1. Investing in a Beautiful Background for Zoom Calls, Interviews, and Videos
Last year, Zoom was one of many video-call services that people used here and there. But in a post-COVID world, everyone uses Zoom – and having a nice background for calls is getting extremely necessary for high-level entrepreneurs.
Odds are, you’re going to be doing a lot of Zoom calls in the foreseeable future. It’s worth it to invest in a beautiful background to elevate your business and brand on these calls.
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A client of mine has been on over 50 different television interviews, and here’s a breakdown of the entire setup he uses for professional-grade Zoom calls and how much it costs to create a beautiful background. It’s not too expensive and really makes you look good on calls.
The other day, I bought a face mask for $30. $30! If you told me a year ago that one day I’d buy a piece of fabric for my face that cost $30, I would’ve laughed. No way.
But thanks to COVID, I wear my face mask every day. For months, I was using cheap, throwaway masks that were uncomfortable and fogged up my sunglasses. After realizing I’d be using a mask for the foreseeable future, I decided to invest in a high-quality mask.
Entrepreneurs of all kinds are coming to the same conclusion about video calls – they’re going to be standard for many more months to come. Invest in a beautiful background now.
2. Hiring Virtual Assistants To Take Care of Low-Level Tasks
Hiring a virtual assistant is one of the best investments you can make for your business. Period.
They can be hired for extremely cheap and can do tasks in a day that take you months to learn and weeks to finally set up. If you’re a full-time entrepreneur or even still working at your day job, odds are you’re working remotely from home during COVID-19, and you want to use your time at home to build your business as much as possible.
You get the best results when you’re working on the truly important tasks, the power activities that really help you make money and grow your business. You can probably hire a virtual assistant to run things for you even while you’re sleeping, so you can have the maximum possible time to do the things only you can do – the things that make a difference.
I just hired a whole team of virtual assistants to manage my social media advertising and automated webinar sales, something that will free up countless hours a week for me. It’s going to cost me thousands of dollars to keep using their services, but I’m expecting to make ten times that amount with all the free time I’ll gain.
Virtual assistants are cheap, flexible, and agile, handling tasks that only serve to exhaust and drain you. If you haven’t looked into hiring a virtual assistant, the early stages of 2021 will be a great time to delegate time-consuming busywork so you can get back to working on the more important stuff.
3. Getting Featured on Podcasts, Conferences, and Virtual Summits
The modern world is getting very familiar with new forms of media, especially virtual forms.
Since most in-person gatherings, speaking events, and performances are still canceled for now, these events are moving to smaller, more accessible platforms like podcasts and virtual summits.
It’s difficult to get speaking events, especially as a beginner entrepreneur. World-class keynote speakers often charge upwards of $25,000 for a single speech, and it’s an extremely competitive world.
Fortunately, getting on high-level podcasts and virtual conferences has become very simple. As people are flocking to podcasts in droves, it’s smart to start expanding your influence and going where the people are.
Virtual summits are a form of conferences that’s been getting traction in recent years, especially now. Since most people can’t fly and meet in-person at these events, the events are happening virtually. As professional sports drafts, international conferences, even the world-famous Comic-Con become entirely digital, high-level entrepreneurs are working hard to get featured on these events.
I was just on a virtual summit called the Online Business Toolbox. I hadn’t heard of it, and when I was approached for an interview, I didn’t think much of the event. Perhaps a few people would tune in, I thought. Then I forgot about it.
But launch week happened, and I was surprised to see lots of emails and messages coming in from new readers who’d found me through the summit! I was giving away free access to an online course, and I saw that dozens of people had signed up for the course during the virtual summit.
These virtual events and conferences are critical during this time, and will only get more prominent moving forward until a viable solution to COVID-19 is in place.
In the meantime, start focusing on getting on these events, especially in the beginning of 2021.
4. Consistently Publishing Quality Content (Articles, Podcasts, Videos, or Social Media)
The world is using digital media more than ever before.
Take a look at Medium founder EV Williams’ post about Q3 metrics for Medium.com. Look at the ridiculous growth from this content-focused platform:
Since COVID-19 has restricted most people to staying indoors, the general public has responded by posting record numbers of internet consumption. Spotify, Facebook, YouTube, and many more social media platforms have posted similar metrics.
This means there are more eyes than ever looking for great content online. We’re in the middle of one of the biggest Internet-user spikes ever. PC Magazine reported that data usage has increased by nearly 50 percent during COVID-19 quarantine. That’s a lot of people looking for great content!
There’s never been a more perfect time to start consistently producing quality content. As more viewers, both new and old, flock to the internet, you want to be there to capitalize on the incoming flood.
5. Researching Up-and-Coming Publishing Platforms
Although social media app TikTok was founded in 2016, ten years after Twitter was founded in 2006, TikTok has gained far more users in the past year (around 850 million people) than Twitter (around 330 million people).
If you were an early adopter of TikTok, it was very easy to gain an enormous amount of followers very quickly. When the app became mainstream, new users followed whoever was already on the platform.
If you want to see ridiculous levels of success in 2021, it’s wise to start looking into new platforms now, building your presence before the crowd comes.
I was a semi-early adopter of Medium, where I quickly became one of the top writers on the entire platform. Back in 2017, I started writing consistently on the platform. The growth I saw was insane:
Here are my monthly views in May:
Here are my monthly views in August:
And here are my monthly views in November, just six months after being on the platform:
You can’t see this insanely-explosive growth anymore, because the platform has leveled out and that type of growth is no longer as possible.
But other platforms are about to experience this, and you can gain tens, even hundreds of thousands of readers if you get on board early. That’s how you can see this growth yourself and immediately become a thought leader on the platform, which you can leverage to create a six-figure business like I did.
For 2021, I’m really looking into paid newsletter platforms like Substack and Ghost. These platforms have been around for a couple of years, and I think people are just beginning to really consider using them. It’s a perfect time for people like you and me to start our brand there, hoping the platform explodes next year.
It’s extremely difficult (and frankly, sometimes plain foolish) to try and get big on an already-established platform like Facebook or TikTok. Their explosive growth has already happened, and if you weren’t on the rocket ship when it launched, you almost certainly won’t ever see that kind of growth nowadays.
Instead, research up-and-coming platforms that are poised to make a huge splash next year, and start building your presence now.
