#85 - You’ve built a following... now what? (Part 2/5)

Again, I would rather you spend the time getting your launch plan right than spend the time creating the product here. It's going to get you a better bang for your buck.

This is the Doing It Online podcast with your host, serial entrepreneur, 6 and 7 figure funnel strategist and super nerd Kate McKibben. Where every week we're here talking, nerdy and sharing the things that actually work to help you do what you do online. But better, easier and with a ton more profit too. Are you ready? Let's do it.

Hello. Hello guys. It is Kate here from HelloFunnels Co and welcome to the Doing It Online podcast. Episode number 85. Today is actually the second part in a little five part miniseries that we're putting together where we are sharing some of our favorite action plans from inside our Ecourse Empire program. For those of you don't know, Ecos Empire is our amazing online mastermind slash coaching hybrid. It's this great little community on the Internet, of course creators and course creators to be who come in wanting to turn their genius, turn their ideas, turn their passions into not just a course that sells kind of here and there, definitely not something that they have to be launching all the time and burning themselves out. They're wanting to create an empire to make a bigger impact, to grow and to scale. And they want to do it in a way that's sustainable and reliable, something that's going to support them and give them that life, that style that they really want, that's going to make sure that it's a business in the end of the day that makes them happy and helps them to have all of the things they dream about. And most of us are not dreaming about being tied to our laptops 24 7. We help people to come up with what the idea for their offer is, how to grow their list and their followings, how to launch it, how to to then automate it, how to scale it, all of that good stuff. And we have people coming and joining our program at all different levels. Last week we shared the action plan for people who are at ground zero, who are starting from scratch. No list, no offer. We have people come through all the way up to already having a six figure programs and they're wanting to, you know, scale it to multiple six and seven figures and beyond, but there's lots of different stages in between. So that's what this series is about is we're sharing these action plans that we have in place for our awesome program members, our amazing A course empirees and we're Sharing them with you as well. Of course, you don't then get all the great support that goes along with it. The the two to three weekly calls where you can jump in and have a hot seat with one of our expert members of our team. Get your sales page audited, get someone to look at your Facebook ads, get some copywriting feedback, help with strategy, help to plan your launch. You don't have access to our amazing templates, to our amazing swipe files for absolutely everything, our trainings that take you through every single piece of the puzzle, but you have a plan. And I think even having a plan is super valuable because there's a lot of different things that you can be doing at any different time, given time in your business, right? And where you get momentum, where you get growth, is when you realize what is the correct thing you should be doing in your business right now. Today, as I said, we're sharing action plan number two. If you didn't listen to last week, and you are a total newbie to the online space, no following. And by no following, I mean, like under a thousand people on your email list, no online offer just yet. Make sure you go back, listen to last week's episode. But today's episode is for another, you know, scenario that we have coming into our program. And that is when someone has actually already got a following. They've built a following, whether it's on social media or on their email list or a combo, but they don't necessarily have anything leveraged or digital or online that they can sell. And they're like, you know what? I can say, I have this asset here. Now what. How do I make the most of it? What is the, you know, the right thing I should be doing here? And there's so many different options. I know why people can get really stuck here. I see people do that actually jump in and do this very badly by trying to sort of emulate something that's at a very different stage of business to them. So that's really why I want to break it down for you today. What we would recommend if this was you. And there's usually two different almost subcategories in this group. There's those who would fall under the, you know, the influencer or content creator kind of bracket. And those are people who are just natural community creators or natural content creators. So they've come onto usually a social media platform or two, and they've just, because they. They love it, you know, created a great following there. Quite often they haven't transferred that following over to an email list. And that's okay. That's kind of step number one for you guys. The other side of the coin is the people who have maybe, you know, maybe they're a service provider or a consultant or they do one on one at the moment. And so, you know, they've been on again, they've been growing their list or they've been on social probably for several years and they've amassed a bit of a following just because they've been doing it for so long. But they may not fall under that. Loves creating content, kind of going viral all the time kind of banner and that's okay too. So they've got a bit of a following. They also, they have an extra little bonus here in that they've, they've sold things before, but usually in a more one to one kind of manner. And they're where they're stuck now is like, I want to grow bigger, but I want to, I want to break out of this hours for dollars kind of model. Like I want to be able to serve more people. I want to be able to step back and work less on the actual physical doing of the business. But you know, I still want to be able to help other people. I still want my business to grow, but the only way to do that with my current model is just to find more hours in the day, work more hours, and I don't want to do that. How can I grow and have other offers that are more sustainable, that are going to be geared more towards that lifestyle that I really want? For you guys, this, this episode is, is just for you. And if you are in this situation, you are. It's such a, like, I know a lot of people look at it as almost like a frustration, but actually you, you are, you've got so many of the puzzle pieces already, you know, miles ahead from someone who's starting from absolute scratch. You should feel really, really good about that. And now it's just a matter of putting a few extra puzzle pieces in to help to really jump you forward. Now, if you didn't listen to last week, I just wanted to reconfirm three things that you guys need because everybody needs these three things when you're going, when you're running an online business. So you need a very basic website. And again, a lot of people can be at this stage and not have it, particularly people who've really built up their platform on someone else's platforms or on social media. You need to have, as I said, it can be a super basic website that just Means that there is a URL that you can start sending people to and all it needs to include is like who you are, what you do, you know, a way for people to contact you, some testimonials if you have them, that would be amazing. Or any other social proof if you've been featured on any big podcasts or blogs or whatever websites or articles or anything like that. And also this is going to have a place for people to opt in to your email list. Super simple website. If you don't have that, doesn't need to be 12 pages, doesn't need to be custom designed, Go get a template, get it set up in a day, do not spend years on this, okay? This is just something you need to get ticked off and it needs to exist, it needs to look professional enough, but you can get a perfectionist on it later. Second thing you need is a very, very valuable option. Opt in again, don't be scared to over deliver here, think of something and also please don't spend a month creating this. A perfectionist dinging all over it. You just need something that your audience that you already have in particular are going to go, oh, that sounds great, that's so generous of you. Yes, I'd love to get on your email list because a lot of people in this category, as I said, they might have a big social following, but they don't necessarily have an email list yet. And you need to get people onto both. It's gonna help to sort of secure up your business and your future and also makes it easier when you come to launch products and stuff because you know, yay, algorithm changes and all of that things. So you want to get people on your email list. So super simple website, a very valuable opt in and an easy to follow content plan. Now you guys, again, you probably already are doing this because you've already built a bit of, I said a bit of a following whether it's on social, whether it's an email list or whether it's a combo. But, but now it's time to get, dial it in, get intentional on it, set your plan and make sure you stick to it. So if you're just doing social media content, you need to start now, sending emails as well to these people who are getting on your email list. Of course you can repurpose what you're doing on social, totally fine. You don't need to go and recreate the wheel here. I don't want you doing extra work for the sake of doing work. But you do need to be communicating with these people on your email list you also need to start and again this is just a highly recommended but not everybody does it. But I would recommend if you are going to all the effort of creating content on another platform like social media or something like that, or like YouTube or TikTok or whatever that you try and find a way to give it a home on your website. Whether it's through blog posts or some other cool some other way that you come up with. But blog post is usually the easiest so that you start to a start building up this, you know, this back catalog of content that you can start linking to directly. You can start pixeling people. When you get up to doing ads your you know it's going to start helping you to rank SEO wise like all of that good stuff. And again if you're already doing it, you may as it's just adding a few extra minutes to make sure it's appearing in multiple places. Those are the foundations. Everyone needs those super simple website, very valuable opt in and a content plan that you're going to stick to that covers blogging. And by blogging I mean it could be embedding podcasts, could be embedding videos, it could be, it could just be writing something, whatever works for you. Social, at least one platform and a regular email schedule. Okay, so we've got all that down. You're doing all those things. Tick, tick. Great. Now we get into the fun stuff. So now I'm gonna walk you through the steps of how you come up with and create your first leveraged offer. So that's an offer by leverage I mean it's something that you're gonna be able to go out there and sell to to whether you sell it to five people or 500, it's not going to be a huge difference for you to be able to then deliver it. Like there's always, you know, extra customer service and stuff that comes in as you grow. But you will be able to if you hit the nail on the head, if you get out there and it's something your audience loves and they all jump in, you make a hundred sales on the first day. It's not then a huge time commitment for you to delete. So this is gonna be something, this is an asset that you are building and there is definitely a set of steps you want to follow while you are building it. So the first thing you need to do is you need to before you do anything is you need to stop and you need to get intentional. Now this is a process that we make our ecourse Empire members go through, no matter what phase they are in, but when, as soon as they join and then we get them to check back in on it. But this is so, so important is you need to stop and you need to think about what it is you really want, where it is you want your business to help you be like you personally as a human is in like 3 years, 5 years, 10 years time. What does that look like? How much are you working? What kind of work are you doing? And again, like, this is something that's going to change, refine over time, but that's fine. But you need to have a pretty good indicator of the things you do like doing and you don't like doing. And, you know, if you're planning on, you know, three, five years from now starting a family, you want to be able to have, you know, set up a business that's going to allow you to have the flexibility to do that, or you want to be able to travel all the time, or you only want to work, you know, three months out of the year, or whatever it is. This is your business, you get to design it. So this is, you have to stop and figure out what you want and then take it that next step further. And we call these, you're coming up with your deal breakers, but figure out, like, what does not work for you, what could you not have? And then you're going to, this is going to all inform the decisions that you make going forward about the business that you create and the offers that you create and how you offer them and how you launch them and how you deliver them, all that stuff. So you need to stop and do this now. I think a lot of people, what they're really tempted to do when they're in this situation, which I said, it's just such a fortunate situation. You've got an audience, possibly an audience is even saying, hey, we want something from you, which is amazing. But a lot of people fall into that trap of going, well, my audience wants this, so that's what I'll do. And it might not be what you want. And I know I did that with my second business is I had a lot of people asking me to create a training for them on a specific topic. So I did. But the problem was, and it was a great training and people got great results from it, but it wasn't a topic that I was really passionate about. It was a topic I got bored of pretty quickly, to be honest. And I was like, I can't talk about this every day for the next 510 years, no way. And it became almost like this golden handcuff where I was like, okay, well this thing makes me money, so I'll just keep doing it, I guess. But it was making me miserable as well. And at the end of the day, I had to end up shutting that all down, starting from scratch again. And Hindsight's great. It's 2020, right? Not the year hindsight is 2020. But I'm sharing these lessons with you to hopefully help you to avoid some mistakes that I made, because that means you're just going to get to where you want to be all that much faster. So step number one is stop, get intentional, think about what you want and what you don't want, and just know, you know, as I said, it can doesn't have to be perfect, it will get refined over time. But just start to list these things out because it's going to help you to make some better decisions. The next thing you need to do is listen to your people and listen to the things, you know, take notice of what they react to, what that gets them excited, what things get really, you know, get a lot of engagement, what things don't, what kind of questions you get asked regularly, what kind of things, like, do people, you know, get really super excited about, or we have reading through comments and things is, you know, what kind of discussions. And you have people going, yeah, me too, or that's so me. All that kind of stuff. You can even do a survey at this point because you have an audience, which is amazing. But you need to just take that time as it get to know your clients almost better than they know themselves. So it's not about just saying, okay, my clients want this. This is, you know, my followers have asked for this. This is what I'm going to give them. Because not it's not necessarily going to be the best product. There may be something there that they don't even realize that they want yet. But you'll be able to see it from doing a bit of investigation, doing a bit of pretending you're Sherlock Holmes kind of thing going in, getting a bit stalky, a little bit single white female, and finding out everything you possibly can about these people, about all your lovely followers. Listen to them, study them, get to know them, start writing down. I love to take screenshots or to even copy paste. When someone said anytime, they say, oh, I'm so sick of this, or yes, that's so me. Oh, brainwave or aha moment or anything. When you get that, any of that, that stuff's Gold. Save it somewhere. Okay, so then the next now you should start to have a bit of an idea around what it is you could offer. So I have a bonus step in here that not everybody needs to do and particularly for those people who have, you know, maybe you've offered coaching or something one on one before so you're pretty comfortable with what's involved in actually setting up and selling a product online. This is more for people who you maybe just need a little bit of a confidence builder. There's a lot of moving pieces, a lot of kind of. It's a pretty big learning curve. When you first sell your very first thing online and you don't necessarily want to do that when it's also got the stress of a big launch and creating a big product and a big program or like a 12 week online course behind it. You can do almost like the little toe dip here where you think of something and this is not going to be your forever product. It could end up being something you add as a bonus or whatever later. But this is just the little toe dip product where it's something that's going to be really easy to create and sell and but you know that means the setup and everything's going to be really nice and easy and it just allows you to first of all allows you to start learning these systems, get the systems in place, see how it works. But it also because something that's been really, really easy to sell, it's just going to get you a few wins on the board, help you to get a bit of confidence and that's going to be really, really useful when you go into selling what becomes then your main offer or your signature offer later on. So some examples of what would be a little toe dip product would be maybe a paid workshop. So maybe you put together like a two, a one hour, two hour, three hour, whatever is going to make sense. You know, something really, really valuable training that's going to be run online but live and people can buy tickets to it. Or maybe you're going to do a mixer for your client. You know, again if you've been listening to them, you'll kind of get a feel for what it is that they want. But something that's easy for you to create that's going to be just a no brainer price like make it $10, whatever is going to be. You think that people are just going to say hell's yeah like without even thinking about it. This is just something to said dip the toe, give you a bit of practice get you a bit of confidence and then you can move on to the main offer. So that's an optional step. Another option or another type of offer you can do here is if you haven't done it before. So this one is definitely more something that I would recommend to people who have never done any kind of one on one work. So maybe you are a content creator or you are under that bracket, so you haven't done spent really a lot of time outside of the DMs and the comment threads actually chatting and engaging with your audience yet offering some kind of one on one something as this little toe dip product can be literally the best market research you'll ever do. So maybe it's you going to do, you know, take 10 people and spend an hour each with them and help them map out a social media plan or something like that, like and again price it so that it's a crazy easy no brainer. So you get to all your wins here in that you get the practice, you get the confidence, but the extra bonus win is that you get a chance to actually one on one engage with your potential clients. And going for potential ideal clients for your next product, you get to hear their feedback, you get to hear their struggles, all that stuff, it's just golden. So again, optional but recommended particularly if you've never done any like actual face to face interacting work with your target market. Okay, so now you may or may not have done a toe dip product. Now it's on to step number four. Well, piece of advice number four really. And that is that when you are creating your offer, whatever it is, is I really, really recommend. And again, our content creators may just use naturally, but anyone who's been creating amazing value and sharing stuff online for free for a long time, you sometimes can get a little bit of pushback from some of your followers because they've sort of been trained that you give away everything for free. So the second that you all of a sudden decide, hey, actually I'm going to create something, it's even more valuable and I'm going to charge for it. Some of them get pissed off and to be honest, that annoys me and I'd almost go through and just unfollow and block all those people because how dare they. Like you are allowed to charge for what you are worth and you've been giving away so much for free for so long, but no one wants that, right? You know, you want people to be excited and come along with you. So that is step number four is that as you are creating your offer, whatever that is, you want to make sure you are bringing everyone, all your existing followers and everyone on your list along for the ride. Sharing behind the scenes snippets, telling them like, hey guys, I've got this great idea. I'm so excited about it, I can't wait to share it with you. Here's a little sneak peek. Getting, you know, getting them to vote on what it should be called, putting up potential names as polls and seeing what they say, all that stuff and share how excited you are. And this is the key to create something even more special for them that's going to help them even more. Because if you make sure that they know that this is for them as much as it's for you, that you know this is not just you getting greedy, quote unquote, like insert all the money blocks and all of this, you know, all the negative imposter syndrome talk you want here help to frame it for them as something is that's extra special and new for them that you are doing something for them and it makes it a much more pain free experience. All right now step number five. And this is again, it's really important. We talked about this actually last week, but this is one of our mottos here at hello Funnels and that is that we always test before we invest. So what that means in this scenario is when it comes to your signature offer, whatever it is you're gonna create, whether it is a membership site or a, you know, online program or a coaching program or a mastermind or a hybrid or something else you come up with completely before you go and spend the weeks and weeks and weeks creating it because it is a big job. We've just come off the back of creating our Funnel Pro program which is a certification program. So that's like next level again. And I'm very happy to say that I'm not creating any new programs this year. I'm already banning myself and I'm done. But it takes like that's a lot of investment of your time, of your resources. So you want to make sure that you're investing it into something that actually is going to pay you back. So we always, always pre sell an offer before we create it. So normally, you know what that looks like is you know, you'll create your welcome content or your pre work or something like that, or even just a little welcome video and a welcome email and you don't even need to do the full all singing all dancing sales page. Like we share inside a course empire or we Call our quick and dirty sales page formula. And it sort of takes you through how to create something that you can do in a couple of hours and it will convert still really well. You also need to obviously have a quick and dirty launch plan. So again, this is a something I see happen and really be a big stumbling block for people who've never launched anything before is I think, oh well, I'll just send an email and say, hey, I've got this thing, do you want to buy it? And then they get, people get really disappointed when the sales don't just come flooding in. For some people, they do. Some people, the unicorns and their people will literally, you could take some poop, roll it in glitter and people would buy it. Most people don't fall into that category. And so you need to have a proper launch plan. And it's a different launch plan for a brand new offer. It is a different launch plan to what you would do for an offer that you've launched multiple times before. So it's really important that you. Again, I would rather you spend the time getting your launch plan right than spend the time creating the product here. It's going to get you a better bang for your buck. And of course this is like Inside Equals Empire. We have launch plans for all the different types of launches. For a beta launch, for a second launch, for a webinar launch, for a challenge launch, all of that kind of stuff. We have it all broken down with calendars and what you need and swipe files and all of it. But it is really, really important. So that's the, that's my advice like that this is the steps I would follow. Guys, if you are one of these lucky people who are in this situation where you've got an audience and now you're ready to create something for them. So as I said, first of all, get intentional. Make sure you're planning and designing a business you actually want. Number two is you need to stop and stalk your people just a little. Three, you've got the option of adding in a toe dip product just to test the waters, just to get some runs on the board and make sure you know how it all works. Then bring everyone along for the ride. Make sure you share your excitement, make sure you frame it as being something that is for them and then finally test before you invest. And then bonus one is make sure you have a proper launch plan, a proper beta launch plan. So I hope that you, I hope you've got that, that framework. If you follow that framework, guys, it's going to help you to move from this phase. Obviously by the end of this framework you will have an offer and it's out there and hopefully when you test it, it goes well. If not tweak it, come up with, you know, try something else, test it again. Basically that's the, that's how you move through to the next phase where you have an offer that sells and now you're like, okay, now how would I sell more of it? Right? So that's, that's our next action plan and that's what I can't wait to share with you guys next week. Now of course, if you've been listening to this and you're nodding along and you're like, yes, this is me, yes, I need to follow this plan and oh my gosh, I would love some help to do it. That is what ecosys Empire is designed for. Guys, as I said, you get not just a step by step trainings for every single piece of this action plan, plus so many more. You also get templates for and swipe files for everything from emails to sales pages to your actual funnel setups. Once you get up to that part of things, launch plans, launch calendars, because there's so much stuff in there. We have canva templates for when you're sharing stuff on social media. We have content plans like it's everything and we set it up and drip it out in a way that you only get, you get what you need and it's not so overwhelming. Like that's really one of our sort of key things that we think is super important. And then on top of that is the amazing support. So as myself, there's our amazing team of mentors. You've got Facebook ads experts, copywriters, designers, social media experts, tech experts, mindset experts. All in that we do two to three calls a week and they're hot seat styles you can jump on, bring your questions, we can, you know, one to one chat or you can submit things if you can't make it to it live. Plus an amazing community. It's just a great place to be. So that currently the applications are open. We have a few spots left if you would like one. All you need to do is head to eCourse Empire.com or just head over to HelloFunnels Co click on Programs and you'll see it right there. Links are also below. This episode of course. Fill out the application, we can't wait to read it and hopefully we'll see you inside ecosysempire really soon. Until then, guys. Make sure you come back next week where we're diving to action plan number three. And keep doing what you do guys, and we'll see you all online. Bye.

Thanks so much for listening to the Doing It Online podcast. If you love this episode, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. And if you're ready to take your online course sales to the next level with your own six or seven figure funnel, let Kate show you exactly how today@Stealmyfunnel.com.