The #1 Underused Tactic For Making Money Online

It's a new year, and my question for you is, do you have a plan for this new year to sell more products in your business? Seems like a silly question, but you would be surprised at how many people don't have a plan. They just kind of randomly and sporadically make offers throughout the year without a clear-cut plan. Or worse, they make no offers at all, which results in zero money. And then they complain, say, why am I not making any more money? It's because they haven't actually made any offers to their email list or just their audience in general. If you want to make as much money as you can this year, you need to create a product launch plan or a promotional calendar of some sorts, which is what today is all about. When you do this, you're going to know what products to sell and offer throughout the year and when, which is going to take a huge weight off your shoulders because you don't need to randomly game plan things. It's all planned out. This doesn't take very long and I'm going to walk you through it all. But also you're going to be able to tailor your content for when that new product is coming up and it's going to give your, your business a nice flow and feel for the year. And it's really just going to take a huge weight off your shoulders. That, and then on top of that, you're also going to move more product and make more sales, which is huge. Because when you make more offers to people, more people are actually going to buy. That's kind of the psychology behind it. It's pretty simple, but so many people don't do this. And we're going to dive into all this throughout today's episode. Today, what we're going to specifically cover is how often to email or how often to sell to your email list. We'll also go over what products to offer them, and I'll give you plenty of ideas for this. Even if you don't have a lot of products or any products right now, we can still come up with a couple options for you. And at the end, we're going to go over how to plan out your promotional calendar, and I'll show you just how simple this is. But truly, it is the number one underused tactic for selling more products is just creating a promotional calendar and having a plan so that you can win this new year. Let's dive in. Welcome to episode number 25 of the Profit Your Knowledge podcast. I'm your host, James Allen, here to help you turn your knowledge, passions, and skills into an online business so that you can be your own boss, make a difference in this world, and ultimately live a life of freedom. Today is going to be a fun episode. It is perfect timing to talk about this because it is a new year. And by the way, Happy New Year. Curious if you have New Year's resolutions. If you do that, if you don't, I don't blame you. I don't either. I just come up with some goals for the year. I'm super pumped for 2023 personally because my girlfriend and I are moving into a bigger place, which is going to be super cool. I'll be putting out a bunch of content on the YouTube channel so you can see the place and get more of a behind the scenes of my life. It's kind of part of my personal plan. I guess it's a resolution for 2023, but there's going to be a lot of cool stuff coming out in 2023. I'm thinking about doing some other interviews with some really cool coaches and people that I have met throughout the years. And, uh, getting some really high-caliber people here to deliver you high-quality content. But today, let's stop talking about me. We're going to dive in to focus on you. Uh, before we get into the content, I do want to say, if you're new, welcome, happy New Year. And if you are in a position where you either are working a job and you want to just kind of get the ball rolling, you're looking at other options, you want to start an online business of some kind, teaching things online specifically, if that resonates with you, you see yourself creating YouTube videos or podcasts or blogging and then being able to create passive income or work with people one-on-one, then I have a great resource for you. It's a 5-step action plan that's going to walk you through exactly how to do that, how to create passive income, how to build an audience, how to find the perfect business or product idea. And it's all compacted into a short PDF. I have a couple of videos inside that give you a little bit more of a deep dive. As well. But basically what this guide is going to do is walk you through how to build a knowledge business through giving, by generosity, which is what I'm doing right now. I dive deep into these episodes and it's the things that I have learned over the years of falling on my face, hiring crappy coaches and hiring some great ones, learning from the best in the industry, in my opinion, and adopting those things. And now I get to teach other people those as well because they've worked in my life to build a business through giving. I'll walk you through the best type of products that you can build and how much to sell them for. And at the end of it, I'm going to show you how to automate the entire process, whether you're selling digital products like online courses or ebooks and things like that, or even if you're selling high-ticket coaching as well. So you can work with people one-on-one. The cool thing about this guide is that it works even if you don't know what your business or product idea is right now. I'll give you some noodles, give you some ideas to help get the wheels turning in your mind so you can come up with that product. Or business idea and really nail it. To get the guide, just go to ProfitYourKnowledge.com/guide. There's also a link in the description. It's my gift to you. It is free and it's actionable. You can literally use this guide to sell your first $100, $500, or even $1,000 or more in passive income, creating automations inside of your business. And it's really simple. It's not crazy funnel hacking. So ProfitYourKnowledge.com/guide. Link in the description. Let's dive into the number 1 underused tactic for selling more products, which is just to have a promotional calendar. Before we get into like these 3 little steps that I have laid out for you, I want you to think about big companies like Apple, for example, or Honda, Chevrolet, and other just big companies. It's just like there's a lot of car companies, but it's true. Any big company has a plan for at least 1 year of what they're going to sell and really promote when they're going to do it. Why? Because it's a business. And if you are a business owner, you sell digital products like online courses and ebooks and workshops and webinars or retreats or coaching. You have a business, you're trying to sell products and people want to sell products, but they don't actually do it because they're afraid of selling. And part of it too is just the lack of clarity on how much to sell to your list, how much you should be making offers, what to actually offer people, how to go about it. A lot of it is just the lack of knowledge in that department. And a lot of it too is just the lack of confidence in that department. Because when you think about sales, it's, it's sleazy. It seems like salespeople are like the car dealership salespeople who are just like, want to separate you from your money and put you in a worse off position. Than you were before you had interacted or met with them. And we just don't want to be that person, especially if we have interacted and been the victim of other people who've done that. Because unfortunately, there are people out there who do just want to separate you from your money, and they don't care about you being better off after paying them, unfortunately. So this is a topic for another day, but I'm just kind of touching on it because I want you to think about this. Big companies still put a promotional calendar out there, and if you want to make money, you have to make more offers. Selling, to simplify it, is no more than you just offering something to someone. And if you've done really good customer research and you found what people actually care about and what they do want for your specific audience or niche, and you give them the solution to that, you say, here's the solution. I did all this heavy lifting. To give you the most clear-cut, streamlined solution. And now I'm giving it to you. I just asked for some money for the work that I put in to make this happen. I don't think that's a bad thing by any means, but it does take work. If you want to learn more, there's plenty of content on my podcast, blog, YouTube channel where I talk about building good products, the difference in free paid content, building your email list, all that kind of stuff. When it comes to stuff we're talking about today, I am specifically referring to having an email list. Making sales to your email list. This isn't really geared towards social media because I am a firm believer that email marketing is a much stronger channel for selling. Social media is great for building relationships and so is email marketing. But when it comes to actually selling, more people are likely to buy via email. So I'm assuming that you already have a little bit of an email list building. Again, there's plenty of content on my channels for you to learn how to build your email list. But that's kind of what I'm assuming you have right now. So the big question is, if you have an email list and you've been giving them free content, let's say you put out one YouTube video or podcast or piece of content out every single week, and then you email it over to your list. That's kind of your rhythm right now. Maybe you do an extra email, but you're not really selling much. You're barely selling at all. How often should we actually sell to our list? How often should you sell to your list? And what I would recommend you to do I would say at least quarterly. So if you think about the year, that would be March, June, September, and December. December, think about Black Friday. Okay. But in March, June, September, and December, you should at least be making some sort of offer and we'll get into what you can offer in just a moment. So at least quarterly, every 3 months you make 1 offer, 3 to 1, I would say. That's the minimum. The maximum I'd recommend is no more than once per month, one time per month that you make a sale or have a promotion of some kind. And when I say a promotion, I'm referring to not just like one email, but like 3 to 5 days in a row where you are strongly promoting a product. It's like one week, you know, kind of like a product launch, but you're relaunching products or you can be launching an entirely new product as well. Again, we're going to get into that just a second. But no more than once per month. I think that's— to me, that's the sweet spot. You like, think about that 3 to 1. Every 3 weeks you do one offer. That would be if you did it once per month. So you do 12 offers throughout the entire year. I like quarterly. It depends on what you're selling, what you're offering, what your relationship with your email list is like. So you kind of have to decide that. But at least quarterly, no more than once per month. Now, what products should we actually sell to our email list? What should we promote? What should we give people? Well, I'd recommend you to create a product suite, and I'm going to create an episode about this where I dive deeper into building a product suite for yourself. So keep an eye out for that. But basically, in terms of teaching things online, like coaches is primarily who I work with, we can build courses, digital products like ebooks, courses, masterclasses, those kind of things. You can also have book promotions if you wrote a book for yourself or for your audience. You know, that's a great option. Coaching, one-on-one coaching or group coaching. A mastermind is a great option. Or if you create a membership site as well, these are all things that you can eventually develop into your product suite. I wouldn't just say go blowing up creating a huge product suite right away. Focus on one thing at a time, get it selling, and then focus on other parts of your product suite that you can dive into. There's exceptions to that rule. Obviously, one-on-one coaching, you can start from day one. That just requires you and your time finding clients, booking clients, coaching clients, well, enrolling them obviously too. And then there's that. But then you can also be building some courses. May take you a while to build courses to where they actually do sell because it takes practice and it's an art form really, but it really pays off. Let me tell you what, when you can create good online courses that can sell for you automatically, that's inside the 5-step guide, by the way. These are all products that you can sell to your email list when those promotions come around, whether it's quarterly or once per month. So what you can do is, you know, let's say like, let's say that you're just starting out, you're, you're building an email list, like you have created content, you're being creating content, and then you're offering your lead magnet, which gets people onto your email list. You're doing all that. So you're getting people on your email list, but you don't have any courses yet. You don't have a mastermind. You don't have enough traffic or enough of an audience to have a full-fledged group coaching program or mastermind, all you really have at your disposal is one-on-one coaching. What you can do is just offer your one-on-one coaching, offer coaching calls, because that gets people onto your list. But you're making the offer and you're saying, here's what you're going to get when you do this coaching call with me. And that gives you an opportunity to enroll someone into a higher ticket coaching program with you. Okay? So you can do one promotion of just your one-on-one coaching, which requires no digital products whatsoever. It's not the most scalable, but it gets you going. You can do that once a quarter or you can do it once per month. But if you do too much, like every email comes out, you're just doing hard sells, you're going to burn out your list. You're going to make them kind of just like stop opening your emails or they're going to want to unsubscribe from you because you obviously just care about selling. You don't really care about them as much, even though selling is a way of serving. It is the best way to actually serve people. But they also want to see that you're an expert through your free content without ever promoting anything to them because it's a relationship. Okay. So we can get a little more sophisticated with these different products that you can sell, but let's talk about how do you actually create a promotional calendar. To create a promotional calendar, we just need to decide for you right now what products you're going to offer. And when you're going to offer those products to people. For example, in my business right now, I have 4 different products that I offer people. I have a course that is all about performance and productivity. It's called Peak Focus Academy. I'm also creating a new course right now called Effortless Income, and that's going to be all the stuff that I teach about online business put together. I have— I mean, the course is done. I'm just working on copywriting right now for the the sales letter and the emails and email funnel and that kind of stuff to make it automated like I teach. I have a couple people inside of the course right now doing a beta test, but it's going to be really cool. So two courses right there. I also have another course, which is an affiliate program. It's the only affiliate product that I do. It's Kajabi, which is the tool I use to run my business. And I created a course that helps people get the most out of Kajabi when they sign up. They get a 30-day free trial, whole cool package. So that's another product that I can offer. And then I have my one-on-one coaching. So right there are 4 different products that I can offer people throughout the year. And if— I mean, what I do is do it quarterly, so I'll be able to offer each one of these products throughout the entire year. Maybe Black Friday, do like a bundle pack of some sort. Those are different ideas too. If you have multiple different courses, you can bundle them together and sell them for the price of one. And people get a bundle for Black Friday. Really cool option, especially if you have digital products, because it's digital, it's super, super easy. You can even include some one-on-one coaching at a higher price tier as well. But when you decide on what products you're going to offer people and when, map it out on your calendar. That's all you really need to do. Put it on your calendar, block out a week and say this week In March, I'm going to promote my coaching. I'm going to write some emails, promote my coaching and say, this is what you're going to get. Here's all the cool stuff. Here's some case studies, people I've worked with, testimonials, frequently asked questions. All that stuff is entailed inside of that launch week. I'll create a video too, or a piece of content where I talk about planning out a solid launch week. So you have that resource as well. That'll be in the coming weeks. But really, you just need to decide on what products you're going to offer. If it's just that you're just starting out, you just have one-on-one coaching, offer your one-on-one coaching a couple of times throughout the year, but decide on what it is and actually map it out on your calendar. I'd recommend using a digital calendar like Google Calendar. That's what I use because you can add reminders too. So, you know, when it's coming up, send it out 2 weeks out to remind you, oh yeah, this product launch is coming. So that I can start to curate my content and relate it to whatever product I'm going to be promoting. For example, if I'm going to be promoting my performance and productivity course, then I will create some content about performance and productivity 2 weeks out. See what I mean? And then it transitions, transitions nicely into me actually offering the product, performance and productivity, because it gets people familiar. With that topic. So map it out on your calendar. And the biggest tip is just stick with it. Okay. So my biggest question— I mean, if you don't stick with it, you don't make the offers, you don't make the money. That's really just how it works. The biggest thing, though, is that you just decide on what product or products you're going to sell throughout the year, how often you're going to do it. Are you going to do it quarterly? Are you going to do it every single month? It depends on where you're at in your business. If you have a lot of products, you can do it every single month and have a new product. Every single month, be promoted. That's fine. It's really up to you to decide what's right for you and your list, what makes sense for you. I'd say if you're doing one-on-one coaching and that's all you really need to do, you could do monthly. You could do every two, every two months too. It's up to you. Okay. But at least quarterly, no more than every single month, make some offers to people and really like do a legitimate promotion and promote to your list. Just put it on your calendar. You could do a paper calendar too, or, um, like a whiteboard as well and just kind of write it all out. As long as you have the plan, that's what really matters. It's, it's so underused because so, so many people don't do this. And I wish that I did this sooner when I first started my online business. But make the plan, map it out, stick with it. If you're on a digital calendar, add reminders. That's the biggest thing. Okay. And that's really all there is. That is the underused tactic to help you sell more products is just having a plan and sticking with it and actually making the offers. If you're not making offers, you know, damn, I could be making a lot more offers. Okay. And this is really going to help you. So again, if you want to get started with your online business, maybe you haven't even started building an email list yet, uh, pick up the 5-step guide. It's going to walk you through the entire system. It's actually going to walk you through exactly how to build your email list. But also the different types of products that you can use. So it's really going to couple well with today's piece of content. It's my gift to you. It's free. It's an action plan. It is actionable. Links to different videos inside. It's going to be a great resource for you to help you grow your online business, or at least just start it. That's the biggest thing. To get the guide, just go to profityourknowledge.com/guide, or again, there's a link in the description. And if you are open to it, let me know down in the comments. I'd love to hear from you. If you are on YouTube right now or if you're on the podcast, leave a review. Let me know when you are going to or what products you're going to sell and when you're going to sell them. Tell me that throughout the year. Or you could even just give me, give me a, I'm going to do this, I'm going to make the plan. But better yet, scratch that. Just give me at least one product or a couple of different products and what your plan is. Let me know down in a comment below. I'd love to hear from you. Love to see it down below in the comments. That's all I got for you. I hope you have a very productive year, very productive month and week as well. I hope it was a fun holiday. It's time to get into the grind, even though it's not really a grind. I'm not really big on grinding, but get back to work and make it be meaningful. Have fun with it and really start making some more money inside of your business. Hope you got value from today's lesson. Thanks for sticking around. I will see