As I quoted in an earlier post, from Derek Sivers, one of the ways to help people is to become famous. I take that to mean, to serve you, I need to be seen by you, so that means building an audience of people like you who dig what I say and get something out of it. You need to be interested in what I say and find me likable as a person and a brand.
I’ve been researching how to develop a personal brand, so recently I clicked on Instagram ad for Teachable, a platform for giving and taking classes online. They sucked me in and I’ve been obsessed with their Book to Course Online Summit this past week. I saw it as an opportunity to get the latest tips and tricks for free. The summit wasn’t directly related to my needs at the moment since I’m starting from scratch, and it assumes you may have a book idea, written a book or want to create a class. However, there were a lot of jewels in there I want to share with you:
- You need to build an e-mail list. This is how you communicate with your audience and build a relationship with them. This is the most important. Right now I have about 3 people on my e-mail list that are from my current coaching group. Thanks guys! So my goal is to take this list into the tens of thousands within two years. (Gulp – Did I just write that?). I did.
- Offer free stuff aka a Lead Magnet to get people to sign up for your email list. This could be checklists, an ebook, a template, or a slideshow. People need a compelling reason to sign-up for your list, and a freebie is a good transfer of value for someone giving you their e-mail address. Think about what’s an easy problem you can solve for your audience.
- It’s good to offer up this Lead Magnet on Landing Page. The Landing page offers one choice for the person, so you can focus their attetion on one action, like giving away a free resource guide, to get an e-mail address. Sidebars and navigation on your regular website get in the way and distract. Also landing pages with people on them work well. AND, fun fact, if those people are looking at the CTA (Call To Action) button that increases conversion (the number of people who click through and sign up). Below is an example from one of the presenters Melyssa Griffin. Square Space and Leadpages are both good tools for creating landing pages easily. You can even test multiple lan
ding pages before making a course, writing a book, or creating a product to see what your audience wants and what resonates with them. - Destination websites are dead. You need to publish where people are. This means you need to publish content to LinkedIn or Medium, and then send them back to your site.
- Drip Marketing – I’ve noticed this being used expertly by the best online marketers. This is coming up with a sequence of interactions to get someone interested, get to know you, and then after a few days or interactions with you, pitch a product or service at the end of the sequence. I’ve seen this used well by Ramit Sahi and Selena Soo for example, where they start with a couple e-mails, then they invite you to a live online webinar and finally they sell you at the end of the webinar. You’re more inclined to buy a course for example after you get to know them, committed to an appointment for a webinar and they’ve already provided a lot of valuable information.
- Know your audience and their needs. James Altucher succinctly said, “Get Paid. Get Laid. Lose Weight.” These are the things people are universally interested in. Those are the easy ones, but you need to get input from them on what they want to hear about.
- Use Social Media intelligently. This means having a social media strategy, batching content creation and batching interaction on social media. Tools like Edgar and Hootsuite can help. I’m going to write another post based on the talk from Laura Roeder the founder of Edgar since she provided a lot of excellent tips.
- Partner with Influencers is key to expanding your success as it you can grow you reach exponentially, the ROI on investing will be huge and when done the right way you’re making relationships that can last a long time. Navid Moazzez gave a really great talk about finding and reaching out to influencers. The five steps he outlined are: identify the right influencers, choose the right ones, connect with them and add value, ask in a non pushy way, then follow up to get the influencer. The secrets are to push past the fear of asking, get influencers who are maybe not A level, but B or C level, and go deep not wide to really nurture these relationships over time.
ding pages before making a course, writing a book, or creating a product to see what your audience wants and what resonates with them.These are really high level lessons, and all different pieces of the marketing strategy that I will be learning about, implementing and optimizing. My next steps are to come up with a compelling freebie, get a pop-up e-mail box, instead of the current sidebar I have, and also improve the text and call to action for my site. Then work on landing pages, then….oh dear there’s a lot do 🙂