Episode 18: 5 invaluable strategies to get paid to grow your leads & email list

Transcript

Now, the problem, as it stands, of course, is that building your leads, building your email list, can be very expensive when we do it the more traditional way. So, one of the major ways that online business owners build their email list, and increase their leads into their business is through ads. Now, this is expensive, and it can also be very, very complicated. Ads is never something that I would recommend to new business owners, but all of these five methods absolutely, definitely could be applicable for new business owners.

So I think, Facebook ads, meta ads, they make it very easy for us to get going and to start spending money. They don’t necessarily make it easy for us to do this effectively, and, to do it cost efficiently. And of course, when we’re advertising for email addresses, we’re interrupting people who are otherwise scrolling on social media, and we don’t necessarily gain somebody’s trust right off the bat. It takes time. It takes emails for that person to get to know us, to like us, to trust us, if they’re paying attention to our emails at all.

Number two is networking. I had a very strange conversation just the other night with a woman who was quite an introvert. it was kind of obvious that she wasn’t very comfortable at this networking event. And she said something to me like, I said something like, I’m not really a fan of networking. I’m sure I sounded awkward at the time as well. And she said, well, how do you get new clients if you don’t do networking? And I’m like, well, that’s really weird. I said through marketing. And the strange thing is that this woman was marketing. I know she’s marketing because I see her marketing.

So, networking can be great fun sometimes. Absolutely, it can be awesome. And I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t go to events that look interesting to us, but certainly there is more than one way of gating leads and new clients into our business. And it can be a lot of, wasted time. It can be tedious, it can be angsty. Even if you’re an extrovert like I am, even if you enjoy meeting new people, which I do, there’s a lot of hit and miss, right? There’s a lot of kind of spending your precious time with people where you’re like, you’re not my person. And then the third thing is social media marketing.

Now, this can be really time consuming. It’s awesome if you’ve kind of got it nailed. But what I see a lot of, what I see a lot of is that business owners spend a hell of a lot of time and effort and creativity and thinking, posting to social media, or thinking to post to social media. And it’s very, very time consuming and can be notoriously slow. It really is a nurture marketing strategy. a great nurture marketing strategy. Not so much an attract marketing strategy. Not so brilliant for growing quickly and for getting those leads in through your door.

So the three key things that I’m going to focus on today are, firstly, I’m going to walk you through five key methods to get paid to raise your visibility and grow your email list. Secondly, to understand what other people find fascinating about you. And thirdly, to being memorable. Now, the last two bits, I’m going to kind of give you the top level advice because they are huge topics. We are primarily focusing on those five key methods. But I’m going to give you the top tips that I’ve got for fascination, and being memorable. But before I share these five methods, I want to, acknowledge that it’s not going to be a five out of five for everyone. And that’s completely okay. I do not expect and I do not recommend that you go and implement all five of these methods. Instead, what we’re going to do is we’re going to look at these through the lens of our communication strengths. We’re going to look at these through the lens of, what do we have capacity for? What are we interested in? Where do we have that natural ability to really make headway with this particular method? So, without further ado, let’s kick off.

15 years ago or thereabouts, when I started my business, I think it was probably, a few years into it. So roughly 1112 years ago, I met somebody. I met that person at a yoga class. They were the yoga teacher, I was the yoga student. And, I introduced myself to the person. I gave my elevator pitch, so to speak, and he immediately said, would you like to be a trainer on my yoga, teacher training? Would you like to teach people how to do digital marketing and how to build a business off the bat and build their professional reputation as a soloist? And I said yes, of course. Never done it before. but this was one of the major methods that I used to grow my business. And what happened is that people came back. So I would be paid to teach and train on other people’s courses. And that was just the first client. I ended up doing a load of different, courses, and still do to an extent, to a small extent.

Today I’m a teacher and trainer on other people’s courses, and I develop training on behalf of training institutes. so you get paid off the bat. You’re practicing, your methodology. You’re practicing your processes. You’re practicing your densely branded language. More on that later. You’re practicing having an opinion and sharing your ideas in a memorable, fascinating, interesting way, because boring should be a crime, right? And people will come back. Yeah.

So to do this well, you will need a niche. And if you don’t really feel like you’ve nailed your niche, which it takes a lot of trial and error, I think. I think we don’t talk about that nearly enough in business. There is a lot of trial and error in finding our niche. But you need to have a different take on the same thing if you’re going to be memorable, if you’re going to make an impact, if these people are going to come back to you, and they might not come back straight away, but some of them will be immediately ready to buy the next thing from you. And some people in the audience, some participants will come back years and years later. ideally, you have an interest in teaching or experience teaching. Yeah.

You don’t have to have qualifications in teaching to be good at it. but you do have to have an interest in teaching. It’s not like standing on stage, because when you’re standing on stage, you tend to have less interaction with your audience. When you’re teaching or training, you’re going to have lots of questions. You’re going to have, hopefully, lots of interaction from people. And not everybody likes that. Yeah. It’s also good if you know the art, of the humble brag.

Now, the art of the humble brag is what you’ve heard me do. just in the prior slide, I weaved in that I had relevant experience in this. I weaved in my expertise, my experience. I made mention of how many years ago it was, how many years of experience I’ve had. I didn’t start the sentence. I didn’t start by saying, I’m an expert in this and I’m very good at this. I didn’t say that I weaved it in as it was relevant. And this is a much more effective, more natural way of helping people to understand that you have expertise, that you have experience, that you’re good at what you do. You don’t want to say, hey, I’m, the best at this, I’m great at this, because that’s a quick and easy way to lose credibility. Right. And it sounds all kinds of clunky coming out of your mouth. Ideally, it’s also really useful if the audience have paid and you can deliver your teaching or your training live.

So I’ve done all kinds of different things at conferences where I’ve been in kind of side rooms with smaller groups. I’ve been up on the stage. I’ve done training that’s lasted anywhere from m one, hour to all day or two days. Ideally, there is a big difference when the audience are paid to be there and when they’re just turning up because it’s a free thing. Yeah. So that is kind of a nice to have, I guess.

So. Method two. Now, we’ve seen quite a bit of this in the last two or so years, two to three years. I’ve used it to great effect, and it can be a really quick and easy way of validating ideas. Validating your ideas for a larger course or a larger program that you’re wanting to develop. Yeah. So in the process, you are, making money because you’re charging, of course, you’re building your email list. you’re raising your reach and visibility. And I’ve run paid live workshops.

I’ve run quite a few different paid live workshops at the $97 price point and have immediately had 5000, 6000, $10,000 worth of business off the back end of that. Not because I had some amazing offer and I was super organised, because I wasn’t, but just because I gave my people I gave people an experience of my training. I gave people an experience, my approach, my opinions, my personality, and they went on to buy different things from me. So, for this to work, you need a clearly defined problem with a defined solution. You are not doing the whole kit and caboodle. You are not creating the PhD on the topic. If this is to work well, not just for you, but also for your audience, so that people look at it and they go, oh, yeah, that looks great. It needs to be defined what the problem is that you’re going to solve for people. And if we’re talking about an hours master class or two hour master class, you can’t solve all their problems. Right. It’s impossible for you to kind of solve everybody’s problem in one to 2 hours. So it really needs to be clearly defined and it needs to have parameters.

Ideally, you’ve got an interesting angle and a memorable name. And, I’ve made this mistake many, many times over the years. And then I’ve corrected myself. I’ve sold the same thing when I’ve changed the name. And it’s been a hell of a lot more, popular as a result. Hell of a lot more successful. It’s also really good. Again, if you know the art, of the humble brag, you’re going to hear me say that a lot. number two, you want to pick a price which is not too cheap and not too expensive. So, of course, what we’re trying to do with pricing is we’re trying to ensure that the price and the value make sense. And sometimes we get this wrong the other way around. Right. We try and sell something where the perceived value is really high, but we’re selling for $29. Or we’re trying to yeah. So the price point that I see work in my business, in my clients businesses, and what my colleagues have told me that they’ve seen work in their businesses as well, is somewhere between 59 and 299, depending on what that clearly defined problem is. Yeah.

Okay, method number three, we’re going to write or produce someone else’s marketing in a relevant niche so you can interview experts. Again, this one is not for everyone. This one is especially useful for those who have a communications background or a marketing background. I came into digital marketing from public relations, so I was very used to writing. I was very used to interviewing people. And when I first started my business 15 years ago, this is one of the major methods that I used to grow my audience, to build my professional reputation, and to help get leads in through my door while being paid at the same time.

So, a little trip down memory lane. 15 years ago, I had a digital marketing agency. I had a small handful of clients who I looked after month in, month out with website content. So I, was writing articles. They weren’t called blogs back then. I called them articles. and I’d write a handful of articles for one client, handful of articles for another, and so on. And what I did then is I thought, okay, so who are the experts in this particular sector? Who are the experts in the niche in the sector that my clients are in? And then I would reach out to them, introduce myself, ask, to interview them, and write up the interview as an article on my client’s website. So it was a win win situation. Yeah, I got paid, I got marketing content. I didn’t need to do all the research as thoroughly as I otherwise would, because I had an expert or three to interview. the expert got to meet me. They got to see what I did. I gave them publicity. In effect, I did them a favour right off the bat. so nobody lost, really. Yeah, there was no downside to any of this. And of course, the client got, some fabulous experts featured on their website. So that was good as well, for search engine optimisation.

So, of course, for this to work, you need marketing skills, you need interviewing skills. Interviewing skills really are half of the game, I think, is being good at listening and being interested in other people. And not everybody is right. It’s also good if you can follow up and cultivate relationships beyond the first meeting. So there’s not a huge, amount to be gained if it’s just like a one off event, and then you never kind of speak to the expert again. Ideally, you’re good at cultivating this relationship and keeping in touch with that person. And perhaps, maybe in future, we’re relevant pitching to them. Or maybe they’ll ask you without you needing to pitch. and of course, your client needs to be happy, so you’re not providing them with fluff. You’re not being self serving or obviously self serving. You need to give value. They need to see the value of what you’re doing, if you’re to keep your client happy.

Method number four, writing articles for industry publications. Again, this is something I did a lot more 15 years ago than today. but it’s amazing how easy it is and how much more easier it’s becoming, because the public relations industry is less and less, powerful in the olden days, in the 1990s we used to have the public relations industry kind of like gatekeepers between business and media. Because of digital, because of social media, because of the internet. We have this breakdown where business and media is becoming closer and closer together and it doesn’t require the gatekeepers of, public relations consultants anymore.

So for this method to work, you need writing skills. Of course you need storytelling skills and it would help if you had trend spotting skills as well. It’s also good if you know how to pitch the media. So in this method you’re being paid as a writer, you do not need a media release. Media releases are not so relevant anymore. In some scenarios and cases, yes, they may still be relevant, but most of the time you can simply pitch the media with a one to one email. And of course if you’re going to pitch you need to be good at following up. There is so much following up required and I think most business owners tend to underestimate that. Just because somebody doesn’t respond to you straight away does not mean it’s a no. So please do keep following up and then you can get paid to be writing articles, in your niche, talking about your expertise in a kind of a subtle way.

So it can’t be too obviously self serving, it can’t be too obviously advertorial. Otherwise you’ll probably be asked to take out ads. Yeah, if you’re being asked to take out ads, it’s a good indication that your pitch is not really newsworthy. Method five speaking at events. Again, this is something that I have done many times and continue to do. for this you’re going to need storytelling skills. You’re going to need speaking skills as well. A lot of this is really learnt through observation. So if you like listening to Ted Talks, if you like going to conferences or events, you like watching stagecraft. I love watching stagecraft. I love watching the drama of people and the way they move their bodies around and the way they make the cadence of their voice faster and slower and the pitch higher and lower. Really interesting stuff.

If you’re interested in that then absolutely you can learn speaking skills and storytelling skills. It’s also super, useful if, you know, again, the art of the humble brag if you’ve got a strategic topic that relates to your lead magnet. So what I mean by that is whatever your lead magnet is on is hopefully a topic that you are building your reputation around and you can absolutely, definitely build keynote speeches around the same topic, which makes it very easy and with far less friction when you do segue into pitching the audience. Your lead magnet. Pitching the audience. Here’s a QR code on the slide behind me. Point your phone at it in order to access your free minimum viable marketing plan, for example, which is one of my lead magnets.

So what are your communication strengths? Where is your edge? And remember, you may not have experience in something today, but if it makes your heart beat a bit faster if me talking about speaking on stage makes your heart beat a bit faster and you’re like, oh, God, that scares the bejesus out of me, but I’d love to do it. Then that, is a really good indication that indeed, you owe it to yourself to give it a red hot go. So are you good at listening closely and making people feel seen? Are, you good at asking great questions or telling great stories and being entertaining? Are you good at writing and deep thinking? Are you great at rapport building and relationship building? Yeah. Think about these five methods through the lens of what is your communication strengths?

All right, so business is really a collaboration. At the top here is your reputation. So this is the word on the street about you, about your business, whether or not you’re good or somebody to be avoided, as well as social proof, such as social media testimonials, media appearances, awards, et cetera, then we have your partners. So this is a lot of what has been kind of talked around in these five methods. So you’re borrowing their audience, you’re borrowing their authority in order to grow your own audience, your email list, your leads through the door, as well as your credibility.

It’s very, very different from advertising. When you’re advertising to, a cold audience. it’s a massive shortcut in gaining trust of these new people in front of you. And then there’s your existing community, which hopefully is growing all the time. So, starting from the inner sanctum of your current clients, further out from there is your past clients. Then we have your email list, then we have your social media followers, and then we have further out other people who’ve heard of you. And this is, in effect, what we’re talking about today when it comes to growing your reach, growing your visibility, growing your email list, of course, and increasing your leads.

So how do we go ahead and find these partners? Where do we find the people who are going to employ you, who are going to, have you talk at their events or at their conferences, or train in their courses or programs? The first piece of advice is be a great partner. Be a good human. Model the behaviour you expect in others. You can’t be flaky and expect that everybody else is going to be anything other than flaky. Yeah. Be grateful and enthusiastic. Ensure your values are in alignment with each other, and that you’re similarly savvy. You don’t want to be in a relationship with a partner where you’re doing all the heavy lifting of the opportunity. You’re the one pushing the marketing. You’re the one pushing the visibility. You want it to be an equal partnership where you’re more or less as savvy as each other in business and in visibility raising.

All right, so how to be memorable. Now, again, this is a huge topic. I’m just going to give you my top level advice. How do we be memorable? How do we make an impression so that people remember us, so that they come back, they look us up, they go, stalking us on social media, which is what we do, right? You want to be kind, you want to be human, and you want to be interested in other people. There’s so many people out there who are only ever interested in themselves. They suck the oxygen from the room. They are energy vampires. You want to own your opinions. So what does that mean? Work on your presentation skills. Work on cutting out qualifiers, cutting out minimisers. Stopping with the jargons, stopping with the industry. Speak plain language. Plain, powerful, specific language never goes out of style. Ensure you’re building your body of work on your website, not just on social media.

If you want to be the go to expert, people need a body of work to go to, and that typically sits on your website. You want them to binge your website in the same way we binge Netflix. And then finally, you want to turn your ideas and opinions into densely branded language. Now you’ve been hearing some of my densely branded language today. You’ve been hearing me say just now, energy vampires. You’ve heard me say the art of the humble brag. And some other examples could be, stop being the elevator music of the Internet, your ideal clients, and you together form mutual admiration society and make boldness your business strategy. These are all examples of things that I say over and over and over and over and over again. Interesting turn of phrase, hopefully so that they get stuck in people’s head. And so it becomes my densely branded language. It becomes what I am known for.

So I hope you found this helpful. I hope you found this enjoyable. I hope at least one of these five methods resonates with you. I hope that you can make the most out of this presentation by doing something, by getting up, changing what you’re doing, and getting paid to build your visibility, grow your reach, and build your email list in the process.