170: Get Your Perfect Summer PTO Plan (AI Prompt Included)
Welcome to today's episode! I'm excited to talk about an important topic for many online business owners—how to effectively manage your time and business during the summer with a well-planned PTO (paid time off) strategy.
Over the past few weeks, I've chatted with a bunch of online business owners interested in my 1:1 coaching. A common theme keeps popping up: time management.
Many of these entrepreneurs are feeling stretched too thin, especially with summer vacations planned, and they're struggling to find enough time to grow their businesses. They're often stuck doing the bare minimum, which begs the question: what is the minimum? They're asking me, "What should I focus on to get the best results?"
In today's episode, I'm excited to dive into how you can create your summer PTO plan. I'll be sharing some of my top time management secrets to help you get that much-needed break while keeping your business running smoothly.
By the end, you'll have the tools and an AI prompt you can use to prepare a customized Summer PTO schedule to set yourself up for a successful and productive fall.
Here’s Your AI Prompt to Create Your Summer PTO Plan:
Here’s the prompt for Chat GPT.
Role
You are a productivity consultant specializing in creating comprehensive and efficient plans for businesses to ensure seamless operations during periods of reduced staff availability, such as summer PTO.
Task
Create a detailed summer PTO plan for a business that ensures all critical tasks, including content marketing, newsletter emails, social media posts, nurturing the audience, growing the audience, and creating a tripwire sales funnel (including sales page for a mini-course, mini-course content, order bump, and one upsell), are completed without interruption.
Context
The business needs to maintain a consistent presence and engagement with its audience even when the owner is on vacation.
The business focuses on digital marketing strategies to engage and grow its audience.
The business typically operates with a set number of hours worked per week over the summer, specifically 10 hours per week.
Content will be repurposed to maximize efficiency.
Steps
Assess the Current Workload: List all weekly tasks, including content marketing (blog or podcast), newsletter emails, audience growth activities, social media posts, and the creation of a tripwire sales funnel.
Determine Weekly Work Hours: Establish the number of hours worked per week (10 hours) and allocate time for each critical task.
Plan PTO Schedule: Determine the team members' PTO schedules and identify the periods when resources will be limited.
Create a Content Calendar: Develop a content calendar that includes all critical tasks such as blog posts or podcast episodes, newsletter emails, and social media updates, ensuring these tasks are planned and scheduled in advance.
Repurpose Content: Identify key pieces of content that can be repurposed across different platforms (e.g., turning a blog post into a podcast episode, social media snippets, and newsletter content).
Automate Where Possible: Use tools to automate content publication, email newsletters, and social media posts. Schedule content ahead of time to cover the PTO period.
Batch Create Content: Prepare multiple pieces of content in advance. For example, write several blog posts or record multiple podcast episodes before the PTO starts.
Audience Engagement Strategy: Develop a strategy for maintaining audience engagement, including pre-scheduled social media posts, automated email sequences, and engagement prompts.
Develop and Implement the Tripwire Sales Funnel:
Create a sales page for the mini-course.
Develop the mini-course content.
Set up an order bump and one upsell.
Leverage Tools for Audience Growth: Use tools and strategies such as social media ads, collaborations, or guest appearances to continue growing the audience without requiring daily input.
Monitor and Adjust: Regularly check the performance of scheduled content and engagement strategies, making adjustments as necessary to ensure all tasks are being effectively managed.
Constraints
Ensure the plan is realistic and can be followed without causing burnout.
Incorporate flexibility to handle unexpected issues or changes in PTO schedules.
Make use of available tools and technology to automate repetitive tasks.
Operate within a 10-hour work week.
Maximize content repurposing to increase efficiency.
Creating a Summer PTO Plan for Online Business Success
Summer is here, and for many online business owners, it's a time for well-deserved rest and relaxation. However, balancing the need for downtime with the demands of running a business can be challenging. Over the past few weeks, I've spoken with numerous entrepreneurs who are struggling to manage their time effectively during the summer months. The common thread in these conversations is the need for a solid plan to ensure that their businesses continue to thrive even when they take time off.
In this blog post, I'll guide you through creating a comprehensive summer PTO (paid time off) plan. This plan will help you maintain your business momentum, keep your audience engaged, and set yourself up for a successful fall. From identifying essential tasks to leveraging automation, we'll cover practical strategies to help you make the most of your summer break without sacrificing your business goals.
Assessing Essential Summer Tasks
The first step in creating your summer PTO plan is to identify the essential tasks that need your attention during the summer. While it's tempting to take a complete break, certain activities are crucial for maintaining your business's momentum. One of the most important tasks is your weekly email newsletter. This communication keeps your audience informed, engaged, and connected to your brand. In your newsletter, you can promote your content, affiliate products, and your own offerings. Consistency is key here, even if the content is repurposed or simplified. The goal is to stay visible and relevant to your audience.
Leveraging Content Marketing
Content marketing is another critical area that requires attention during the summer. Consistent content marketing helps maintain your brand presence, engages your audience, and attracts new customers. To make this manageable, consider batch creating your content ahead of time. This could include blog posts, podcast episodes, or YouTube videos. If creating new content feels overwhelming, repurpose existing content to save time while still delivering value to your audience. The key is to keep your content efforts consistent, even if you're not producing new material every week.
Utilizing Automated Sales Funnels
Automated sales funnels are a powerful tool for generating revenue while you're on vacation. These funnels guide potential customers through the buying process, from awareness to decision-making, without requiring your constant involvement. Set up a lead magnet to attract potential customers and create a series of automated emails that nurture these leads and encourage them to make a purchase. By having a well-designed sales funnel in place, you can ensure that your business continues to generate income even when you're not actively working.
Time Blocking for Balance
Time blocking is a highly effective technique to help you allocate specific times for business tasks and personal activities. During the summer, this method can help you balance work and leisure more effectively. For instance, you might dedicate your mornings to business tasks such as checking emails, creating content, and managing social media. In the afternoons, you can focus on personal activities, family time, or hobbies. By setting clear boundaries and sticking to a schedule, you can enjoy your summer while still keeping your business on track.
Creating a Personalized Summer PTO Plan
Every business is unique, and so are your summer goals and priorities. To create a personalized summer PTO plan, start by setting clear objectives for what you want to achieve during the summer. Break down these goals into actionable steps and incorporate them into your schedule. Use tools like AI to help streamline your workflows and create a customized plan based on your specific needs and available time. Whether you're aiming to maintain consistent content output, develop new sales funnels, or simply stay connected with your audience, having a clear plan will help you stay focused and make steady progress towards your goals.
In conclusion, creating a summer PTO plan is essential for balancing relaxation with business continuity. By assessing essential tasks, leveraging content marketing, utilizing automated sales funnels, and implementing time blocking, you can ensure that your business remains productive and engaged while you enjoy your summer break. Remember, the key is consistency and strategic planning, allowing you to recharge and come back stronger for the fall season.
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Transcript:
Dr. Destini Copp [00:00:00]:
Hi there. Destini here, and I am super excited about today's podcast episode. And I wanna talk about and walk you through how you can put together a summer PTO plan, so pay time off plan. And over the past few weeks, I have spoken to many different online business owners who are interested in my 1 on 1 coaching. And the one thing universally across the board that everyone needs help with is managing their time. They are stretched too thin, and they don't have a ton of time to devote to growing their business, especially over the summer. They can only do the minimum. But then the question is, what is this minimum? Right? They're asking me, what should I focus on to maximize my results? So today, I am diving into how you can map out your summer PTO plan, and I'm also gonna share some of my time management secrets with you to help ensure that you get the much needed break while keeping your business running smoothly and to set yourself up for success in the fall.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:01:15]:
But before we dive in, there is one thing that I just want to mention. I saw a post the other day from an online entrepreneur, and she was encouraging folks to take a full summer sabbatical. The problem with this is is what you're doing now will affect your results in the fall and quite frankly, going into Q4. So it is important to keep nurturing and growing your audience even during the summer months. Now for me, personally, I definitely plan to take off a good amount of time this summer. We have several different vacations planned, and I just really wanna take it easy at our pool. And I have, you know, friends that I'm wanting to spend time with, so I'm gonna take it easy this summer. So the bottom line is that while summer is a time for relaxation and, you know, basically recharging, As an online business owner, you cannot afford to let your business come to a complete halt.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:02:22]:
So even while you are enjoying your well deserved time off, certain things in your business definitely need attention over the summer. And the first thing I want you to do is to assess what is your have to do this summer, and I'm also gonna give you some suggestions here. The first one is your weekly email newsletter. In this email newsletter, you're going to promote your content, which could be your repurposed content. You're gonna promote any affiliate products, and you're gonna promote your own products. You're gonna give them tips. You might be involved in some audience growth initiatives that you need to promote. Really, the goal here is to not be perfect, but to stay consistent.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:03:15]:
Now if you recall, if you're on my email list for the creators MBA newsletter, in one of my most recent publications, I talk about how I recently read Principles of Newsletters by CJ Childers, which covers his lessons learned from 37 years of newsletter publishing. I highly, highly recommend if you want to check it out. And the question one of the questions, I should say, that was posed in that particular ebook was why do mediocre creators often get more attention than the best creators? And the answer is because they are consistent. So if you take podcasts, for example, there are 5,000,000 of them out there, but only around 448, 929 are active, meaning they have published an episode in the last 90 days. And even fewer of them stick to a regular schedule. And I can tell you from experience, it is tough being consistent in podcasting. And the same thing quite frankly happened with blogging back in the day. And it's also true for videos, and it is true for email newsletters now.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:04:40]:
So staying consistent is a huge, huge game changer. People's attition spans are super short, so you need that consistency to keep them engaged. We are all creatures of habit, so you want to make sure that you are becoming a part of the regular routine. And this is why you don't wanna disappear over the summer. It is super important to engage with your audience and make sure that you have your email schedule even when you're on vacation or just taking time off. So that being said, your weekly newsletter schedule is a must have for the summer even when you are on PTO. Now moving in to the next area that needs your attention this summer, and I'm gonna give you some caveats here, and that is your content marketing. So consistent content marketing keeps your audience engaged, and it also attracts new customers.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:05:50]:
It helps you maintain your brand presence, and it helps you, you know, basically keep that authority out there in your niche. And to help you plan for your summer PTO, a couple things you can do here. You can batch create your pillar content ahead of time. So that could be your YouTube videos, your podcast episodes, or your blog post. And if you're like, Destini, I don't have any time whatsoever to create new content, you can repurpose existing content to save you time and just keep your marketing efforts consistent. And I really wanna throw in another tip here. So let's say that you don't have anything to repurpose for that week. You know, you need to get your newsletter out, but you don't have any, you know, content that you can repurpose or you don't have any new pillar content that you want to promote, you can just write a short content section in your newsletter with some tips for them that you and you can also repurpose that on social media too.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:07:02]:
That is okay to do. Again, we're not focusing on being perfect. We are focusing on consistency here. And I'll give you a specific example. So going back to what I mentioned a few minutes ago about that section in one of my recent newsletters that I wrote wrote about, talking about that ebook I had read about principles of newsletter. This is just something I wrote. Right? It wasn't a pillar piece of content. Like, it wasn't one of my podcast episodes.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:07:34]:
It wasn't something, that I had, you know, created to put on social media. It really was something that I was writing out my newsletter, and I was like, you know what? I read this this week. This is important information for them. I need to, you know, basically communicate it out. So it was super, super valuable. I've had several people contact me in in, like, Destiny, I love that. You're right. I just need to be consistent.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:08:03]:
And quite frankly, it was super easy for me to write. It probably took me, you know, just 2 to 3 minutes to write that, and I could take maybe a quote from that and put that in on out on social media and repurpose it. So it doesn't have to be a huge piece of pillar content that you're putting in your new in your email newsletter. Okay? So the next thing I want to focus on is the paid in the paid time paid time off, and that is sales funnels. So automated sales funnels, when they're set up and converting, are one of the best ways to get paid while you are on vacation. And somebody asked me today what I thought of the everything pages, and should they just put all of their digital products on something like that and link that in all of their emails? And I told them, I said, I think they're fine to showcase what you have to offer, but they don't take your customer on a specific journey like a sales funnel does. So when somebody signs up for your lead magnet, you're gonna have this sales funnel to guide potential customers through the buying process from awareness to decision making, and they work very, very well. It is much more unlikely that somebody's gonna come to your website, land on your everything page, and click to purchase.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:09:39]:
But they will sign up for a free lead magnet. Maybe you've posted on social media. Maybe you've been a speaker at a summit, or maybe they're, you know, you promoted that lead magnet on Pinterest. They go and they sign up. They see your tripwire sales page. They click to buy because it's awesome and it's, you know, completely related to your lead magnet. And then they click to buy that. They add a order bump, and then they may even go on to purchase additional upsells or cross sells.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:10:11]:
Again, that is a very different customer journey than just linking to an everything page in a email. So I'm a huge fan of sales funnels. I think most online business owners need to have them set up in their business. And, again, they are one of the best ways to get paid while on vacation. Okay? So next, I want to help you create your personalized summer PTO plan because at the end of the day, every one of our businesses are different. We have different goals and priorities to accomplish this summer. I have spoken to probably almost 15 online business owners this week, and every single one of those businesses were different, and they were all at different stages in their business journey. So the first step in creating your summer PTO plan is setting very clear priorities and goals.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:11:13]:
And, again, like I said, they're gonna be different for you than they are from you me. So I want you to determine what you're going to achieve during the summer and what tasks are most critical to your business's success. For instance, if maintaining consistent new valuable content, like new podcast episodes is a priority for you, then you're going to decide on a batching schedule that works for you, and then you're gonna automate that process as much as possible. This way your audience will continue to receive that valuable content even when you're not actively working. So you're gonna write down these goals, and then you're gonna work to break them down in actionable steps. So this approach is going to help you stay focused and make some steady progress to towards your objectives. And I'm going to give you a a prompt that you can use in AI. I've actually set it up in chat GPT, but you could use this in really a any AI system out there.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:12:21]:
So I'm gonna give you a prompt to help you do that in just a second. The other thing before I get into that, the other thing that I just want to mention that I do that I think you'll find it very valuable, especially over the summer, is time blocking and scheduling. So time blocking is a very powerful kinda technique to help you allocate specific times for tasks and specific times for personal time. So, basically, how this works is you might allocate your mornings to tackle business tasks, such as, you know, checking your emails, creating your content, managing your social media, working on your email newsletter, right, all those things that you have to get done. And then your afternoons, maybe, you know, maybe your kids are in the camp in the morning, so you can actually you have a block of time that you can actually work on those business activities, but you have to go pick them out at maybe 12 or 1. In those afternoons, you can set aside that block of time for personal activities or family times or your hobbies or taking your kids to the pool. So time blocking is something I highly recommend that you look into for the summer. Now to create a customized workflow and really to streamline your business task, what I would like you to do is use an AI system like chatcheapiti to help you with this.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:13:59]:
And I have put together a prompt that I'm going to share with you in the podcast show notes that you can use. You can just copy and paste it, and you can use in really any AI system. And it basically, what it will do, it will based on your goals and what you want to get accomplished this summer, it's gonna give you a very specific customized workflow for this. And the particular prompt that I have put together assumes that you're working no more than 10 hours per week, but if you have more time to allocate, like 20 hours per week you would put that in there. And you would also customize this prompt based on your specific goals. For example, if one of your goals this summer is to create a new tripwire sales funnels, you're going to add that to the prompt. So it's broken out. It basically breaks it out for the role.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:14:58]:
So it's telling the AI that you are a productivity consultant and you specialize in creating comprehensive and efficient plans for businesses to ensure seamless operations during periods of reduced staff availability, such as summer PTO. So we're basically telling the AI, you know, this is who you are, and this is what you're gonna help us create. So we have the task in there. We have the contacts, and that's where you're gonna put in, you know, the hours that you want to work. And between between the contact context and the task, that's what you're gonna put, what your goals are, how many hours you wanna work. And then we have the steps in here and the constraints. And that's gonna give you a very personalized plan that you can use over the summer to really kinda streamline your workflows and still achieve your business objectives. Okay? I will make sure that those links are in the show notes so you have all of those, prompts and you know exactly what to do there.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:16:10]:
So there you go. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and it helps you create a personalized summer PTO plan to nurture and grow your audience and bring in revenue over the summer even while you are on vacation. But before you go, I just wanna mention something, and you may have already seen this. I have recently announced that I have opened up a few select spots to work 1 on 1 with me to help you grow your digital product revenue while working a limited summer schedule. And I wanna just give you a little bit more additional information on my 1 on 1 coaching program. And when you are ready, I would love to work with you. So let me just go into details and explain exactly how this will work. It is personalized one zero one unlimited coaching.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:17:09]:
We do that via Voxer, but I have a ton of other perks in there for you. And, basically, how it works, after you sign up, you're going to complete an intake form. This is gonna give me some details about your business, your goals, some of the struggles that you have had to date, and I'm gonna use that. I'm gonna review it. We're going to meet via Zoom, and we're gonna put together an action plan. So for the majority of my clients, one of their main goals and their target outcome that they want to achieve during our time together is growing their digital product revenue. Your goals may be a little different, but most people definitely wanna focus on growing their digital product revenue. And I would say that while we definitely put together a customized plan, I do have a profit growth blueprint that I work with, and I have a very step by step process there.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:18:14]:
The first step is we define your personal and business goals. In step 2, we refine your messaging and your targeting. Some people have that all buttoned up, and some people just need to have you know, we need to do a little bit of refinement there. Then in step 3, we work to update your offer portfolio and your pricing. Then in step 4, that's when we really focus on lead generation and visibility efforts. In step 5 we work to fine tune your business processes and automations. And then in step 6, that's where really where we go in to amplify your growth and scale your business. So every single week in this program, at the beginning of the week, we're gonna work together on your goals, what you wanna accomplish for that week.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:19:04]:
And then on Friday, we're gonna celebrate what you accomplished so you really do get that accountability. The other thing that you get in here, and I would say that a lot of people say that this is one of the things that they love one one of the things that they love about the program is that every single week, you have the opportunity to submit a weekly 15 minute marketing audit. And, really, this could be anything in your business. So if you have question about one of your offers, you have questions about pricing, you have questions about the, offers that you're including in your sales funnel. Maybe you want feedback on a sales page. Maybe you want feedback on a landing page. Maybe you want feedback on a lead magnet that you're using to drive traffic into your funnel, really, is anything in your business. And you can do that every single week.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:19:57]:
So, essentially, it's like a done with you type of service where you can get direct feedback on what you're working on just so you don't get stuck. And, of course, you can ask questions at any time and get coaching via Voxer. Even if you have a question in the middle of the night, I had a client tell me this week that how much she appreciates that she can ask a question at any time she wanted because if she waited, she'd forget all about it. So she really enjoyed that particular aspect of it. So I have opened up my calendar for express 1 on 1 coaching sessions to really assess whether or not we would be a great fit to work together. So even if you're just a little bit curious about this, I can hook you up with a time, and we can talk about your specific situation. I've been doing these all week, and let me tell you, I have absolutely loved them. So what I want you to do is go to destinicopp.com/apply and less touch base.
Dr. Destini Copp [00:21:07]:
Bye for now.