Lessons

Lesson Info

Create a Profit Playbook

I don't play a lot of sports actually I hate sports but I believe I'm told that in football they have like playbook you know if this happens you do that whatever ironically in business we took a lot of the principles of sports and apply them here when we create a course um we have a playbook and a playbook tells us who's our market what are their hopes fears and dreams and we used the actual words that they used we paste him into our document like they filled out a survey monkey so they're like oh my god like I create this business so I could be free but now I have like twenty clients who are dragging pulling me in all directions pasted okay so that's their hopes fears and dreams we talk about why now what is their pain point? What kind of products have they already bought? What kind of progress you're looking for so for example if they're just looking to lose ten pounds maybe a simple e book of workouts and some healthy food would be great but if they're looking for something much dif...

ferent like for example if they're looking to lose one hundred plus pounds they're going to need an ongoing program they're going to need words like accountability and so that suggests a different type of product a subscription product perhaps and then we can start to brainstorm price but we're not really even at that stage it what does this do? It's basically a two, two fifty in our case we do very extensive playbooks ours are often over fifty pages but you don't need a fifty page document you need like a one to two page document when you start that reminds you what is this product who's the market? What do they want? Because you're going to be in the weeds pretty soon you're going to creating your email list, you're going to sending emails doing all this stuff and somebody earlier mention that they kind of get lost in the details. This helps you stop that it's the equivalent of having an outline for your paper in college if you get stuck, you go back and look at your ass. Okay? Okay, okay. Is what we're talking about backto work make sense. You should have this before you ever start building your product before you ever start writing the first page of your e book recording video whatever you have profit playbook. Okay, all right, so let's, move on. Now we're going to get into some of the tactics and lots of time for questions here, so I'm gonna go through this fairly quickly at this point you don't have a product yet, but you're building a website it's very simple you can build a uh these are some of the tools that we use it's basically a blawg with an email opt in and email often is one of those things you goto website it says enter your name and email for blah, blah, blah that's it it's really simple a lot of people spend tons of time. My first website was horribly ugly you can look it up on the internet archive look it up from two thousand four it is it's just atrocious. I didn't even know how to set up a blogger archives, so they were like two hundred post on one page, but the content was pretty good. Ah, and so people came, they read, and eventually I put an email often and the email is grew to several hundred thousand people, so it just takes time, but it takes writing the right material, which I'm gonna show you how to do. All right, so now we've got a website and your website can be a simple as you put your idea up there hey, I'm going to help women between the ages of thirty five and forty five get their body back. You've had kids, I know how that is. I've been through it too here's a picture of me I struggled with eating this and that we're going to talk about how to do this if you're interested into your name and email here and we'll go on this journey together I mean something as simple as that. Okay, so why are we doing an email list? Does anyone here have an email list? Okay, a couple people good. So an email list is probably the single best asset you can create for yourself and nobody can ever take it away when you have an email list. These are people who have volunteered they raise their hand and said, I want you send me material is anyone here on my email list and you read my stuff? Okay, awesome. So when you get an email for me let's, pass that around someone who's on my email. What do you feel when you see an email from me in your inbox? I'm taking a big risk right now, so I hate this guy. What do you feel? Uh, curiosity? What have you written next? He's written some good stuff before. Ok, good. What else? Who else? What do you feel when you see remi it's? Eighty, some subject line in your inbox. I'm ready for a story. I'm like what's the story today. Good today, today's story that's going out to a few people on my list is the subject line is I'm so good with asian moms and I am amazing and, uh, I talk about why and I talk about how to talk to parents and like you know whenever people come to my house so I have to coach them on the things they are allowed to say and are not allowed to say and that story and so people come to look forward to it now it doesn't mean you have to have these crazy stories that's my like that's my personality that's what I like to talk about but the point is after you write a few these emails if you make your way in their in box that's when that was treasured parts of someone's life they're in bach's many of us subscribed to newsletters where we see and we're just like you, right? But if you could become something they look forward to then it's not about selling it's about a relationship and that's why I say own the relationship not the first sale fact I'm willing to forego millions of dollars every year for example, I forbid people with credit card debt from joining my flagship programs I don't want to try to sell them on something that's not right for them I'd rather own the relationship because who here has been on my list for over one year, two years, three years or more at a certain point you're going to buy and so it's all worth it right from a business perspective but now they know this guy's not here to just tryto like scam me into something that I don't need I'll only sell something that's right? So I want you to get an e mail list up I want you to send e mails to your list. My recommendation is once a week if you can't do that at least b times a month okay? One of the biggest mistakes I've ever made was not emailing my list when I first started for about six or seven months and when I sent that first email they were like who are you? I don't remember you this is spam and it wasn't good. Now what do you send a lot of times it could be a story it could be a challenge you went through you know, if you're writing about nutrition it could be like this is something that I struggled with or here's what I do to have a healthy breakfast every morning that's interesting we're breaking it into chunks and that brings us to how to write irresistible material. Um somebody share your business idea we'll talk about how to break it into how to show them don't tell them and break it into chunks who's got it? Share your business idea right now. Yes, right over here. We got the wedding industry. Yes, so helping people navigate the wedding blawg world when they're planning their wedding perfect. So what is one piece of irresistible content that you could write to your subscribers um where to start okay or how to how to figure out what kind of wedding you want to have in the first place. Okay, now I want you to go one step deeper and break it into chunks where to start is like vast get really narrow what is it? Um whether you want to plan your wedding or you want to hire someone to plan it for you good let's go even narrower um how to know if your florist is ripping you off super super niche by the way, do you think that the wife ice or the fiancee I assume that your audience is mostly women most likely yeah do you think that they would open that email and be interested in what you have to say? Yes, you would get a eighty percent plus open right? Absolutely you say you break it into chunks if you're doing a dating uh email subscription and website, you wouldn't say like how to find the love of your life it's like way too broad we might say where to go on the first date ice breakers for someone you don't know how to handle yourself if you get nervous there's a famous piece of content online called the kiss test how to know if you should kiss her look how narrow that isthe and that's showing not telling right we're getting really specific versus oh like really broad like here's where to start that is the death of your business if you're really because only an expert would know the kiss test, only an expert would know that when a guy goes on a date and it's like at the end of the night and you're like oh I really like her what should I do on ly an expert would know that in his head he's like kiss her what do I do? My god, that is the true son of expertise that they can get that narrow okay and of course provide immediate results in one of our courses be launched earned one k we showed people how to find started online excuse me start a freelance business we put them through multiple emails and I didn't sell anything we put him through like over twenty, emails you have to do twenty you could do for it doesn't matter, but we showed them how to find an idea how to earn more money how to charge etcetera before we even opened up our course for them to buy a lot of them had already earned five hundred or thousand bucks. So guess what they said when they realize there was a course where they could learn even more about this it was a no brainer they're like already learned how to do this for free I wonder what is behind this premium product and at that point price was a mere trivialities you see how price is one of the last things that your customers consider if you've done all the things we've talked about it it's actually amazing most people they jump right to the product and then they're sitting there oh my god am I charging too much fifty dollars but that guy is charging ten my products we don't price is a triviality because we've done all this work up front so we can charge often tend to one hundred times what other people are charging and remember talked about the money mindsets it's not bad to charge one hundred times when other people are charging for the right market it's actually the perfect thing any questions now? Yes um grab like we got one over here so for instance um nutrition how could I show immediate results it's not really like people want to lose weight or just feel better when I show immediate results okay, so they want to lose weight you're not gonna help him lose fifty pounds in a week but what could you do? What happened like walk through their day they wake up what do they do? Breakfast. Oh, they do well no what were you going to say? Hopefully you live in a world of what we hope is we live in the world of what is okay what do they do sometimes they just have coffee, huh? Or juice or completely skipped breakfast okay and then what happens? Their blood sugar goes way out of whack there they might feel tired or what time do they start snacking? Probably about eleven maybe or one and a snack on what junk? Perfect. So now we know what they're doing and it's an enviable position you're in because I mean they're doing everything wrong so with just one subtle change you could dramatically change their energy what might that be that you can suggest have some protein for breakfast make sure that you have time to make a breakfast even you have to prepare it the night before. Okay, so first of all remember, a lot of people don't know what protein means okay, so we need to get we need to get down to their level, okay? Like I could talk all day about asset allocation and stuff like that but nobody knows what that is. I need to make it relevant to them but you're exactly right so you're going to basically tell them to eat breakfast that's the simple thing and guess what happens when they eat breakfast for five days? How are they going to feel better? Good, great and buy you were to hesitate because you're like I don't really know guess what you could do you could find five volunteers or friends see look, I'm trying to start this thing I'm going to share some nutritional advice it'll make you have better energy, etcetera no charge I'm not trying to make a cent as long as you agree to fall through for just five days now you get the testing results you start to sail like wow, I know this by the way if you were to tell me a guy who doesn't eat breakfast and then I snack on all these unhealthy things and you would tell me like just make breakfast every day what do you think would go through my head like yeah kind of thing like and I don't know if it worked why why would I push back and say I can't do that? I can't because you're not motivated you interested? You don't feel like it's going to change anything I don't have time or you don't have time okay that's the number one reason so you want to make them a promise of something simple they can do? The simplest thing would be to say here's, I want you to have breakfast I don't want you to go crazy I'm just going to recommend that you tell me exactly what to eat super simple like maybe even making eggs is too complicated okay it's just super simple do this for five days and report back on how you feel that's super simple also a lot of us don't have time so I've carefully created the simplest breakfast that gives you all your nutritional ingredients and all you have to do is creates takes less than ninety seconds for five days, right? That is what will get people results in advance it's a very simple example of how to break it down other questions we have some that are coming in from online right now let's do one here now one thing I do want to mention for people who are watching out there that we do have a feature where you can vote for the questions that you want to see answered all you have to do is click the blue arrow to vote up the questions that you want so these questions here have been voted on and I want to touch on these a few people have suggested these so this question comes from richard leland and they say can you talk about kickstarter for launching your idea or product a similar question from drew he wants to know if a platform like kickstarter or indiegogo could be a useful approach to test for new customers. No, I don't like it I mean it's great kickstarter and indiegogo are amazing and they've enabled millions of businesses but we're not trying to create just one launch we're trying to create a business and a business means you own the assets yourself ah lot of people like you know why they like indy go go on starter two reasons one they don't have to do much work they go and write something and pushed paste and then they pray that traffic is going to find it right and to its building on an existing platform so lets them save a little bit of time and they see all these other successes and they're like I can do that I just have to it's not about the platform you're using okay? It doesn't matter if you use those wordpress things I recommended or whatever the point is you want to build a business where you can own it just to give an example let's say you created something on indiegogo or whatever and it didn't it didn't sell out it didn't work so now do you know what happened? Was it that you didn't get enough traffic? Was it that your copy wasn't good? Was it that the product was you don't know and the point is you can't test it again you've put it all into one thing and you can't disentangle those so stop looking for the fads and tactics and we want to build something that is enduring to stand the test of time that means you own it and over time you can control it good question other questions here in the room great so in your experience working with people they come to you with an idea and they say you know I'm ready to go I want to do some sort of testing with it you take them through the emergence strategy and the playbook you know my first reaction is okay how long until I actually get to do something like before you know how much research do I need to do before I actually get to do something good question so a lot of people are very eager to jump to building a product and putting on a website because that feels like riel like now aiken traffic and something and in general uh I would rather see every hour you spend in research will save you ten to twenty hours down the road so for some your first time it should take a while for some of my students like if you're really lucky and you're really good you might be able to launch an online business in eight to twelve weeks two to three months many of my students take many more months to do it some of them actually take a really long time and as they start going through this process they discover something very subtle like oh this market actually won't pay for this reason and they go back and start again with a different idea for some of them it takes six to nine months even more but check this out let's say you spend nine months and you're like uh like you're making progress but you don't have a like uh e book or something and then one day you cracked the code and you're like I got it. I know every word they say I know every pain point they I know them better than they know themselves at that point it's so easy to create the product because you truly understand them the product creation and pricing process for us is light fifteen percent of our time. Okay, at that point we launch it, we charge a premium price and we already know that it's going to sell so all that work, you're never going to remember all the work you did time is going to go on anyway, but you're going to know that you were successful that's the difference? It feels good to throw something up just like it feels good to send out a million resumes, but what really matters is doing the research to find out what company you love, et cetera. And then when you submit that one resume, you know you're gonna get the job, okay? Other questions here in the room, in the chat room, this one comes from re haas and they say thank you for sharing all this advice, but my question is I'm so bad at writing content, I can't even fill out a twitter with valuable content am I doomed for creating a business? I am a photographer by trade you might be doomed if you keep talking like that. S oh, I first want to challenge is this person I want to challenge them on saying I'm so bad at creating content, you're not bad. You just haven't had a lot of experience doing it the right way. Look for someone who hasn't taken photos, are they? Are they bad at photography? Maybe, but they haven't learned the rules of taking photos. So it's very it's very important for us to be mindful of our self talk. A lot of us say things like, I'm not good at selling, okay? I'm not the kind of person that likes toe workout I could never give up rice. I'm asian like these air these air things we actually say to ourselves and it seems like a joke like I used to be like, oh, I'm a skinny indian guy ha ha and it would get, like, a little laugh, huh? But it actually prevented me from investing in my health for many years, so I want to be really careful of the way we describe ourselves that's negative self talk in terms of learning how to write amazing material. I bet you if you ask this person, what have you done in order to improve your skills? They're going to be like nothing, I just suck yeah, you saw because you haven't tried anything have you bought a course on copyrighting or a book? I mean there's great but there's a great book by bob blind on writing copy it's amazing have you just talked to your market it's hard to write about something when you don't actually know what your market wants so if you're sitting there saying like I want to create a business helping people to start uh knitting and you don't really know that much about nikki where you're trying to help people with nutrition but you haven't actually spoken to people to find out what their barriers are and of course it's hard you're sitting there with a blank page, but as you do this research, you're getting tons of ideas of what people's problems are remember their hopes, fears and dreams they're like they'll say something like this still say ah, you know, I really want to lose weight it's really important to me and my wife even mentions it and I'm motivated like I'll do it I have to gym memberships but what always happens is I go to the gym, I try it for six months and then we go on vacation or something and I just yo yo right off and I stopped doing and so boom irresistible content how to stop the yo yoing of going to the gym that's a great piece of content right there so it starts with the research which enables you to know what to write about what kind of product to create and how to price it. Other questions anymore here in the room oh, yeah we have a mic over here so let's talk about distribution um besides how did you reach your target audience in the early stages besides through your newsletter or your block? Okay, so great question. What do you do once you have this website up, you have some irresistible content. The biggest and easiest way to get other people to know about it is to piggyback on other sites where there's um or traffic. So what I like to do and this is exactly what I did. In fact, you can go look at the two thousand four post that I did I would write a few great post from my sight and then I would go find other high traffic cites and I would build a relationship with them. We just email them be cool, be nice. And I would say I think your readers would like something like this would you be interested in it? Guest posting is a very simple strategy. People comes in and out of fashion but it actually works its work for ten years it'll work for a long time if you our reading a website about whatever your hobbies and you see this great piece of content and at the end it says you know, hey, mike jones writes uh, how to do x how did you needing howto whatever if you're interested sign up for his newsletter you're going to sign up and that's how you get news that our subscribers really to do up to do your first launch I recommend you don't need a huge amount of subscribers you need roughly I'd like to say five hundred to a thousand subscribers in general that sounds like a lot, but once you get that moving once you get one or two you can get twenty once you get twenty and get a hundred once you get a hundred you know you could get a thousand ah thousand or five hundred two thousand means if you launch of course you're going to sell at least one or two and has anyone here had the magical experience of selling something online and you saw the first check come in? Has anyone felt that experience? Go on, tell us about how that felt let's get the mic what was the product? What was the price? Um the product was a custom tapestry and the price was seventy five dollars on sale from ninety you know it's very exciting I love it the first time I sold an e book I told you like I had such low self esteem about it that I didn't even set up a distribution. I was just going to email to people when the papal money came in because I thought, like literally us and fifty people would buy it. And, uh, the first person bought it, and I was like, oh, my god, because I had stepped away from my computer and I came back and the sale had come in. And it was almost like one of those moments in the movie where it's like because I realize, like, if I could step away for, like, ten minutes to go the bathroom or something. Then when I went to sleep, it would still work. In other words, there are a lot of people at their computers when I'm not, and I could now scale what I knew up here to the rest of the world. You don't need a ton of sales at up front. All you need is a couple to show you that you're on the right track. It's a marker that you're doing the right thing.