Daily Shortcut Checklist For Consistent Lead Generation (Part 5)
John Oakes opens with a number worth remembering: the entire daily shortcut assignment takes 10 to 15 minutes to complete, and even for someone brand new and non-technical, he says, “I’d have a hard time believing that it took you more than 30 minutes.” The rest of his talk is a walkthrough of exactly how that short daily routine is built to generate leads, using that day’s actual assignment, episode 86, as the live example.
Three habits are the whole system
Before touching the mechanics, Oakes lays out the three daily habits he wants people to build from day one. First, complete each assignment in the checklist in order. Second, comment on what was learned that day. Third, come back Monday through Friday and repeat it, since the daily shortcut updates with new content every weekday. He shows where to find it inside the Empower Network back office: right on the main login screen, in a box that reads something like “Hey, John, here’s your daily shortcut for Thursday, December 8th,” or by clicking the Empower Network logo or hovering over the total shortcut tab.
Further down the page sit two standing links: one to the total shortcut system, which he describes as handy for sending to a friend or family member who’s already asked “what is it you’re doing,” since it drops them straight onto the Empower Network sales video, and one to that day’s specific daily shortcut episode, already coded with the user’s affiliate ID.
Watching, commenting, and where the leads actually come from
Step one of the checklist is to watch the daily shortcut episode, an eight to fifteen minute piece of content that Oakes says ranges from personal development material to internet marketing strategy to interviews with industry leaders. Step two is to leave a comment on it. He points out that today’s episode, number 86, already has a strong run of comments, and argues that the volume of comments matters beyond etiquette: “the more people that comment and leave good value in a comment underneath the video, it provides more and more social proof of what we’re doing here.” He notes that each day’s winning comment wins a prize, often a personal development book tied to that episode’s content, sometimes a cash reward.
The lead generation mechanism itself sits at the end of each video. Every episode ends with a call to action to opt in for a piece of free content, an audio recording, a PDF, a guide, something Oakes says people often pay for elsewhere but is given away here. Visitors type in their email, click “give me the total shortcut,” and land on a page where they get the promised content and also see the Empower Network sales video. Because the whole chain is affiliate coded, any resulting sign-up belongs to the person who shared it, and the new subscriber lands on that person’s list inside the Kolatu Cloud email system.
Sending the email takes about five clicks
Step three is sending the daily email, and Oakes is direct about who should skip it: anyone with zero leads can wait until they have at least one subscriber, but he insists that number won’t stay at zero for long once the sharing habit is in place. The process, he says, is identical whether someone has one lead or ten thousand. Inside Kolatu Cloud, the user clicks “send quick campaign,” selects “daily shortcut” from the letter category dropdown, and picks that day’s episode from the list, at which point the subject line auto-populates. He demonstrates changing it on the spot to “Would you like recruiting secrets from 2002.”
From there the sender checks which lists to send to, typically the daily shortcut list and the total shortcut list at minimum, and can schedule delivery for later if they’re working in a time zone where two in the morning US time isn’t the moment to email a list. The message itself arrives fully written, with image and affiliate-coded links already in place, ready to send as is or edit through the letter builder, where Oakes shows swapping in a personal photo and resizing it.
To prove the mechanism works rather than just describing it, he pulls up the audience manager and shows the daily shortcut list sitting at 16 leads generated in the last day and a half alone.
The same content, copied across five platforms
Step four is posting the daily Facebook message, which the checklist provides pre-written, image and affiliate link included, ready to paste onto a personal wall, a group, or a page. Step five is a personal invitation to existing contacts, phone or email, for which Oakes suggests something simple: “Hey, I just watched this video and got tremendous value from it today. I thought you might also be interested in it.”
He then shows how fast the same content moves across other networks. The Facebook post pastes directly into Google Plus and LinkedIn with the image pulling in automatically each time. Twitter needs an extra step because of the character limit: each episode includes a “swipe today’s text messages here” link to a document with ready-made tweets, and the full affiliate link gets run through a shortener like Bitly before being dropped in. He also grabs the episode’s image directly off the daily shortcut page with a right click and attaches it to the tweet, noting that tweets with images get noticed more than those without.
By the end of the walkthrough, which he times at 22 minutes, every piece of copy across every platform has come from the assignment itself. “I didn’t have to write any of this content,” he says. “I didn’t really even have to think about it. All I did was follow the steps laid out in the daily assignment for that day.”
Written up from the original recording. The full transcript is below.
Read the full transcript (24 min talk, 4,571 words)
Hey, John Oakes here. And in this video, I'm going to walk you through your daily action plan. This is the simple and quick process of completing your daily shortcut assignments. Now, before I dig into this, I wanna make sure that you know how to find your daily assignments each day, Monday through Friday. So right here, I'm logged into my Empower Network back office, and you can see right on the main login screen, this section right here in the left-hand column where it says, hey, John, here's your daily shortcut for Thursday, December 8th. Each day, Monday through Friday, this will update with a brand new daily shortcut assignment.
And you can easily navigate to this page from anywhere inside your back office by simply clicking on the Empower Network logo up here in the upper left corner, or coming down here to this tab where it says total shortcut, and hovering over it, and then selecting daily shortcut. Either of those things will bring you right back to this page, and you'll be able to find the daily shortcut easily. Now, let's go ahead and dig into this. I'm gonna scroll down just a little bit here. There are three daily shortcut habits that we want you to start developing right from the beginning. These are the daily habits that if you develop them, you're going to start seeing the results that you're looking for inside your business.
Now, the first habit is to complete each assignment in the checklist in order. And then habit number two is to tell us what you learned in the comments after you complete the daily shortcut for that day. The third habit is come back Monday through Friday and do it again. As I stated a minute ago, every Monday through Friday, each day the daily shortcut assignment updates with a brand new assignment and brand new content for the daily shortcut. We're gonna talk about that here in just a minute. Now, as I scroll down a little further, you'll see that there are some links here that will be here for your handy access each day in each day's daily shortcut content.
And the first one is your link to the total shortcut system. So what that means is that this is a very quick reference spot where you can come in here and grab, copy and paste this link and send it to somebody who may be interested in what it is that you're doing already. This is really handy for somebody who's brand new, who may be already talking to some friends or family and saying, hey, this is what I'm doing. I'm really excited about it. And they're saying, hey, I'd like to check that out. This is where you can grab the link to send to them that will take them straight to the Empower Network sales video so they can see what Empower Network is all about.
And so you can simply copy that and it's already coded with your affiliate ID inside your back office. The second link is the affiliate coded link for that day's daily shortcut episode. Now we're gonna click on that here in just a minute and I'll show you what that's all about. But before we do that, let's jump down here to the daily shortcut checklist. This is where you're gonna spend the most time doing the daily assignment. Now the really cool thing here that I wanna be sure you understand is that the daily shortcut assignments are about 10 to 15 minutes of work each day, right?
So there is nobody who is too busy that they can't fit in completing the daily assignments. It's just impossible. It's so simple and it's so quick and so streamlined that it can be fit within anyone's schedule. So I'm gonna step through these step by step and show you exactly what it's all about. And even if you're brand new and you're not technical and you've never done this stuff before, I'd have a hard time believing that it took you more than 30 minutes to complete the daily assignments. So step number one is to watch the daily shortcut episode.
And today is episode number 86. And then step number two is to comment on the episode after you've watched it. So we're gonna take these first two steps. I'm gonna step right up here and I'm gonna click on the link that will take us to today's daily shortcut episode and I'll walk you through those first two steps. So when you click that, it'll open the daily shortcut assignment. The video will auto play.
And the first thing you wanna do is watch it. Watch today's episode, whatever day that might be when you're logging in and doing this for the first time. These daily episodes are about, you know, anywhere from maybe eight to 15 minutes in length and they're high quality content. And what I mean by that is that this is personal development related content. Sometimes it's strategic training, internet marketing training. Often it can be an interview with successful leaders in the industry.
There's all kinds of high value content that is displayed and shared through these daily shortcut episodes that will appeal to a very wide range in the marketplace. And the value in this and how this helps you build your business by sharing the daily shortcuts is that when you provide high value content into the marketplace, you attract people in to see what it is that you're doing and to learn more about it. And over time, as you're consistently sharing this high value content, you start to really develop a relationship with people that are getting this content from you and they start to be more and more interested in what it is you're doing. Now, how do you develop your list? How do you actually get signups and sales from sharing this content? Let me talk about that.
When somebody watches one of these videos, at the end of each one, there's a call to action to leave a comment and there's also a call to action to go ahead and opt in to get free content. And there's a free giveaway with every single episode of the daily shortcut. That could be an audio recording, it could be a free PDF document or a guide. All types of different things are given away as free content. And this is high value stuff that often people online will actually pay for, but we're giving it away for free. And so what people will do is they'll come straight down here and they'll put in their email address and they'll click the button that says, give me the total shortcut so that they can get that content.
It will immediately then take them to a page where they can get the free content that they were promised. And then on top of that, they have the opportunity to learn more about Empower Network, watch the sales video and potentially join your team, right? And because this is all affiliate coded to you, you get the sale, you get the benefit. And when somebody puts in their email address, they go on your list inside of our Kolatu Cloud email marketing system, which I'll show you here in just a minute. So that's how you start to generate leads and sales simply through doing the daily shortcut assignments. Now I'm gonna scroll down here just a little bit so you can see the comment area because step number two was to leave a helpful comment on that day's daily shortcut.
It's well worth it to take a few minutes and leave a comment and you can see today's episode already has a number of really good comments that have been left here. And how does that help the whole community? Well, it's simple. The more people that comment and leave good value in a comment underneath the video, it provides more and more social proof of what we're doing here. And it creates more and more interest in them to go ahead and opt in and get the free content that we're promising them. It just continues to add more and more value to this page.
And over time, there will be hundreds of comments on every single episode of the daily shortcuts, which makes this very unique content and adds more and more to the value over time. So important to leave a comment. And on top of that, by leaving a comment, each day the winning comment is selected and you can win a prize, which is often a free book. It could be a personal development book that was discussed in the actual content of the video. It could be a cash reward, but each day there is a prize. So certainly, you know, you'll be motivated to go ahead and leave a comment on these.
So let me jump back to the steps. So we've watched the daily shortcut. We then left a comment on the daily shortcut episode. And then the next thing is to send your daily email message. Now, if you're brand new and you don't have a list yet, sometimes people will say, well, I can just skip that because I don't have a list. If you truly have zero leads, you have no list at all, then you can skip that part until you do.
But I'm telling you that as soon as you start being consistent in sharing this content through the other things that I'm gonna show you here, the other steps we're gonna cover in a minute, you will very quickly start developing a list. And as soon as you have one subscriber on your list, meaning one person has put their email address into the daily shortcuts, then step number three is something that you're gonna wanna do. And I'm gonna show you how simple it is, whether you have one lead or a list of 5,000 leads or 10,000 leads, the process is exactly the same and it's super simple. So step number three, here we go. For sending your daily email message, you simply come right up here to the top of the screen where it says Kolatu Cloud, and you click that link. And that opens your Kolatu Cloud email marketing system.
Once that loads, all you have to do to send today's daily assignment is come right over here in the left-hand column and click on send quick campaign. And then when that screen opens up, right here where it says select email template, on the first dropdown box where it says letter category, you wanna select daily shortcut. And then under select letter, you click there and scroll all the way to the most current daily shortcut assignment. In this case, today is episode 86. And you'll notice as soon as I do that, it automatically populates the subject field. Now you can come up here and you can change the subject if you'd like.
I'm just gonna show you how easy it is to edit things. So I just changed the subject to would you like recruiting secrets from 2002. So all we have to do now is come down and select the list that we wanna send the email to. This is real easy, when you open this up, it'll give you all the lists that you have set up inside Kolatu Cloud. You can simply check the one box up here if you wanna send it to all your lists. But you'll most likely wanna send it at least to your daily shortcut list as well as, let me scroll down here a little bit, as well as your total shortcut list and any other lists that you might wanna select that you've been building to send today's message to.
Now real quick thing to note is that automatically you're going to have a daily shortcut list as well as a total shortcut list and a few others set up for you. And anyone who opts in through daily shortcut assignments will go into your daily shortcut list. And so the cool thing is that somebody goes, they like what they see on a daily shortcut, they decide to go ahead and opt in, and then they get on your daily shortcut list. Now you can send them every day's daily shortcut through this process I'm showing you and they will continue to get more and more of this high value content. And then over time, if they are interested enough to continue to watch them, then they very well may go ahead and join your team. And that's how over time we start getting more and more signups just from sharing high value content.
So I'm gonna go ahead and leave those four lists checked. And down here, if you chose to schedule this, now this is important to note for people that are in other countries outside the United States, are in completely different time zones, you might be doing your daily shortcut assignments at two o'clock in the morning, United States time, and that's probably not the best time to send your email message out to your list. So what you can do is check this box that says later, and then you can go ahead and use this calendar function here and you can choose when you want that message to be sent out, and it will simply schedule it and send it out at the time that you choose. Now for the sake of this demonstration, I'm gonna go ahead and use the now selection so that we send the email message out immediately. So once you've done this right here, all you do is select next, and look at this. This is super, super powerful.
This gives you the power of having professionally written content done for you. As you can see, this email message is completely written, complete with image and links, and the cool thing is, is that these links are already coded to your affiliate ID so you don't even have to do any of this. So you could, at this point, go ahead and click the send button and it would send out this professional email out to the list that you selected. But I'm gonna show you one extra step, just so you know. If you click here where it says go to letter builder, it will go into the area where you can actually edit the message. Now I'm gonna come in here, I'm gonna click this little edit button right up here, and I have the ability now to go in and change anything I want inside the message.
So you can see right here in the from line, it says see you inside, and then it's got some code there. That's gonna automatically insert my first name when the message goes out, but if I wanted to change that and maybe just go ahead and put my full name in there, I could do that very easily. And let's say I'd like to personalize this with my own photo, then what I can do is go down a couple of spaces here and come right over here to where it says images and click that little drop down box and it opens up this feature where I have all these images uploaded into the system. Now if you wanna upload a new image, you can click right here where it says green image upload, and that'll take you to a box where you can go ahead and select an image on your computer and upload it into your Kolatu Cloud system, but I'm just gonna go ahead and select one that I've already uploaded, and I'll just grab a family picture here, and boom, it's in. Now if your image is too big for the message, you can simply double click on the image and it'll open up this screen where you can resize it to wherever you want. So I'm gonna leave it right about there, and if you wanna hyperlink the image to something else like your Facebook profile, you could simply do that right here, and then click insert, and it's that simple.
Now everything else here is done for you, you don't have to change anything, unless you want to, you wanna edit the message, customize it for yourself, you can certainly do that, but if you're short on time and you're trying to get this out, then that's really all you need to do, and I've got a completely done, customized, personalized message going out to my entire list, and I just click this button that says send, and just like that, the email is sent out and being delivered now. So really, really fast, automated process, every day, the daily shortcut, Monday through Friday, the email content, professionally written email copy will already be set up for you inside the system, and it's there and it's generating leads for you as you continue to be consistent with this process. Now let me just show you one more thing to make sure that it's completely clear. I'm gonna click here where it says audience manager, and then right up here I'm gonna go to manage contact lists, because a lot of times people will say, I don't know how to see my lists or how many people I have in my list. This will give you a display of all your lists and how many leads are in there. This daily shortcut lead thing you can see, I just wanted to prove to you that it is in fact generating leads.
This is 16 leads from daily shortcut episodes just from the last day and a half, because usually every day I'll take them from this list and move them into my main list, just so I can kind of keep track of how many are being generated by the daily shortcut. But that just shows you the power of this and how you can use this to generate leads on a regular basis into your business. So I'm gonna jump back now to the steps, and we've completed one through three, and step number four is to post your daily Facebook message. So guess what? You don't have to write it. You just scroll down a little bit here, and you'll see assignment number four, post your daily Facebook message.
So I'm just gonna grab this right here and copy it, and then I'm gonna go to Facebook, and all you need to do is simply paste it in. Now I'm gonna go ahead and take an extra step here and just format this a little bit so that it's not all bunched up. Now sometimes, I'm glad this actually happened, because sometimes Facebook will not pull the image in automatically. So if that's the case, all you need to do is close that, refresh the page, and then paste it in again. And there you go. So now you can see this is how it should look when you paste it into Facebook, is that it pulls the image in, it's got automatically linked using your affiliate ID to that day's daily shortcut, and you've already got the copy in here, which of course you're free to change or update or customize in any way that you'd like.
This can be shared on your own personal wall inside Facebook, or it could be in a Facebook group, or you could share it on a Facebook page, or all of those. So very, very simple. And then all you have to do is click the post button, and boom, it's up there, it's on Facebook. Now back up to the steps. There's a couple of other things here we're gonna run through, and you'll see how simple this stuff is. The next one here, it says, send your daily personal invitation.
Okay, so daily personal invitation would be maybe for somebody brand new, or somebody who wants to send out a personal message to some people that they know that are already their contacts. This could be through text messaging on your phone, it could be through people that are in your Gmail contacts, or your other email system contacts. And what I recommend that you do with that is just draft up a very simple message that says something like, hey, I just watched this video and got tremendous value from it today. I thought you might also be interested in it. By the way, if you like the content and you'd like to get more of them on a regular basis, then just be sure that you opt in towards the bottom of the page, and you'll get them every day. So something like that, simple, and send it out to people, and you'll be surprised how many people that you already know that are interested in this content, and we'll get value from it.
So I'm gonna run you through a couple more things with regard to social media. We're gonna talk about Twitter, LinkedIn, and we'll do Google Plus as well. We'll just throw that in. I wanna show you how fast you can share this content across other social media sites as well. So we've already copied the Facebook post, right? Right down here, the one we just shared in Facebook.
And so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna jump over to Google Plus really fast and show you how fast this stuff works. So I'm gonna paste it in there, and it takes about two seconds, and Google Plus will interpret all of it and pull in the image. I'm gonna hit post, and that's done. And then I'm gonna go to LinkedIn. I'm gonna go share and update. I'm gonna paste that same thing in there.
They pull all the information in. I hit share, and boom, it's done, right? So that's two more social networks that I just shared today's daily shortcut on. Now we're gonna talk about Twitter. Twitter is a little bit different because you have a very limited amount of text that you can put into the actual tweet. So I'm gonna click tweet and bring up this screen, and then I'm gonna come back here to the daily shortcut, and I wanna show you something really cool.
Every day in that day's daily shortcut episode, there will be a link down here towards the bottom that says swipe today's text messages here. If you click that link, that will take you to a page. It will open up, it's actually a document inside of Google, and you can simply come down here just a little bit for that day's episode, and you'll see that there are Twitter and Instagram messages. There's another version of the Facebook message here. There's just additional stuff that's done for you that you can use to share that day's daily shortcut. So I'm gonna go ahead and copy this first tweet that's in this document.
I'm gonna go back to my Twitter account, and I'm gonna paste that in. Now before you share that, you wanna be sure that you replace this little spot here that says link with the actual link to that day's daily shortcut. So I'm gonna come back over here to the daily shortcut episode for the day. I'm gonna copy the full affiliate-coded URL, and then with Twitter, you wanna be sure that you shorten your link, because there's only 140 characters' ability to post anything on Twitter. So what I recommend you do is you take that long link to that day's daily shortcut, and you use a link-shortening service like, this one's Bitly. Bitly is very commonly used.
A lot of people are familiar with it, but you could use any link-shortener that you choose. Most of them are free, Bitly is free. I'm just gonna paste that long link in there, and it's gonna give me a short link for today's daily episode. I'm gonna copy that, and then right there where that spot was, I'm gonna paste that in, and now I have a complete tweet for today's daily shortcut episode. Now, one thing I wanna show you, you could go ahead and click tweet and post it just like this, or if you wanted to, you could add an image, and I'll share with you guys that images or tweets that contain images get noticed a lot more than the ones that don't. So how do you put an image in here?
It's really, really simple. You can find an image from anywhere you like, but one easy and fast place to use it from is from the daily shortcut episode. So each episode, when you scroll down here, there'll be an image that is related to that episode. You can just do a right mouse click and click save image as, and just save it somewhere on your computer. I'm gonna save this one into my downloads folder, and then I'm gonna go back to Twitter, and I'm gonna click on this little add photos button, and I'm gonna click episode 86. That was the image I just saved, and add that to the tweet.
Now I'm gonna click the tweet button, and it's posted. So I can come right down here and see, and there it is, right there. So again, I didn't have to write any of this content. I didn't really even have to think about it. All I did was follow the steps laid out in the daily assignment for that day, and that's it, it's complete. So what you've just learned from John in 22 minutes is how to shortcut the results that you get by using our simple daily shortcut system.
My promise to you is that if you'll just do it every single day, we're gonna go to work really hard as a team in the background to help you get results over and over and over again. Now that you know how to get daily results with our system, it's time to set outcomes together, and outcomes are better than goals. I actually like to think about outcomes as results in the future, and we're gonna help you design your lifestyle in the next video here at Empower Network, and to do that, I want you to meet the most incredible trainer I know, which is actually my brother, William Wood. Now Will isn't just my brother, he's a coach's coach, and has invested over $100,000 in his personal transformational coach education, sitting face-to-face with clients for tens of thousands of hours in training in English and Spanish all around the world. He actually trained psychologists in South America and Peru. If you could imagine how difficult that would be, that's how good he is.
So now that you're ready, I want you to proceed to the next video, and let's set some clear outcomes together, and I want you to pay attention, take notes, and intently focus on what William Wood is gonna teach you now. Proceed to the next video, and I'll see you there.