mentor Naveen Dittakavi how he would prepare for it.

He recommended me to go through Ramit’s CreativeLive class (an 8+ hour online class on different ways of making money online), take notes and come up with great questions. I spent tens of hours doing deep research this way, and the end result was that I had a stack of questions ready for Ramit that I continued to ask him during the Q & A sessions and breaks to really get the most out of the event.

I learned the system for coming up with great questions from my mentor, and this is how it works.

As I was doing the deep research through the CreativeLive class I:

Took notes: I took notes of insights, interesting fact, strategies, tactics and actionable steps I could change in my business in a paper notebook.
Asked myself how these applied to me: I looked at my notes and I asked myself: “How does this apply to me? How can I leverage this? What can I do in my business to apply this insight TODAY?”
Prepared questions: Whenever my mind blanked and I wasn’t sure how exactly I could apply something to my business, I wrote it down as a question.
Tried to answer the questions myself: I first tried to Google the answer to the question. If that didn’t work, I asked myself “What would Ramit do?” and then tried to answer the question again.

With the questions that I still couldn’t manage to answer myself, I used the following process to polish them and make them really great:

I made sure the questions I was asking were specific: First, I wanted to make sure that my questions were very specific. Questions like “how do I get more testimonials” were vague and would just get vague answers. Instead, I focused on being much more specific and pinpointing the parts of the processes that I didn’t understand. For example, I would ask something like: “What is the exact script that you would use for asking for a testimonial?”, “What is a good timing to ask for a testimonial on a 6-month project?”, “Would you ask for a testimonial via email, at the end of a client call or schedule a separate call just for that?”
I visualized Ramit’s response: Then, I visualised what the answer to my question would be. I imagine standing in front of Ramit at the conference and asking him the question, and then listening to his response. If my question could be answered with another question, like “what do you mean by that?”, I went and made the question even more specific or added more detail (see below).
I demonstrated that I did my research: To avoid the “obvious” answers and get really personalised answers, I wrote down what I already tried, what worked and what didn’t. I wanted to show that I’ve done my research beforehand and tried the solutions that I could find on the internet before asking the questions.
I offered potential solutions: Whenever I already had some ideas what to do but wasn’t sure which solution to go with, I would write down three solutions, choose the one that I felt is best and explained why. (“I’d like to get your thoughts on X. I’m thinking about doing X, Y or Z. I think Z is better because… [insert reason], but I’d love to hear what you think.”)

I used a notebook like this to take my notes and write down questions:

Let’s take a look at an example of what a great question would look like:

“Hey Ramit, I’ve really been struggling with raising my rates with existing clients. More specifically, I’m not sure at when is the right timing for raising my rates.

Here’s what I managed to come up with:

I can raise my rates after we finish the first project that we do together
I can raise my rates after the client gets some really good results
I can raise my rates after a fixed time frame like 3 months

I feel like raising my rates after the client gets some really good results seems best because they will be compensating me for the value that I bring to them and they will be happy to pay me more as I just made them a ton of money. What do you think?”

This is how I used the guidelines to form this question:

I made sure the question was specific: I didn’t just ask about “how to raise my rates”. I asked about WHEN is a good time to raise my rates with an existing client. There are other things that I could ask, like “What should I say when I try to raise my rates with an existing client?” or “for how much should I raise my rates”.
I visualized Ramit’s response: You can notice that there’s a huge difference with raising rates with new and existing clients. If I didn’t specify what I’m looking for, I would almost definitely get back the question “are you trying to raise rates with existing or new clients?”.
I demonstrated that I did my research: By preparing the three solutions, I already show that I’ve done my research and make life easier for Ramit to answer my question (it’s easier for him to just say “you should do X because…” than to explain all of the possible solutions to me).
I offered potential solutions: By choosing a solution on my own and explaining my thought process behind the choice, I again show that I’ve actually thought about this problem on my own, and I also show Ramit my thought process (in which he might find some holes that I can fix).

Once I’ve written down my questions, I decided to implement a system that would help me keep the questions at hand and keep them neatly organized:

I bought a hundred small notecards, in 10 different colours. Each of the colours would be for a different topic or a different speaker (there were a few guest speakers that I wanted to ask some questions).
I wrote down the questions that I had onto the notecards on the flight to US. I left about half of the notecards empty so I could write down additional questions during the event. In the end, I split the notecards into two different envelopes – one with the questions that have already been answered and one with questions that I still had to ask.
During the event, I had my notecards in a pocket and I could have the questions ready to be asked within seconds. After I got the question answered, I would write down the answer to the back of the card.

This system worked great for me because:

I didn’t have to rely on my memory to remember the questions
I could easily categorise my questions with colour coding
It showed that I was well prepared for the event
It helped me prepare questions that were really good because I could see them in front of me, on a piece of paper and they weren’t just random words put together in my head
It made it easy for me to write down the responses to different questions

Whether you end up using notecards or not to prepare for your next conference is up to you – but I highly encourage you to combine the process for coming up with great questions with the deep research phase for the people you really want to connect with.

You can also use the same process for coming up with specific questions for the business challenges you wrote down in Chapter 2.3. The goal here is to have plenty of well thought out questions ready for the Q & A sessions, breaks and for when you manage to get some 1on1 time with the speakers or interesting attendees. This will help you make the most of the time at the conference and lead to some awesome business breakthroughs.

At this point, here’s what you will have already prepared for the conference:

You’ll have a list of 5-10 people that you’ll want to connect with.
You’ll have a list of 1-3 major business & personal growth challenges ready to tackle at the conference.
You’ll have a one-page bio created for each of them (using the list research).
You’ll have done the deep research on 1-5 attendees or speakers, depending on how much time you have.
You’ll have a list of great questions created based on the deep research for each of the people that you want to connect with.
You’ll have a list of great questions created based on your business & personal growth challenges.

Even if you do nothing else to prepare for the conference, you’ll be better prepared than 95% of the people there. Give yourself a pat of the back!

But since you’re a top performer, I know you won’t stop there. You want more – you really want to be as well prepared as you can be to really get the most out of this event and make every penny you spend on it totally worth it. So let’s keep going!

CHAPTER 2.6: How to get on the radar of speakers and attendees before the event

Now that you’ve done your homework and you’re more prepared than 95% of people at the conference, it’s time to take advantage of that.

Since you already know who you want to connect with, have done your research on them and have some talking points and questions ready for them, there’s no need to wait until the conference to connect with them. If you want to stand out from all other attendees, a great way to do that is by reaching out to the speakers and interesting attendees in the days BEFORE the event – so that when you meet them, they already know who you are.

The night before the 100k Summit I sent the following email to Ramit Sethi, the host of the event:

The email included this video testimonial for one of his courses called Earn1k.

I recorded this video testimonial and sent it to Ramit because I knew how valuable it would be for him (very few people record video testimonials even for the biggest influencers out there), and because I wanted Ramit to already recognize my face when he first saw me.

If you’ve got specific results with the advice of someone you want to connect with, sending them a video testimonial before the event is a great way to get on their radar. It’s very likely they’ll open the email and watch the video (because who DOESN’T want to listen about the results someone got with their advice in a video that makes them look awesome?), thank you for it, and remember you when they first meet you.

If nothing else, you can say “Hey NAME, I’m the person that sent you a video testimonial for [YOUR COURSE] yesterday”, which can be a great way to start a conversation with someone you admire.

If you want to create a great video testimonial for someone, you can use these talking points as a guideline (with my example in the brackets):

Who you are (Primoz from Slovenia)
The problem that you used to have (Used to work as a programmer in a boring job, earning $7/h)
Why this was a difficult problem for you to deal with (Because I felt like I wasn’t making any meaningful difference in the world and I was earning very little money)
How the person’s product or advice helped you solve the problem (Ramit showed me how to start my own business on the side and eventually quit my job)
Specific results that you got with the product or advice (going from $7/h to $165/h at the time)
How your life and business changed afterwards (I was able to work less, earn more money and travel more, including the trip to NYC to meet Ramit in person)

I’ve found this to be a great framework for a testimonial, and you can use it to record testimonials for the people you follow as well. Whether you use a script or bullet points doesn’t matter (just use whatever works better for you), but writing your ideas down certainly helps you articulate what you want to say.

You can record a video with something like Zoom.us quite easily, and upload it to YouTube. Make sure you take the time to get this right – it might take you multiple tries to make an interesting video without making mistakes that’s short, crisp and powerful.

The ideal length for a testimonial like this is 1-3 minutes (anything longer will likely become a bit repetitive or boring).

Recording a video testimonial is just ONE of the things that you can do in order to make a great impression on someone. The important lesson here is to go above and beyond what everyone else is doing, be different and stand out (which is how you can get noticed).

I encourage you to think of things that you could do to get on the radar of the people you want to connect with (especially the speakers). It could be things like:

Being super active and helpful in their online community in the weeks before the event
Giving helpful tips to event attendees (for example, if there’s a conference in Chicago and you live in Chicago, you can create a list of your favorite restaurants and share them with the attendees)
Sending them a written or a video testimonial, or a review of their book or their online course

I encourage you to get creative with this step and to think about what would be cool to do or what comes easy for you. For me, sharing my results comes easy, but for you it might be sending a notecard, a gift or being helpful in the community. A question that I like to ask myself is “what would be cool to do that nobody else will likely do?”.

Even this guide is an example of going above and beyond – I’m writing it to help fellow Forefront attendees prepare for the event better – and will add value both to event attendees, as well as to the host (as it will make for a much better conference as the attendees will be better prepared).

If you can’t come up with something super creative or you don’t necessarily have the results from implementing the advice from speakers, don’t give up. In that case I would still reach out to the people that you want to connect with and just tell them how excited you are to meet them and why (because of their speech, because of the story you read in their book, because of their work, etc.). And even here you can go above and beyond by recording a 1-minute video rather than just sending them a regular email.

With the people that you’ve done deep research on, it will be easier to go above and beyond – so those are the people you should try to go above and beyond for. With others that you’ve done light research on, you can still send them a quick Facebook message and tell them how excited you are to meet them at the event and why. Almost nobody does this, and you’ll automatically make yourself stand out by doing it.

Here’s an example of an email you could send to a speaker:

Subject line: Can’t wait to see you speak at [CONFERENCE NAME]!

“Hey [SPEAKER NAME],

My name is… [INSERT 1 SENTENCE INTRODUCTION]

I’ll be attending the [CONFERENCE NAME] this weekend and I’m really excited to hear you speak about [SPEECH TOPIC].

I’ve read [THEIR BOOK NAME], and loved your story about [INSERT STORY]. I’d love to talk to you about that at the event and ask you a few questions – hope that’s ok with you!

I’m so excited to meet you this weekend,

-[YOUR NAME]”

It’s short, crisp, to the point, and doesn’t really ask for anything, which is perfect. I don’t encourage you to copy this email word by word. Instead I want you to look at the length (make sure you keep the email under 10-15 lines as busy speakers don’t like reading long emails from strangers) and the tone of the e-mail: it’s friendly and noncommittal.

You can usually find the email address from a speaker through their website or blog if they have one (if they have an email list, you can just email them to the email they use to send out newsletters), or if they wrote a book you can sometimes find their contact details in there too.

To connect with a fellow attendee, you can send them a message like this:

“Hey [ATTENDEE NAME],

My name is… [INSERT 1 SENTENCE INTRODUCTION]

I saw that we’re both attending [CONFERENCE NAME] this weekend and I’m really excited to meet you because [WHY YOU WANT TO MEET THEM].

I’ve read [THEIR BLOG POST TITLE], and loved your story about [INSERT STORY]. I’d love to talk to you about that at the event and ask you a few questions – hope that’s ok with you!

I’m so excited to meet you this weekend,

-[YOUR NAME]”

It’s usually easier to find the contact details of attendees than of speakers. If there’s a Facebook community available for the event, it might be as simple as befriending the fellow attendees on Facebook and sending them a private Facebook message.

Reaching out to speakers and fellow attendees before the event is a great way to stand out, and even if you’re on a limited time schedule I encourage you to do it, share a specific reason why you’d like to connect with them at the event (from your light research) and say hi. This goes a long way towards turning you from a stranger to someone they’re looking forward to meeting at the event.

CHAPTER 2.7: How to use the conference’s Facebook community

A lot of conferences these days offer online communities for fellow attendees. These communities are great for connecting with fellow attendees (as outlined in the previous step), and they’re also a great tool for getting noticed by other attendees at the event and turning yourself into someone that everyone wants to talk to.

I like to think of these communities in a similar way as the stage at the conference. Whenever you post something there, many of the conference attendees will see your post, just as if they would be listening to the speech on stage. Pretty cool huh?

Now before we go into detail on how to use a conference community to get the most out of a conference, let’s get one thing out of the way: you should NOT use the community to promote your website or services. It’s true that these communities usually aren’t heavily moderated, but still – you’ll look like an asshole if you use the community to fish for clients and people will less likely want to talk to you if you do that.

Instead, you can use the community to get noticed by writing an awesome introduction in it or adding massive value to the conference attendees.

First, your introduction. It’s common that these communities have threads where people introduce themselves (we talked about how to use these threads to find potential people to connect with in Chapter 2.2).

You can use these threads to get noticed yourself as well (and make people want to connect with you), and the way to do that is to stand out. The best way to stand out? You should (again) go above and beyond what everyone else is doing.

So instead of throwing together a quick introduction like “Hi I’m Primoz and I run an online business, and I’m really excited to meet everyone!!!”, take the time to craft an incredible introduction. I always like to take at least 15-30 minutes to do this, as writing a detailed introduction will really make me stand out from everyone else and make me look like someone who goes the extra mile (which is who other top performers want to connect with).

Crafting an amazing introduction is sometimes as simple as taking the time and adding a lot of detail about what you do.

Instead of saying “I run an online business”, you can talk about things like what your business is about, who the audience is, which products you’ve created, what’s your yearly revenue (if you’re comfortable with sharing it), your website, etc.

You can also think deeply about questions like what you’re looking to get out of the conference or who the people are that you’d love to connect with. Again, extra detail and specificity goes a long way.

To take things a step further, you can again think creatively about how to stand out. Can you include a photo with your introduction? A meme? A video? Adding some visuals can instantly make people remember you and put a face to your name – and actually recognize you at the event.

Another thing you can do to get noticed in the community is to think about how you can add value to the members of the community.

You can add value to the community members by:

Inviting them to special events that are taking place
Recommending your favorite restaurants to them
Going above and beyond in answering their questions (if you’re from the home city)
Responding to their introductions with thoughtful responses
…and more.

Again, get creative with this step and think about what you could do that would genuinely help the conference attendees.

Here are some great examples from the Forefront community:

A great introduction thread that asks fellow attendees to record 2-minute video introductions of themselves (that got 40+ comments!)

Inviting conference attendees to a free workout in your GYM is an awesome idea!

Or giving attendees VIP access to police boats!

You might notice that everything we’re doing so far is in line with “standing out”, “going above and beyond” and “doing the things other people aren’t willing to do”. That’s because those are the exact principles that will help you get the most out of every conference you attend, and we’ll continue to apply those insights throughout this guide in different ways.

If you have some extra time before the conference, definitely pop into the conference community for a day or two and try to add value to the community members. They’ll love you for it, and people will know who you are and start a conversation with you at the event more easily.

CHAPTER 2.8: Crafting your perfect introduction

In the past, I thought I had to prepare one introduction for the event about what I do, along the lines of:

“Hi, I’m Primoz, and I help online entrepreneurs grow their audiences by creating high quality premium content”

Then, I had a conversation with Derek Halpern from Social Triggers who forever changed the way that I think about introducing myself.

You see, when you attend a conference, the people there might not necessarily understand what you do.

For example:

I won’t mention someone that I help entrepreneurs create Ultimate Guides if they don’t know what that means
If you’re a programmer that helps android developers learn RxJava… Then not many people will have an idea what that is
If you’re an “email marketing expert”, many people might not be familiar with what that means

I stopped counting how many times people’s eyes glazed over when I talked to them about Ultimate Guides, or hear them say “oh, that’s good for you” and moving on without further asking me about it.

Talking to Derek helped me realize that that was my fault. I always thought I had to introduce myself in the same way to every person I met. He told me that’s actually not the case, and that he actually uses completely different introductions with different people he talks to. He won’t use the same introduction when talking to an online business owner, a professional poker player or an angel investor – he’ll likely say completely different things.

Derek taught me that you should always TAILOR your introduction to the person you’re speaking to, which means that you need to learn something about them before introducing yourself to them. And that can be as simple as you asking them what THEY do first, before they get the chance to ask you (and actually being curious about what it is they do).

Once they get around to asking you what you do, you’ll already know what to say that they’ll actually understand.

For example, I was recently talking to the owner of my favorite restaurant, and he asked me to remind him what I did again. Instead of talking about things like Ultimate Guides that likely wouldn’t be relevant to him, I told him that I’m one of the few people in Slovenia that’s really good at creating online courses. I went on to ask him if he knew the online training from another famous Slovenian chef (he said yes), so I told him “Imagine that, but making it 100x better”.

He was instantly interested in learning more about it, and we’ll grab coffee to see if we could work on a project together.

That’s a difference that a tailored introduction can make, and I encourage you to tailor your introduction to every person you meet, and explain it in their language. This will instantly make you 10x more interesting and want people to talk to you more.

Now of course you should always have your go-to introduction ready in case someone asks you what you do before you have a chance to get some information about them, or in case you’re participating in a Q & A session, a panel or a hot seat.

And how do you come up with a great go-to introduction? Well, just like you can tailor your introduction to the specific person you’re talking to, you can tailor your go-to introduction to the general audience that’s attending the conference (you’ll get the feel for the type of the people that are attending the conference in the language used in speech topics and attendee introductions in the Facebook community).

Here’s how I’d tailor my own introduction to different conferences:

If I was going to a conference from Leadpages (a company that sells landing pages), I could say something like “I help online entrepreneurs develop incredible lead magnets that help them increase the conversions of their landing pages”
If I was going to Traffic & Conversion Summit (a conference on online marketing), I might say something like “I help companies increase their organic traffic with high quality content that ranks high on Google”
If I’m going to Forefront (a conference full of online business owners and other top performers), I might say that “I help top performing entrepreneurs create high quality premium content like Ultimate Guides and $1,000 online courses”.

As you can see, I would tailor my introduction to each specific conference. I would mention landing pages at a conference led by a company that sells landing pages. I would use the marketing jargon at a marketing conference. I would use online business jargon at an online business conference.

Now those introductions above are far from perfect (I wrote them up on the go), so let’s talk about how to actually come up with a great introduction.

In my mind, every great introduction is short, clear, straightforward and in the language / jargon of the people you are talking to. You should never use the words that people in the audience won’t understand, and you should always be able to say your introduction in one breath.

I find that most people overcomplicate their introductions. Instead of keeping them short and sweet, they try to share their whole demographics in one sentence. They say something like “I help 25-35 year old millennial mothers who are in a relationship but don’t have kids…”, and every time I hear that I stop following. Why not just get to the point?

The main things you want to communicate with your introduction are:

WHO you can help
With WHAT you can help them
HOW you can help them (this step is sometimes optional)

And if possible, you want to communicate each of the above in one or two words, creating a short and sweet introduction that will peak the interest of the right people.

For example, if you say “I’m a high performance coach for online entrepreneurs”, an entrepreneur that’s interested will want to talk to you. It’s that simple! You don’t need to overcomplicate it. If you really want to be more specific, you could say something like “I’m a high performance coach for 6-7 figure online entrepreneurs”, which helps you attract a more high end audience.

You can come up with your own introduction by filling out the blanks:

I help [WHO] with [WHAT] by [HOW].

Remember, 2 words at most for who, what and how. If the how feels like it’s stretching the sentence out, I might just remove it. You can also sometimes move the HOW / WHAT around, to make the sentence flow nicer. Test different versions, say them out loud and see what sounds better.

Here are a few great examples:

I help online entrepreneurs increase engagement of their online communities
I help fitness & yoga studios get more clients through Facebook ads
I help online entrepreneurs set up their first website

These are extremely simple and short, and yet they work. If you’re struggling with community engagement, you’ll want to talk to person A to find out more. If you’re a fitness studio owner that’s burning money on Facebook ads you’ll want to talk to person B. If you’re stuck with setting up your website you’ll want to talk to person C.

Again, these are just the go-to introductions that you can use when you don’t have more information about the person you’re speaking to. Once you do, you can tailor these to fit their world.

Keep in mind that the “keep it short and one-breath long” rule is more true for group conversations or speaking on stage than for 1on1 conversations – there you usually have more time to explain what you do as you have the person’s attention anyway.

Before going to your next conference, I encourage you to think of your “go-to introduction” that’s tailored to all the conference attendees, as well as think about the different introductions that you can use when you meet different types of people at the conference (you can even create introductions tailored to people on the list of people you want to connect with that you’ve already done research on).

Then, when you’re at the conference itself, always try to get the information about what the person you’re talking to does first, then tailor your introduction to them on the go.

CHAPTER 2.9: How to never run out of things to talk about

Congratulations, you’ve made it to Chapter 9 of the prep part of this guide! You’re now well over 10,000 words into reading this guide, and well on the way towards making this the best conference you ever attended.

The next thing I want to talk to you about is finding stuff to talk about at the conference, because everyone hates awkward silence (am I right?). To avoid the awkward awkward silence scenario (no typo there), let’s think about some fun stuff you can talk about the conference that will lead to great conversations.

There’s this concept of a “story toolbox” that I learned from my mentor Ramit Sethi.

The idea of the story toolbox is to always come to an event prepared with 5-10 (or, if you’re Ramit, like 5,000) different stories that you can share with other attendees. Everyone loves a great story, and exchanging your personal stories with others is a great way to build a connection fast and really get to know each other, rather than just talking about “hey, what’s the conference like?”.

Before attending your next conference, I suggest thinking about 5-10 different stories or events that happened in your life that will be relatable or interesting to the other attendees. If you have a ton of time available before the conference, you can practice sharing these stories with your friends to gradually get better at telling them, but if not, you should at least come up with them.

Here’re a few interesting stories or conversational topics that I can talk about at Forefront:

Why I quit Facebook
How I took a trip to Israel to watch a basketball game
That I’m considering joining a $25k business mastermind
What I learned from Slovenia’s national team that won the European basketball championships
How working with a high performance coach has transformed my business

All of these stories can lead to great conversations because they all have a bigger message behind them. The Facebook story can lead into a conversation about social media and how it prevents us from doing the things that really matter in our businesses. The Israel story can lead into a conversation about serendipitous risks that we take to further improve ourselves. The $25k mastermind story can lead into constantly improving yourself and investing in yourself.

As you’ll share these stories at the conference you’re attending, you can use them to get to know other people better as well. For example, I could ask people if they ever considered quitting social media, if they ever took a serendipitous trip on a 2-day notice, or made a huge investment in themselves. This would help me get to know them WAY better than by just talking about the regular stuff that’s happening at the conference (that everyone is talking about anyway).

To come up with your own collection of conference stories, you can think about interesting events that have happened in your life recently that could lead to great conversations. If you run an online business, these could be stories that you’ve shared in recent blog posts. If not, just think about a few stories that you shared with your friends over the past month that they’ve found interesting.

You don’t need to come up with 30 stories – just 5-10 is enough to get some great conversations (and you can reuse these stories as you talk to different people). Now go ahead and craft those stories!

CHAPTER 2.10: On-stage hot seats & teardowns

At certain conferences, you’ll have the opportunity to participate in an on-stage “hot seats” or “teardowns” where you’ll be able to talk about your business together with a speaker, on stage in front of all the conference attendees.

If you have a chance to do a hot seat or a teardown (applications are usually sent out a few weeks before the conference via a survey), you should always take advantage of it.

Here’s why:

Getting 1on1 feedback on your business from a top expert can lead to some major breakthroughs
Being on stage automatically gives you a “higher status” – which simply means that many conference attendees will treat you like a speaker and want to talk to you about the topic you discussed on stage
You’ll be able to share what you do on the stage in front of hundreds of people (and get their full attention), which will dramatically increase your visibility at the conference and the chances of potential clients approaching you

I’m always surprised how few people actually apply for hot seats & teardowns though. You’d think that everyone would jump at an opportunity like this, but the reality is that most people don’t because they disqualify themselves.

They say things like:

“I just don’t have anything interesting to talk about”
“I’m sure everyone else will apply, so the chances of me getting chosen are super small”

And when most people say these things to themselves, what happens? Relatively few people actually end up applying (and being on the other side of hosting conferences I know how hard it can be to make teardowns really great if too few people apply).

I even considered not applying for a hot seat at the upcoming Forefront event because I couldn’t think of a good topic to talk about. Then I noticed that that was just my mind telling me to be lazy and not give it my all – so I picked the best topic that came to mind and applied anyway, even though it was a few days after the survey went live. Just yesterday I got an email that I was selected for a hot seat, which made my day:

So how do you make sure that your hot seat or teardown application gets selected? There’re really two things that are important. The first is filling out the application earlier rather than later (they usually collect applications for a week or so), and the other is going way above and beyond in your application (and standing out from all other applicants).

You’d be surprised to see how many people that apply for teardowns do it in a half-assed way. They share 1 sentence as a response to each question, don’t provide any detail at all… And are then surprised they don’t get chosen. With applications like this, effort means a lot. If you show that you’ve taken the time to ask a great question and really thought it out, people will notice that.

The good news is that by the time you’re reading this part of the guide, you already know how to do deep research and come up with great questions. Ideally, you’ve already used the deep research to learn more about the speakers at the conference and come up with great questions for their Q & A sessions. If you’ve done your homework, then making a teardown application will actually be quite easy. All you need to do is to use one of your best questions for the teardown application.

Having said that, there are a few things that you should pay attention to when filling out the application survey, and I thought I’d take the Forefront survey questions as an example to guide you through them.

The underlying theme for thinking about these questions is to always think about (1) how to go above and beyond what everyone else is doing, and (2) what is the question behind the question (full credit to Ramit Sethi for teaching me about that concept).

Now let’s look at the questions!

Q1: Please tell me about yourself (name, email, phone #)

Nothing tricky here. I do suggest using a real rather than a fake name though.

Q2: 2. Tell me a bit about yourself (occupation, where you live, etc.)

Here, the questions behind the question are:

How are you interesting and relatable to other attendees?
How do I know you’re not a weirdo?

This question is great for filtering out weirdos like people who help others build an online business (without having done the same thing themselves), people with some weird business ideas (like MLM people) or people who would be boring on stage.

The question I ask myself here is always “what makes me interesting to the crowd?”, and then I usually paste in my go-to introduction for the event. I might add some detail like “I’ve been a case study for the Zero to Launch, 6 Figure Consulting and Earn1k courses (courses from the host of the conference)” in here, just to add some extra credibility.

Q3: 3. Which area below would you like to discuss? (business growth, starting a business, earning more money, etc.)

The purpose of this question is usually for the conference organizer to select one hot seat out of each categories. You could argue that some of the categories might be less popular than others, but without real data it’s hard to make these assumptions.

I personally wouldn’t overthink this question and just focus on asking the question that I think would be the most interesting to the audience (more on that below).

Q4: What would you like to discuss? Be as specific as possible. If you have real life examples please share them.

Ok, here’s something you need to know about teardowns and hot seats. They’re not actually meant to help YOU 1on1… They’re meant to help the whole AUDIENCE at the conference.

So if you share a question that’s super relevant to you, but irrelevant to almost every other person in the audience (something like “hey, how do I get my website to rank as #1 rather than #3 on Google with SEO” at a conference that’s NOT full of SEO geeks), it’s unlikely you’ll get chosen for the hot seat.

Instead, I like to think about questions that are important and relevant to me… But also to all the other people in the audience. For this hot seat, I chose a question about psychology about money, and developing a millionaire’s mindset. I knew that would be relevant to most people at this conference because (1) everyone there wants to make more money, and (2) we all have beliefs (or people around us) that subconsciously prevent us from making more of it.

Whenever you see things like “be as specific as possible” and “if you have real examples, please share them” in a question, this is a great opportunity for you to provide extra detail about the question (again, you’d be surprised that most people don’t).

In my case, I provided specific examples like “we all have people around us saying things like “money doesn’t make you happy”, “I hope you’re not just doing this for the money”, “I hope you’re not doing anything shady to make your money”, etc.” – these are real examples that relate to everyone.

If you’re asking a question about business growth or earning more money, you can also share some specific numbers that are relevant (your monthly revenues, website traffic, conversion rates… anything that will be relevant to the conversation).

Bottom line – the most important thing is to select a question that’s relevant to everyone, make it a great question, and add in the extra data and relatable examples.

Q5: Why do you think I should select you?

What you don’t want to say here is “because I will take all of your advice and implement it, I promise!!!!!”. Everyone will say that. If you want to go down that route, talk about the things that you have already done and accomplished (SHOW that you have a proven track record of taking action).

But the real question behind the question here is “how will this help the other attendees at the conference?”. In my application, I focused heavily on how having this conversation on stage will help hundreds of other attendees improve their money mindsets and lead richer, guilt-free lives.

With your application, I encourage you to do the same. Don’t think just about yourself – think about how your hot seat will help the whole audience and make the case for it.

Q6: (Optional but recommended) Record a quick 3-minute video of yourself summarizing your question or topic. Once you record your video, upload it to Youtube, and set it as “Unlisted.” Then copy the link to your video, and paste it below:

I love it when people put “optional” in their application surveys, because “optional” is never actually optional. Questions like this separate the lazy people from people that are willing to put in the extra effort (and the people who put in the extra effort get chosen for the hot seats). So whenever something says “optional”, make sure you fill it out to stand out from everyone else who doesn’t.

Beyond that, the reason why this YouTube video question exists is to see if you’re going to be great on stage (or if you’ll be a hot, rambling mess instead). I encourage you to take the time and practice / rehearse this video (just like you’ll be asked to practice and rehearse for the actual hot seat), to make sure you come off as energized, clear and concise. You can do this by doing a few practice runs, and then stopping recording once you end up with a video you’re really happy with.

One last thing I want to say is that the YouTube video will usually be the LAST thing that people will review, not the first one (because it’s easier to skim through the text application within 10 seconds than it is to watch a 3-minute video, or 50 of them), so make sure you don’t just rely on the video. Make sure you put a ton of effort into the other questions as well.

And, as you can imagine, you should never “wing” this video – because if there’re two applications that are equally interesting, the person who puts in more effort and creates a better video will likely be the person that gets the last remaining spot.

Q7: Any other comments or questions?

I don’t think this question has any deeper meaning – apart from the fact that you shouldn’t use it to share things like “I’m not good on stage!” that will reduce your chances of getting chosen. If that’s the case, focus on getting better at speaking on stage for the next few weeks!

Q8: Have you participated in a Teardown before? (yes/no, please give details if yes)

I’ll be honest – I’m not sure if this question will improve or decrease the chances of getting a Teardown, and what they’re looking for here. The only thing I will say is that you should always be honest here. For what it’s worth, I said “yes”, and shared about how I participated in a hot seat at the 100k Summit. But again, I don’t think this question will make or break your application. It’s a small detail.

Well this was fun! Bottom line on teardowns and hot seats is:

If you have a chance to be featured in a hot seat or a teardown, do it!
Take the time to come up with a great question that will benefit everyone in the room.
Put in the extra effort in order to maximize your chances of being chosen.

What about preparing for a hot seat? What might that look like? Well, if you’ve already done the research, came up with a great question and got your application accepted, that’s 95% of the work. The only thing that I’d do at this point is make some time to practice your question so you’re clear and concise on stage. The rest has already been taken care of. Good job!

Ok, on to the next chapter.

CHAPTER 2.11: Your “conference within a conference”

When I attended Ramit Sethi’s 100k Summit conference, one of the questions I asked him was how I could best prepare for his next conference, Behaviorcon. His one piece of advice on that topic was to read the chapter about conferences in Keith Ferrazzi’s book called “Never Eat Alone”.

That’s exactly what I did, and I absolutely LOVED that chapter. I loved it so much that I reread the whole chapter as I was doing research for this guide, and would recommend anyone who’s reading this guide to read that book as well. As a funny turn of events, I was actually invited to Keith Ferrazzi’s party in his mansion in LA a few years later where I was able to meet him – small world!

Ok, enough bragging – the one thing I want to talk to you about is Keith’s concept of the “conference within a conference”. Keith recommends approaching each conference as a “conference commando” that doesn’t necessarily stick with the traditional rules of the conference (like attending every single session) and focuses on getting the most out of the conference on his own rules instead.

One of his ideas that he shares is the “conference within a conference”. The idea is to host your very own meet up (over drinks or dinner) outside of the conference (could be on the day before the conference or after the conference, or for breakfast / dinner as a pre-party or after-party for one of the conference days.

To this meet up, you would invite the people that YOU want to meet, connect with and get to know better. These could be speakers, fellow attendees, staff members, or someone else. It could be people that you already know you want to connect with before the event, or people that you meet during the event.

Private meet ups like this is usually where the magic happens, where the best conversations happen and where the relationships are really built – as you’re not in a room surrounded by 500 people and actually have the time to have a long, deep conversation.

I always make it a point to host at least one such meet up during a conference. At last year’s Forefront event, we hosted a meet up (actually two meet ups) for our Accelerator students (plenty of whom were at the event). We even brought in a few special guests that made the events more special. We hosted one of these before the conference began, and one for breakfast on the day of the conference.

During the upcoming Forefront event, I’ll be grabbing some coffee with my Ultimate Guide System students and am considering throwing another drinks meet up for my close friends + a few people I want to meet. I was also invited to a similar event from a friend of mine – we’re grabbing dinner at a three-star Michelin restaurant Alinea, which will be awesome.

If you have some extra time before the event, I would highly recommend that you host a meet up and invite some people over for drinks or food. It’s a good idea to look for a place in advance and make a reservation up-front. If you’re going to host your very own “conference within a conference”, and you’re following the other steps from this guide, you can even fit this strategy into your outreach.

This means that instead of just reaching out and saying “I’m excited to meet you!”, you can invite people for drinks or dinner right there on the spot (as it’s likely that they don’t have plans for the outside-of-conference activities yet). If you’re into sports, you can even take it a step further and organize a group workout or something similar – we’ve done this during last year’s Forefront too and it was awesome!

Once you have your own special event in place and you’ve invited a few people to it, you can continue to invite more people to the event throughout the conference (you can even mention who’ll already be there). This is a great strategy for getting to know people better at the event and make them feel special (which we’ll talk more about in the next part about attending the conference). It can help you turn a 10-minute conversation into a 1-hour conversation over dinner and get some proper connection going!

Now if you’re not into hosting events and bringing people together (or you’re on a super tight schedule), don’t sweat it. It’s likely that these special events will be happening at the event anyway, so you can instead just keep an eye out for them – and make sure you join one that you’ll be able to benefit from.

CHAPTER 2.12: Should you “dress to impress” at the conference?

I’m no style expert – but I do have friends who are personal stylists and can guide you towards dressing to impress at a conference. If you already know you want to look great at the conference (but don’t know HOW to dress well), check out some of Peter Nguyen’s articles from Essential Man (like this Beginner’s Style Guide) if you’re a man, or check out Hilde Fossen from Get Style Confidence or Clarissa Grace from Waking up in Paris. Clarissa even wrote an article on this exact topic!

Dressing well and looking sharp at a conference does make a difference, as people will more likely approach you than if you’re wearing boring clothes that don’t fit well (especially if they don’t know who you are yet).

As I said, I’m not a stylist, BUT I do know of one thing that makes it SUPER easy for you to meet more people at a conference, and that’s standing out.

Derek Halpern is REALLY good at this. He wears funny t-shirts to events:

Or red or sparkling shoes:

Accessories like this instantly capture the attention of other attendees, and make it way easier for them to approach you and start a conversation. If you can, think about something that will make you stand out at the conference, and then bring it with you!

Here are some ideas for what you can wear:

Colorful pocket squares (that’s my go-to strategy)
A dress in a bright color (for women)
A funny t-shirt that you can start a conversation about
Interesting / impressing jewelry (I guess this is mostly for women)
Flashy / super niche shoes (and socks!)
A different hair color (my girlfriend will be going to Forefront with pink / purple hair)
…etc.

I’m not saying you need to go batshit crazy on accessories. But I do know that wearing my red pocket square brings me a lot of pocket squares and leads to a lot of cool conversations. So take one cool accessory with you for the conference (or more, if you want to use them on different days), and then figure out how to dress well by reading stuff from my friends Peter, Hilde and Clarissa :). They’re the experts!

CHAPTER 2.13: What about business cards?

I’m sure that at least some of you have noticed at this point that I haven’t even mentioned business cards once in this guide. Why is that?

Well, the short answer is that (like my mentor Ramit Sethi), I think they’re pretty damn useless. The last time I carried business cards with me was back in 2014, and I have never gotten a single referral, paying customer or a call from them – so I simply stopped carrying them.

The reality is that most business cards these days simply get thrown into trash, without being used. So why bother with bringing them with you (and then relying on the OTHER person to do the work and follow up, which, you know, never happens)?

Instead of worrying about business cards, you can use the strategies that we talk about in this guide to actually turn one-time acquaintances into business partners, clients, mentors and friends. I won’t spend too much time on this topic, so if you’re curious what my alternative strategies to using business cards, keep reading.

This concludes the last sub-chapter of preparing for the conference in 1-2 weeks. If you haven’t yet, make sure that you download my Conference Battle Plan, which comes together with the PDF version of this 27,000+ word guide. This extra worksheet includes all the steps you need to take to prepare for your conference in as little as 24-48 hours.

Ok, let’s move on to the next chapter – how to get the most out of the conference (once you’re actually there).

PART 3: The ins and outs of attending a conference

You’ve done the hard work. You’ve come up with a list of people you want to connect with at the conference and a list of personal & business challenges you wanted to solve. You’ve done your research and came up with a list of great questions that you can ask during the Q & A sessions and conference breaks. You reached out to the people that you’re looking forward to connecting with at the conference. Perhaps you’re even throwing an intimate dinner during one of the conference nights for the select few people you want to connect with.

You’re as prepared as ever for this upcoming conference, and you know you’ll have a blast there. The question is… What now?

In this chapter, I’ll show you how you can really make the conference your playground. I’ll show you how to get the most out of Q & A sessions, talking to speakers and breaks, and how to handle different conversations (both great and boring ones), so you walk home from the conference with plenty of new relationships and business breakthroughs.

Are you ready to dive in?

CHAPTER 3.1: Connecting with speakers

Earlier in this guide, I shared with you that there are 3 groups of people you should be trying to connect with at the conference: speakers, attendees and staff members.

Over the next few chapters, I’ll show you how to connect with these different groups of people in different ways, so you can build lasting relationships with them. Let’s start with the fan favorite: speakers.

Speakers are hands down the most popular people at the conference, and the hardest people to build relationships with (as you’re literally competing with EVERYONE else in the room that wants to connect with them and ask them questions). In some cases, the speakers are at the conference for only a few hours as well (and not the whole event), which makes it even harder for you to reach them.

The good news is that most people have no clue what they’re doing when they talk to speakers. I remember speaking at Selena Soo’s Get Known, Get Clients LIVE event in NYC:

After I spoke on stage, roughly 50 people stopped me on my way to the bathroom (I’m not exaggerating here). They wanted to come and say hi and tell me how much they loved my speech, which I appreciated. Some of them were just excited to talk to me, and others shared specific insights I liked. All good so far.

The interesting part of this experience was the amount of people that followed up with me after the conference and that I’ve built lasting relationships with. Can you guess the number of people? Is it 3? 5? 10? Well, guess again. The number is zero. Sadly, for most people, the “meeting the speakers” means just that. Meeting them, saying hi, snapping a photo… And that’s where it ends. That’s the harsh reality of meeting speakers at the events (for most people).

Since I know that you want to get more than just a few selfies out of the conference you’ve spent thousands of dollars on, let’s talk about how to stand out from the crowd and actually use conferences as ways to build lasting relationships with speakers that you admire. First, let’s get the basics down.

The best times for approaching speakers during a conference

The worst time to talk to a speaker is right after their speech – as that’s when EVERYONE in the room will approach them and want to talk to them. Good luck with having a deep, great conversation when you’re surrounded by 20 other people who want to do the same thing.

Instead of approaching the speaker right after their speech, try approaching them at the following times:

Before their speech: One of the best times to approach a speaker is 2-3 hours before their speech (if they’re at the venue already). You should always respect their privacy and ask if they’re ok with talking to you and aren’t in the middle of preparing for their speech (I don’t recommend you approaching them 10-15min before their speech for this reason). At this time, they’ll likely be bored and waiting for their speech to come up, so they’ll appreciate you talking to them.
After another speech: Once another speaker speaks after the speaker you want to connect with, they’ll instantly become the new shiny person that everyone wants to connect with for the next hour (and the swarm of fans will go their way). At this point, the speaker might still have a handful of people around him (if he’s still around) which makes it a worse time to connect with them than before their speech, but a better time than right after their speech.
On a day they’re not speaking: If the conference is a multi-day event and the speaker happens to be staying there for the whole thing, that’s awesome news as you’ll have plenty of time to connect with them. Connecting with them on a day when they’re not speaking is one of the best things you can do.
During the lunch break: Some conferences include lunches, and if the speaker you want to connect with is staying for lunch, finding a seat next to them can help you have a great 30-minute or longer conversation with them. Because the seating is usually fixed, this will be one of the best times to connect with the speakers at a conference and really talk to them for a long time (and ask them all the questions you’ve prepared for them).

Approaching the speakers at the right time is the great first step towards standing out from everyone else. Combine that with asking great questions that you’ve prepared for them, and you’ll already make a great first impression on them.

One extra note I want to share here is how to speak to the HOST of the conference. Back in 2013, when I attended the Behaviorcon conference, Ramit Sethi was hosting it (and had around 12 other speakers there). If you thought that speakers were busy, think again. The host is usually 10x busier (as they need to speak at the event AND organize it), and they’re usually surrounded by people wanting to talk to them all conference long.

In this case, I just like to be really respectful of their time, and perhaps approach them once during the event, when I see they’re not completely swarmed or in the middle of something. A better time to do this is usually towards the end of the conference as well.

At Behaviorcon, that was exactly what I did. On the last day of the event, I approached Ramit and told him that I’ve taken his advice from the 100k Summit (which was a bit more than a month ago), and used it to double my monthly revenue in a month. I also mentioned to him that I flew business class to attend Behaviorcon for the first time, and that it was awesome.

When Ramit heard that, he was so happy and excited about it that he did something radical. He pulled me out of the conference room, into a hallway and lead me behind a corner. Then he whipped out his iPhone and… Wanted me to share with him what I just shared on video:

I knew in that moment that I had made a great impression on Ramit, and it was just one of the many things I did that strengthened our relationship over time.

So if you’re attending a conference and the host is super busy (but you want to ask them an important question or share some amazing results you’ve got with their work), make sure you approach them towards the end of the conference and let them know what’s up!

How to talk to speakers without being weird

The worst thing you can do when talking to a speaker is being weird in one way or another. Things like being super star-struck and asking “can I touch you?”, asking inappropriate questions like “so how much money have you made this year?” or just acting creepy are obviously huge no-gos.

On that note, one thing you should NEVER do is talk to a speaker while they’re in the bathroom. This happened to me at Forefront when someone desperately tried to make conversation with me at the bathroom and it was creepy as hell. Dude, I’m trying to pee here not have a deep conversation with you! I’m not sure if the same rule goes for women as they love their bathroom breaks, but at least for me this is a bit no-go.

Anyhow, how can you talk to speakers and make a great first impression on them without being weird?

Well, the good news is that you’ve already done most of the work by doing the deep research and preparing a number of great questions for them, so you don’t need to worry about “what to talk about” – you already know what to talk about! You can ask them the questions you’ve been dying to ask them for the past few days or weeks. Most people won’t have prepared a number of well researched and thought out questions, so you coming up prepared with your notebook or notecards will make an awesome impression on them.

As far as the actual conversation goes, I follow this simple rule from Ramit Sethi (he calls it the “STFU technique”: I ask the question, shut up, listen intensively, and take notes. After the speaker stop speaking, I either ask them follow up questions or move on to the next question. It’s that simple. People love when you ask them questions, listen and take notes. It doesn’t happen very often, so you’ll again stand out from most people that are trying to pitch them or get them to promote their products.

How to add value to speakers (even if you feel like you don’t have anything to add)

For a long time, when the top influencers in my industry wanted to talk to me, I wondered: why me? What makes me so special? What’s in it for them? How can I possibly add value to them? There’s no advice I could give them that could help them out – they’re 10x or 100x better at what they do than I am and make 10x or 100x more money than I do!

Since this question bugged me, I asked one of my mentors what the hell is going on. His response was simple: People love hanging out with you because you always take their advice and implement it, then let them know about it. There’re so few people who do that these days.

I was surprised – is it really that simple? Could it be that by taking the advice someone gives you, putting it into action, and letting them know about how you applied it is all that you need to do to add value to someone or build a relationship with them? The short answer is yes – it is that simple (and we’ll expand on this later). Coming to people prepared with great questions and taking their advice is something that surprisingly few people do.

When you take someone’s advice and let them know about how it helped you, you’re making them feel like they’re really helping you, which is why they’re running their business and why they do what they do in the first place. Doing this can be more valuable than offering to help them with their website or something else that you feel like you “should” be able to help them. So yes, just taking the advice and putting it into action is a GREAT way to add value to a speaker.

A few months after having this conversation with my mentor, I had a similar conversation with another mentor of mine. He agreed with my other mentor but added something: “You see Primoz, we spent our days helping big companies and really successful people who make 7, 8 or 9 figures and that’s cool. But what we love doing even more than that is seeing TRANSFORMATIONS in people. So when someone like you who’s young, hard working and driven comes up to us and seeks our help (and does the work), we always love helping them out”.

What I learned from that conversation was that if you’re less successful right now (but willing to work your ass off), people might even be more likely to help you (or have more fun helping you) than someone who’s already super successful, because they get to be a part of your transformation.

So if you ever feel like you shouldn’t approach a speaker because you have nothing to add, remind yourself that spending hours and hours doing the deep research, coming up with great questions and then putting their advice into action is MASSIVE for them, because almost nobody else does that for them, no matter how successful they are.

How to get the contact details from speakers

Ok, this is the question that everyone always wants the answer to. How do I actually stay in touch with speakers and build a relationship out of meeting them once? We’ll cover the whole follow-up process in PART 4 of this guide, but before we go into that, let’s talk about one stupidly simple thing that you can do to get the contact details from speakers.

After Behaviorcon ended, I ran into one of the speakers at the event that I really wanted to connect with. I’ve spoken with them a few times during the event, and I’ve taken a ton of notes from their speech that was towards the end of the event. As we were talking, I asked them this simple question: “hey, how can I let you know how I’ll implement your advice from the speech?”, and they said “here’s my personal email, this won’t go to my assistant but directly to me instead. Email me!”.

I did email them later (a few times), and over the past few years we’ve built a great relationship. But the point here is that getting the contact details from an influencer is really as simple as asking them “what’s the best way to let you know how I implemented your advice” IF you’ve done the hard work of doing the research and coming up with great questions. Asking for their contact details is just a formality – as you’ve stood out from the crowd and there’s no reason why they wouldn’t want to hear about how their advice helped them.

I’ve asked this exact same question any time I get to chance a to spend a lot of time with an influencer or when they answer a lot of my questions, and it works every time (plus they LOVE hearing about how they’ve helped me when I email them a few weeks or months later).

Of course this exact same line won’t work if you don’t do the work. If you just come up to them, try to pitch them your product or just say that you loved their speech, then ask them for their contact details, they’ll usually tell you to email support or their team instead of giving you their personal contact details. So don’t be lazy, and do the work that you need to do to earn your way into their circles!

CHAPTER 3.2: Connecting with fellow attendees

Connecting with fellow attendees is generally much easier than connecting with speakers. They’ll be there for the whole event, most of them won’t have 10 people trying to talk to them all the time, and they’re likely at the event for the same reasons as you are – to meet other cool people.

If you’ve done your homework, you won’t be trying to connect with EVERYONE at the event, and will instead focus on building deep relationships with 3-5 people at the event that you REALLY want to connect with, plus you’ll inevitably meet and connect with plenty of other attendees as you run into them.

Here are a few things you should keep in mind when connecting with fellow attendees.

The one icebreaker that never fails

I guess you could go and google 50 different icebreakers that you can use at the conference, but what I’ve found is that to start a conversation, you really just need one go-to icebreaker that you can rely on all the time.

For me, that icebreaker is “what brings you here?”. It’s the one question that will ALWAYS get people talking, as they’ll start talking about why they are attending the conference, what they’re looking to get out of it, etc. – and you can usually take the conversation from there by asking them more about themselves, what they do, etc. (and then, once you have more information, you can introduce yourself to them as well in a tailored way that we already covered in this guide).

Of course there’s other icebreakers that you can use, like “nice shoes!” or “how did you like this last speech?”, and that’s fine – but if you ever aren’t sure what to say, then “what brings you here?” will always help you start a conversation.

How to build a connection with a fellow attendee in 5-10 minutes

Most people at events and conferences just talk about themselves non-stop, try to pitch their services to you, or engage in endless small talk (which I’m not against, but you need more than JUST small talk in order to build really connect and click with someone).

The best way that I’ve found to start a great conversation (and keep it going) is to simply be genuinely interested in other person, and try to learn as much about them as possible. You can do that by asking them “what brings you there”, and then asking them a lot of follow up questions. Follow up questions can be as simple as “oh, tell me more about that!” or “can you share an example of _______?”.

The key to having a DEEP conversation is to go DEEP on one topic (rather than asking 10 different questions about 10 different topics). So instead of going from “what brings you here” to “tell me more about your business” to “what are your hobbies” and “do you have any pets”, try to focus the conversation around ONE theme. Once they mention something that’s interesting to you, dig deeper by asking them, “oh, tell me more about X!”.

Just actively listening and asking a lot of follow up questions can help you start a great conversation and build a connection in 5-10 minutes. This usually won’t be enough to build a long-term relationship, but it lets you learn enough about the other person (and gets their trust) so that it can lead to another, deeper conversation in the future. For example, if you’re really interested in someone’s work, you can invite them to the “conference within a conference” event that you might be hosting within a conference.

How to connect with people more successful than you

At every conference there are usually a few “VIPs” on the attendee list. In the online business conference world, these might be successful entrepreneurs who run 7-figure businesses and are at the event to connect with some of their students or to support the conference host. They might not be speaking at the event, but they will usually have more people wanting to talk to them than most other attendees.

In case you’re trying to connect with someone who’s more successful than you (and add value to them), I suggest treating them in the same way as you would treat a speaker. If you know they’ll be at the event, you can do deep research on them and prepare great questions for them in advance, and have a great conversation with them at the conference.

How to make people interested in what you have to say

If you’ve done your homework, you’ll already have a tailored introduction ready that will get people interested in you, plus a list of potential stories and conversational topics that you can share during the conversations.

Whenever you want to get someone interested in what you have to say, you can simply start sharing a story or talking about a topic that’s relevant to you (and you have a hunch that it will be relevant to them as well).

For example, if I’m having a conversation about social media at a conference, I might mention that I’ve quit Facebook 2 weeks ago – which will inevitably lead to questions like “why did you do that?”, “what is life without Facebook like?”, and “how do you promote your content now if not through social media?”.

If you’re new to sharing stories and opening up conversations, this might feel tricky at first – but with practice you’ll get better. Nobody becomes awesome at social skills over-night, but you can get better by practicing it day by day. And a conference is a phenomenal opportunity to do just that – so take advantage of it!

Don’t know who to talk to next? Try this.

I often find myself lost at an event (usually once I’m done with a conversation), and then I tend to wander around looking who to talk to (or sometimes start looking on my phone). Since I realized that both of those are a pretty big waste of time, I now do the following when I notice myself mindlessly wandering around:

I talk to a person who’s sitting in a corner / bored / on their phone.

You’d be surprised by how many great conversations I’ve had with people that weren’t in the front and center of conversations and were just chilling on a couch. A lot of these people that are sitting by themselves are really smart and interesting people, but for whatever reason (maybe they lack social skills, maybe they’re shy, or don’t know anyone at the conference) they don’t actively go out and approach people.

I know this because for a long time, I used to be one of them (and still am sometimes when I feel super tired). While they might not be in the mood for a large group conversation, they’ll often love seeing you approach them and start a conversation with them that you’ll both end up loving.

So next time you don’t know who else to talk to, talk to that wallflower and see what happens!

How to exchange contact details the non-shitty way

I already explained that I’m not a fan of exchanging business cards as they’re pretty much useless. So when you end a conversation, you don’t want to do that (or just say “we should talk more some time”, because that’s a code for “we won’t because we’ll both be too busy with our lives to follow up after the event”).

I’ve found that if I REALLY wanted to keep the conversation going with someone, I would tell them that right then and there, and try to set up a time to talk more. This might either be at the event itself (I could invite them out for drinks or breakfast) or after the event, by setting up a Skype call.

Since nowadays everyone uses smartphones and most people at conferences have organized schedules and access to their calendars, it’s easier than ever to set up a Skype call with them right there on the spot. To do that, the conversation could go like this:

You: “Hey NAME, I really enjoyed talking to you and would love to talk to you more about TOPIC over the next few weeks. Is that ok with you?”

Them: “Yes, of course, I’d love that too!”

You: “Ok great, do you want to put a Skype call into our calendars right now to make sure we don’t forget about it?”

Them: “Sure!”

Then you can work out a time to chat right there and then on the spot, ask them for their Skype name and the email that you should send the Google Calendar invite to, and create the event before parting ways. This will be infinitely better if you want to build a relationship with someone than exchanging business cards, or even following up after the event.

You can take the initiative and do this if you’re interested in just building a friendship with someone, or if they mentioned that they’re interested in your services (this is the way you can actually get new clients from conferences).

And what if they say no to your request to set up a Skype call? Then don’t sweat it. It might be that it’s just not a priority for them to talk to you more, which is fine – and still better than ending up with a business card or an email address from someone who isn’t really interested in having another conversation with you any time soon.

The exception is if they say they’re super busy in the future weeks (which might be true coming back from a conference), in which case you could ask them if they want to set up a call a month from now or so. If they’re up for it, you could set it up immediately. If they say “I’ll get back to you on that”, then I wouldn’t get your hopes up too high.

Oh, one last thing. If you just want to get their contact details for the future but don’t necessarily want to jump on a call with them right after the conference, then one of the easiest things you can do is to add them on Facebook or ask them to add you on Facebook right then and there OR ask them for their email address and shoot them an email with a note about who you are, how you met them, and your own email address right then and there.

This could look something like:

“Hey NAME, great meeting you today at the [CONFERENCE]! I’m Primoz, the guy you talked to about quitting Facebook. Here’s my email address if you have more questions about Ultimate Guides in the future!”

What to do immediately after a great conversation

This step actually applies to everyone you meet with at a conference (that you want to talk to more in the future), and not just the fellow attendees.

What I like to do right after I meet someone and we part ways is to take a few notes in my notepad or my phone. I like to write down the name of the person, contact information (if I managed to collect it), 1-2 things that we talked about, and why I might be interested in talking to them more in the future.

I like to do this to remember who I talked to, and to make it easier for me to follow up after the event if I choose to do so.

CHAPTER 3.3: Connecting with staff members

When I attended the 100k Summit, I noticed that there were quite a few of Ramit Sethi’s staff members at the event. There was his assistant, his product developer and his product manager (that helped him create his 7-figure online programs), and a video crew.

Most of the time, these people were sitting by themselves, quietly eating lunch, taking notes or working on their laptops. Few conference attendees seemed to notice them and connect with them. What most people don’t know is that these people have a HUGE amount of knowledge that they can share with you, as they’re constantly “in the trenches” of the business from the influencers that’s hosting the event.

In fact, you can have some great conversations with them at the event and build valuable connections with them that might lead to future opportunities.

At the 100k Summit, I had a few great conversations with the product manager and product developer of IWT (the company hosting the event), and staying in touch with them allowed me to occasionally ask them a question about their business, meet up with them in person (I met up with a product developer when I later visited San Francisco), and even move through the interview process for getting a position with the company later down the line.

If you see someone at the event with the staff tag (it’s usually a different color than the attendee tag), then don’t hesitate to walk up to them and ask them what they do at the company (then ask them further questions about their work). Beyond that, the process for connecting with staff members is pretty similar to connecting with speakers or attendees.

If you know that the staff members will be at the event up-front, do your research before the event, then start a conversation with them at the event, and use the tips from previous chapters to build a great connection with them in 5-10 minutes, make them interested in you, etc. You could even invite them to your private “conference within a conference” event, or set up a call with them to talk to them more in the future – why not?

One thing I will mention here is to use discretion when asking them questions about working with the company. Of course it’s fine to ask them questions like “what does the process for launching a product in your company look like” if they are willing to share it, but asking questions related to revenue or about future products that they might not be allowed to talk about might make them uncomfortable, so it’s best to avoid those.

CHAPTER 3.4: 8 best networking opportunities at any conference

Interestingly enough, most lasting relationships that are built during conferences aren’t actually built AT the conference itself. Just think about it: from the amount of people that you’ve met during the conferences and talked to for 3-5min, how many of them are you still in touch with? It’s likely that it’s only a handful, if any.

From my experience, the best relationships are built OUTSIDE of the actual conference, rather than at the conference itself. The reason for that is simple: At the conference itself, you usually don’t really have the time to have a LONG, deep conversation about a topic that would really allow you to build a lasting connection with someone. It’s completely different to talk to someone for 3-5 minutes in a conference hallway than it is to talk to them for an hour during lunch.

If you want to build a REAL connection with someone, you need the time and space to make that happen. It also happens if you’re doing something fun together as that helps with the bonding (do I sound like a dating coach now? or more like a Cosmopolitan writer?).

When I attended the 100k Summit, I wasn’t able to build as many lasting relationships as I would have wanted to with fellow attendees because my follow up skills were inexistent (I didn’t know about most of the stuff that I’m talking about in this guide yet).

But one thing I do know is that the things I remember more than anything is the extra activities that happened outside of the conference. One night started by going to “Hack the Met”, an awesome tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art that included loads of alcohol. As you can imagine, that was a great start of the night.

After the Hack the Met tour, we moved on to the famous Ace hotel for drinks, and then almost got kicked out of it as we started doing the conga line through the hotel bar (we might have had a LITTLE bit too much to drink that night). As we saw that we weren’t super welcome at the Ace hotel, we moved on to a Korean Karaoke bar where we got ourselves a private room, a bottle of Grey Goose and partied well into the night (because MORE alcohol is always a great idea when you’re already drunk).

Looking back at that night, it was one of the nights that I really remember well and that brought us all closer together – and many of the relationships that I did manage to build at that event came from this fun night, and not from hanging out at the conference itself.

I’ve heard similar stories from other people as well – one of my students went up to the room with a few people one evening at the conference where they mixed their own cocktails and had awesome conversations, and she said that that was one of the best parts of the conference for her.

Bottom line is: If you want to build some real relationships at the conference, that won’t happen during the 15-minute breaks or during speeches. Those relationships will form outside of the main events.

Here are a few places / times where I was able to build some deep relationships with people outside of conferences:

Private dinners: The “conference within a conference” dinners are a great way to bring interesting people together and connect with them. I strongly suggest you either host a dinner or a meet up like this yourself, or keep an eye out for other people hosting them and attend the ones that include the people you want to connect with.
Longer breaks: Sometimes during a conference you’ll have a longer, 2-hour break or so for a lunch or coffee. This is a great time so invite someone you want to build a relationship with over for lunch, coffee or a walk, have some 1on1 time with them, and bond with them.
Breakfast: Most people at conferences grab breakfast outside of the hotel (as hotel breakfasts tend to be quite expensive in some cases). You’ll likely find speakers or VIP attendees grabbing breakfast at the hotel though, and this could be a great way for you to join them and connect with them. Alternatively, you can also invite people you’d like to connect with out for breakfast.
Pre-conference parties: Many conference attendees might arrive to the venue a day or two earlier, and announce that in the Community Facebook group. This gives you an opportunity to connect with them before all the madness happens by either inviting them for lunch or dinner, hosting a group dinner or drinks meet up, or joining one (people will usually announce these in the Facebook groups).
After-parties: Similarly to people arriving to the city early, some people will stay in the city for a few days after the event. This is a great chance for you to connect with them through additional drinks / lunches / dinners. Same guidelines apply as for the previous step. Also, there will always be people going out partying or for dinner after each day of the conference, and those parties and dinners can be great for building deep relationships.
Lunch breaks: Some conferences have lunches included, and usually have tables of around 10 people where you can sit down and talk to fellow attendees. Since the lunch breaks do tend to be longer than the shorter breaks during the conference, you can use these as an opportunity to sit down next to a speaker or an attendee you want to connect with and have a deeper conversation with them.
Cocktail parties: As long as the music isn’t too loud, these can also be a great way to build lasting relationships with people – as long as you make it a point to really connect with 1-2 people, rather than trying to meet all 500 people at the cocktail party. Sitting down at the table or the bar will usually help you “settle down” into a conversation, rather than bouncing from one person to the other.
Workouts: There’s a certain group of people that always goes and works out during the conference – either early in the morning before the conference starts, or later on during the break. Going for a joined workout can be a great way to get to know someone better, and you could even run into a few speakers or fitness influencers as you do that that you can then connect with.

These are my favorite opportunities for meeting people at the conference (if there’s something I’m missing let me know in the comment below). The message here is: If you really want to build some amazing relationships, keep an eye out for extra-conference activities, rather than networking at the conference itself. Instead use the short breaks at the conference to get to know people quickly (using the techniques I share in this guide), and then invite them to hang out with you after the conference to start building the relationship with them.

CHAPTER 3.5: Speeches and Q & A sessions

Whenever I’m listening to a speech at a conference, I do two things:

I take notes of the insights I got from it
I update my questions or come up with new questions for the speaker

I remember Jim Kwik’s speech at Behaviorcon where he talked about note taking for conferences. He recommended using a simple technique where you draw a vertical line to split your notebook in half.

On the left side, you can write the “insights” that aren’t directly actionable for your business. On the right side, you can write the specific actions you can execute on. These might be the exercises and action steps that the speakers share with you OR ideas that you thought of by yourself for applying the insights to your own business.

When I take notes during the speech, I constantly ask myself “how can I apply what the speaker is talking about to my own business?”. It’s in the back of my mind ALL the time, and I can quickly see the right side of my notebook fill up with things I can implement in my business after the conference finishes. By taking these insights from the 100k Summit conference and putting them into action, I was able to double my monthly revenue within a month of the conference – and you could do the same, so don’t skip this part.

The other reason why taking notes on speeches is useful is because you can use your biggest insights as an icebreaker or a talking point when you talk to a speaker after their speech. You can say “hey, I loved your story about X – can you tell me more about that?”, and all of a sudden you’ll find yourself having this deep conversation with a speaker.

The second part of listening to a speech consists of creating new & updating my old questions. If I’m using my notecard system for storing my questions that I described in this guide, this would look like this.

First, I would keep an eye on the questions that I already have written for that speaker based on my research. If the speaker answers my question during the speech, I write the solution to it to the back of the card. If they give a partial answer, I update the question. I also write new questions that come up for me during the speech, that I can later ask during a break or during a Q & A session.

Now let’s talk about Q & A sessions. I LOVE Q & A sessions, as they’re such a great way to stand out and get noticed by everyone else in the room. In my mind, participating in the Q & A sessions regularly is the third best thing you can do for visibility at a conference – right after speaking on stage and doing an on-stage hot seat.

During the Q & A sessions, I like to follow a few guidelines:

I try to be the first person to raise their hand as often as possible
I try to participate in every single Q & A session if at all possible

The reason why I like to be the first person to raise their hand is because it makes it the most likely for my question to be answered, plus more of the attendees will still be paying attention at the first question than at the tenth question. Being the first person to ask a question is easy if you already have questions prepared in advance – and it also helps if you sit close to the stage. During the Q & A I like to ask just one question, and I try to ask a question that’s not just relevant to me, but also to other people in the crowd (similarly to how I prepare questions for hot seats).

The other important thing that I do is that I try to participate in as many sessions as possible. I do this because I want everyone at the conference to notice me, see me and remember me (which makes more people want to talk to me), and because if I’ve paid thousands of dollars for the conference I might as well get the most out of it and get as many questions answered as possible.

Whenever I ask a question, I like to briefly introduce myself first (using the conference-tailored introduction), then I share my question. Then, I like to write down the response from the speaker on the back of my notecard to make sure I remember what they said.

Now if you did your homework properly you’re probably asking yourself at this stage: “what about all the other questions I prepared? How will I get those answered?”. The solution is simple: revisit the chapters on best networking opportunities at the conference and connecting with speakers. What you want to do during the Q & A session is get noticed by the speaker, THEN talk to them some more (and ask the remaining questions) during the lunch break or dinner.

And in the case the speaker leaves the conference right after their speech and you didn’t get a chance to ask them your questions? Well, in that case you could always email them, thank them for the speech, mention that you had a few questions ready for them and politely ask them if they’d be willing to answer them via a quick email or a Skype call.

The email could look something like this:

“Hey NAME,

I just wanted to reach out to you to thank you for your speech at the [CONFERENCE] today. I’m Primoz, the online entrepreneur that asked you the question about [TOPIC] during the Q & A session, with a red pocket square.

I loved these 3 insights from your speech:

[INSERT BULLETS WITH INSIGHTS (FROM YOUR NOTES)]

I had a few more questions ready for you that I was hoping to ask you at the conference, but as you had to go right after the speech we couldn’t really talk.

Would you be open to answering my top 3 questions via email or a 10-minute phone call? If not, I totally understand. If yes, I can email you the questions or call you on your cell phone at a time that works for you.

-Primoz”

The email is short, simple, and non-committal. If they say no, there’s no hard feelings, but if they say yes, you can end up having a great conversation with them and start building a relationship with them.

CHAPTER 3.6: Become a “conference commando”

The “conference commando” strategy is my second favorite strategy from Keith Ferrazzi’s “Never Eat Alone” book.

The idea behind this strategy is that during the conference, you’re on a mission to get the most out of the conference (find the business breakthroughs you’re looking for and build the relationships you’re looking to build). Instead of feeling just like an attendee, the idea is to feel like you’re “working the conference” as if it was your own turf.

So how do you make that happen? Well, the good news is that if you’ve read up until this point in the guide, you’re already doing it. You’ve identified your goals / target for the conference. You’ve done the research. You know exactly who you want to connect with and which business challenges you want to solve at the conference. You’re ready to go and get what you were looking for out of it.

Having said that, there’s one more thing that you can do to “work the conference” even better – and that’s making introductions. As you meet more and more new people at the conference and connect with them, a great way to add value to them (and other attendees that you meet) is to start connecting them with each other. So every time you meet someone that would benefit from meeting another conference attendee, take the initiative and introduce them right there and then.

You can also take things a step further with bringing people together by inviting them to your “conference within a conference” meet up, or simply inviting them for coffee during a break or for breakfast on one of the mornings. By doing this, you won’t only strengthen the relationships with people you meet, but also become more valuable in their eyes as you’ll constantly be introducing them to people that they’ll love meeting.

CHAPTER 3.7: The conference “hall of shame”

In this guide, we’ve covered a lot of the things you should be doing to get the most out of the conference. Now, let’s talk about the things that you SHOULDN’T be doing there. In no particular order, here are the behaviors that will make you look bad at the conference (or just won’t help you get much out of it).

#1 – The wallflower

Know that person that’s constantly in a corner, checking the phone, and always quiet? I do, since I know I sometimes tend to become one (especially when I’m tired). Well, the harsh truth is that being at a conference and staring at your phone checking email isn’t much better than staying at home in bed doing the same thing.

If you ever catch yourself doing this, then think about why you’re doing it. If you’re bored, then try finding another wallflower and starting a conversation with them. If you’re tired, then go up to your room and get some rest, then come back to the conference feeling refreshed. That’s much better than being in the corner of the room all day long.

#2 – The follower

The follower is the person that follows a person or a group (that they know already) around the conference and rarely meets new people. As you can imagine, following the same person around all the time won’t really help you build new relationships (plus the person might feel weird that you’re around them all the time).

Even if you arrive at the conference and you already know some people there, remember why you’re at the conference in the first place – to meet new people. It’s totally cool to hang out with your old friends and clients for some time, but that doesn’t mean you should spend 3 days following them around. Instead, focus on working through your list of people you want to connect with first – and then spend more time with your existing friends towards the end of the conference (and, even better, introduce them to the new people you’ve met).

#3 – The Instagrammer

There’s a certain group of people that take photos of everyone and everything at the conference. They take a photo with every speaker that they find, and in many cases that’s all that they do. They take photos so they can use them in their social media and marketing materials, which to me feels kind of sad. Sometimes there’s even a huge line of these people wanting to take photos!

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m open to taking photos with other attendees. In fact, I too sometimes use them in my marketing materials. But what you don’t know is that I rarely ask people to take photos of me or run around with my phone trying to fill up my Instagram account. They’re usually taken by the photographers at the event when I’m in the middle of having a conversation.

The problem with taking photos or being the Instagrammer is that that’s ALL that some people do. They come up to the speaker, ask to take a photo, then talk to the next person. If your main goal is to get as many photos as possible out of the event, I guess that makes sense. But in my mind, you’d be much better off actually taking the time to talk to these people and build a genuine relationships with (which you can do using the advice in this guide) rather than just taking a photo with them.

#4 – The pitcher

There’s two things I hate at a conference more than anything: people that try to pitch me before I even get to know them, and people who try to force business cards down my throat. There’s some of these people (I call them “the pitchers”) at every event. They come up to you, start a conversation, spend 5min talking about how awesome they are, and next thing you know they’re offering you their services and handing you their business card, before moving to the next person.

These people get the conferences totally wrong. They try to meet everyone because they think that conferences are a numbers game. And their biggest weapon are business cards, which then get thrown straight into trash. If you’ve ever caught yourself doing this because you didn’t know any better, don’t sweat it. But with your next conference, focus on building authentic relationships with people rather than trying to sell them stuff all the time – and you’ll have a much better experience.

#5 – The zombie

The zombie is a person that is never present and constantly darts their eyes left and right, looking for new people to talk to. People tend to become zombies when they enter a conversation that they’re not interesting in. They start looking around for something more interesting as a way to escape the conversation. What they don’t realize is how disrespectful that can look and how bad that can make the other person feel, especially fi they’re talking to someone 1on1 or in a small group.

If you ever find yourself in a conversation you’re not interested in, don’t turn into a zombie. Instead politely tell the other person that it was great chatting with them and that you wish them to have fun at the conference. You can also say you’re going to the bathroom or to get some food, or that you’re tired and that you’ll go to the room to take a break (just make sure you actually do that and don’t lie about it). Then, once you do that, find the next person to talk to.

#6 – The stalker

At the last conference I attended, someone who knew who I was came up to me in the worst place of all – a bathroom. While I was doing my thing he thought it would be a great time to start a conversation with me, and it was awkward as hell, plus annoying (as I tend to use my bathroom breaks to recharge). I probably don’t have to tell you to not do this, right? You know better.

Don’t be the stalker that chases people around to their room or their bathroom – you’ll just creep them out. If you really want to talk to someone, there’s plenty of opportunities at the conference and outside of it to do so. You don’t need to invade people’s privacy just to “connect” with them.

#7 – The teenage girl

Whenever I spoke at the conference, there would inevitably be a few people coming up to me that would be completely starstruck and act like teenage girls. They would say weird stuff like “I can’t believe it’s really you!!!” and “can I touch you?”. Then we would look at each other awkwardly for a few moments, and then they’d say “I gotta go! Have fun!”.

I get it. I know that when you’re meeting someone you admire, you might have the tendency to choke and not be at your best. To prevent that from happening, focus on using your homework to start the conversation. If you’re talking to a speaker, you can share some of your favorite takeaways from their speech with them, how they helped you in the past, or ask them if it’s ok to ask them a few questions. Even if you’re nervous when you start talking to them, you’ll likely get more comfortable with it in a few minutes. It’s a much better option than looking like a teenage girl.

Well, it seems like we’ve made it to the end of the third chapter of this guide. By this point, you should know everything that you need to know about getting the most out of the actual conference – from talking to speakers, to using the Q & A sessions as best as possible, and being aware of the best networking opportunities. If there’s something that’s not clear in this part, just ask a question below in the comments and I’d be happy to answer it for you.

Now let’s move on to the last (but not the least important) part: what to do after the conference to get the most out of it.

PART 4: What to do after the conference ends

The conference is over and you’re on your flight back home. You’ve had a blast, you met a lot of interesting people and got a lot of new insights that you can now apply in your business. You’re excited to keep building the new relationships and growing your business… Until your day to day kicks back in.

I’ve spoken to many people about attending conferences and a surprising amount of them told me that while they had a great time at the conference, everything fell apart once they came back to work or to running their business. Since they were away for a few days, they had to catch up on their work, and things like following up with the people they met at the conference and going through the conference notes slowly got lost on their to-do list, until it felt like it was too late to act on them.

If you’ve experienced any of that yourself, I have great news for you. By focusing on just two things (the following up and creating an action plan for your business breakthroughs), you’ll be able to get exactly what you’re looking for out of the conference. You’ll ensure that you’ll build the lasting relationships you hoped to build, and you’ll be able to use the business breakthroughs to grow your own business faster.

And best of all? You’ll be able to do all of that in a matter of hours – even while you’re on your flight home from the conference if you want to!

CHAPTER 4.1: The subtle art of following up

If you’ve read anything related to attending conferences, you’ll know that everyone recommends the same thing: “Follow up with everyone that you’ve met at the conference! And do it as fast as possible!” Right? Now the question is: What REALLY happens when you hear advice like that?

Chances are you knew that you “should” be following up, but when you’re back from the conference and you have to catch up on work, following up suddenly becomes the item on your to-do list #63. Which in reality means that you never get around to doing it, and then feel guilty as hell for not doing it.

If that has been your experience so far, then I have great news for you: This doesn’t need to happen to you any more!

You see, I strongly believe that the premise of “following up with everyone you meet” at a conference is flawed. At an average conference, you’ll talk to 50 or 100 people over the course of a few days for at least a few minutes. Should you REALLY follow up with 50 to 100 people that you’ve just barely met? And if you should, then how the hell are you supposed to fit 50-100 new people in your life after the conference? You’re already busy with work, and you just don’t have the time to make that work.

And even if you do manage to follow up with people and send them an email about how great it was to meet them, what happens next? Well, if your experience is anything like mine, that’s where it usually ends. They thank you for the email and you agree to “staying in touch”… And that’s all there is.

The good news is that there is a better and much more effective way of following up, and I’m super excited to share it with you today. The better way of following up includes a few rules.

Rule #1: You don’t need to follow up with EVERYONE you meet

That’s right. You don’t actually need to follow up with everyone that you meet at the conference. Whereas it might make you feel good if you do it, it’s unlikely that any tangible results will come out of it (doing this just isn’t the best use of your time).

Instead of trying to follow up with everyone, pick a HANDFUL of people that you REALLY want to stay in touch with (and that you can actually fit into your existing schedule). For most people, this will be 5-10 people at MOST (having 5-10 new people in your life is plenty! Especially if they become your business partners, clients or mentors).

In practice, these will be the people that you were originally looking to connect with at the conference with who you were able to start building a relationship with (makes sense, right?), plus a handful people you might have met at the event that you clicked with.

If 10 people feels like too much for you, then make the shortlist even shorter. Pick a number that you’ll realistically follow through with. I’d rather see you actually follow up with 3 people than to THINK about following up with 10 and not actually follow up with anyone.

Rule #2: Define a clear next step

The “it was so nice to meet you!” follow up emails are nice to receive, but if they don’t lead anywhere, they’re pretty pointless (they result in just another person you “should” stay in touch with).

To make a follow up email effective, think about what’s the logical next step for your relationship. Is it jumping on a Skype call to talk about a topic that you’re both interested in? Is it to talk on Skype about potentially working together? Is it for you to email them a few guest post ideas so you can write a guest post for them? Or is it for you to take their advice and put it into action? You should always know what the next step is when sending a follow up email.

The next thing you want to do is make sure that you make it as easy as possible for them to take that next step. If you’re trying to set up a Skype call with them, share a few times that work for you (or your calendar scheduling link like Calendly) and your Skype name. If you’d like to guest post for them, send them some ideas for a guest post immediately with clearly defined next steps. The one exception here is if you’re just planning on implementing their advice. In that case, you can thank them for the specific advice they gave you and let them know you’ll be in touch with your results.

Remember to use the notes in your phone / notepad that you’ve saved from your conversation during this step to make your life easier.

A sample follow-up email could look something like this:

“Hey NAME,

It’s Primoz (the guy with the red pocket square). I really enjoyed meeting you at [CONFERENCE] yesterday! I loved chatting about [TOPIC] with you and will read the book about [TOPIC] you recommended me to read for sure.

At the end of our conversation, you mentioned you’d like to talk about potentially working together. I’d love to set up a call with you some time next week. Here’s the link to my calendar: [CALENDLY LINK].

I’m looking forward to talking to you more!

-Primoz”

The email is short, simple, and has a clear next step.

Rule #3: It’s not about following up, it’s about staying in touch

As I mentioned earlier, I only follow up with people that I actually want to stay in touch with – not with people I “might someday need something from”. That’s why the relationship doesn’t END with a follow up. That’s where it BEGINS.

After the initial follow up email and Skype call, I focus on staying in touch with the people that I want to build a lasting relationship with. If they write a guest post for me, I might invite them to do an interview with me for one of my online courses. If we speak about a topic that we’re both interested in, I try to schedule another call (or a recurring monthly call) with them at the end of that call. If I’m just taking someone’s advice, I’ll make a note to follow up with them once I get some amazing results with it.

This is where most people that actually do follow up mess up. They follow up… And that’s it. There’re countless people I’ve met (or even people that emailed me after reading content) that I loved talking to and working with, only to find them disappear. They would write this one great email about how I helped them and then I’d never hear from them again. It’s nice when it happens, but no lasting relationship comes out of it.

On the other hand, I also have a few students that constantly keep me posted on how they’re progressing (they email me every few months). And guess what? Whenever they ask for my help I’ll usually help them. And if I’m in their town or if I’m attending another conference together with them, I’ll make it a priority to meet up with them (for example, I’m throwing a meet up for my Ultimate Guide System students at Forefront).

Bottom line is: Pick only a few people to follow up with. Set up a call with them or start working on a project together through the follow-up email. Then focus on staying in touch by thinking about how you can further work with them. And that’s the subtle art of following up.

Practically, you can write up all of your follow up emails fairly quickly. It might take you an hour or less to do it. These are simple emails, and you already know what the next steps should be based on the conversation you had at the conference. A great time to work on these emails is either (1) at the event itself, in your hotel room in the evening, or (2) on the flight back home. Regardless of when you decide to follow up, I encourage you to block it out in your calendar (to make sure it actually happens).

CHAPTER 4.2: How to turn your conference notes into business breakthroughs

The second thing you want to do after the conference ends is take some time to go through all of your notes and turn them into business breakthroughs. By doing that, I was able to double my monthly revenue within a month of attending the 100k Summit (and triple it the month after).

To make sure that the conference notes don’t get lost or forgotten, I like to work through them as soon as possible after the conference ends and turn them into actionable steps that I then put into my calendar and other business productivity systems. I like to do this on the flight home as I have plenty of time to do it, but you could also block out an hour or two within the first few days of coming home from the conference to do this.

Here’s what I do during this strategy session:

I go over my non-actionable insights and think about how I can turn them into actionable steps
I go over my actionable steps and decide which ones I actually want to implement in my business
I put the actionable steps into my calendar or other productivity systems I have set up for my business (or I execute on them right away)

I like to act on the steps I can execute on within minutes (like buying a book) immediately, while I like to schedule tasks like writing a blog post further down the line.

Here are a few examples for how that works in action:

If I have a book recommendation written down, I buy the book on Kindle or the audiobook version on Audible
If I have a blog post idea written down, I add it to my running list of blog post ideas
If I have a guest post idea, I put the time to pitch the guest post in my calendar
If I have a new sales technique written down, I make a note in my launch plan to test it out
If I have a new course idea, I make a note in my calendar to create a table of contents for it

Now I don’t act on EVERY single insight I get at the conference (I decide which ones I actually WANT to implement in my business immediately), but for every insight that I do have, I make sure it’s in my calendar or another system and that it actually gets done.

It’s simple, but effective – and it gets results.

BONUS: Your Conference Battle Plan

Reading a 27,000+ word guide is one thing. Putting it into action is another. Whether you have 2 weeks to prepare for your next conference or just an afternoon, you’ll LOVE what I have in store for you.

As a free BONUS for this guide, I’ve created “Your Conference Battle Plan”. Your Conference Battle Plan outlines all the major action steps we covered in this guide over just a few pages. By using the Conference Battle Plan, you’ll be able to go through the steps covered in this guide in 24-48 hours and make sure you get the most out of the conference.

Your Conference Battle Plan consists of 3 parts:

The 12-Step Conference Prep Checklist: This checklist includes all 12 steps that you need to take to prepare for the conference as best as possible, in as little as 24-48 hours.
The Conference Cheat Sheet: This cheat sheet will help you remember all the things you should be doing at the conference in order to get the most out of it. You can even print it out and bring it with you!
The Perfect Post-Conference Flight: My 2-step system for making sure that I build the right relationships and create massive business breakthroughs after the conference, that you can go through on your flight home (AND have plenty of spare time to watch a movie or two)

In order to get the PDF version of this guide AND Your Conference Battle Plan delivered to your inbox, just enter your name and email address below. Enjoy!

P.S. If you enjoyed this guide, I’d LOVE it if you shared it on Facebook – on your own wall or in an online community you’re a part of. You can also email it to a friend that’s attending a conference soon or hosting a conference soon – they’ll thank you for it!

P.P.S. If you loved this guide, leave a comment below to let me know what you loved the most about it! And if you have any questions, leave a comment as well – I’ll happily answer all the questions in the comments section!

-Primoz