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Attract 3.0

How To Find, Attract, & Convert Your Ideal Clients Online

By Nicola Cairncross v1.5

Table Of Contents

Copyright Notice Acknowledgements Introduction

Do I Really Need To Market My Business Online? Clinging To The Old Way Of Doing Things But I’m Doing OK… Aren’t I?

What’s The Difference Between Marketing & Selling?

Part 1

My “Clicks & Leads” System

Why You Need To “Be Everywhere Online” Step 1: Plan Your Content

Research Your Market

Find Out The Pain Points Of Your Ideal Client Plan Your Content To Address Those Pain Points

Step 2: Create Your Content Step 3: Polish Your Content Step 4: Repurpose Your Content Step 5: Syndicate Your Content Step 6: Amplify Your Content

Sounds Expensive! What’s My Investment In All This?

Evergreen Facebook Ads Campaigns The Big Question! Does It Work?

Would You Like More Help?

Part 2

Marketing For Digital Beginners - How To Convert Your Ideal Client Into A Hot Prospect & Then An Ideal Client

It’s All About You

It’s All About Your Business Your USP

Your Ideal Future Customer Who is your IDEAL customer?

Where are you going to find your ideal customers? Which product will you sell them first?

How much will you charge them for it? How will you convince them to buy it? Sales Aversion

It’s All About Your Social Presence

Which social networking profiles do you need initially?

Twitter Facebook YouTube

It’s All About Your Website

Why do you need a WordPress blog website? Traffic, Traffic, Traffic

Offline Online

Local Business

It’s All About Your Product & Sales Funnel It’s All About Your Greatest Asset

It’s All About Your Tribe RECOMMENDED RESOURCES CONCLUSION

What Next?

Copyright Notice

First Published 2020 in Great Britain by CairnX Ltd

© Copyright Nicola Cairncross

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Attract 3.0 and the ClicksAndLeads Logo are Trademarks of Nicola Cairncross

Acknowledgements

First of all I would like to acknowledge my mum, who, before she had me, danced on stage in London at the age of 19 in the original production of The King & I. She taught me that you can have anything you want if you just want it bad enough and work for it hard enough. Perhaps ‘smart enough’ might have been less tiring, Mum!

I want to thank my fabulous sisters; the ‘singing’ sister Heather Cairncross (Altovoice.com) and the WordPress Queen, Sarah Cairncross (SarahCairncross.com). Unwavering support for all my mad schemes, lots of humour and straight-talking in equal measures. Much love also to my brother Alex, who lives in Sydney now and takes beautiful photos (AlexCairncross.com).

Then I would like to acknowledge two of my earliest mentors, Dr William Pitt, of Worthing, who was interested in everything and the first grown-up to show an interest in what I thought about things, He bought his first computer in his late 70’s and, as well as keeping up with current affairs, spent a lot of time surfing the Xena Warrior Princess website as far as I can tell. He also taught me about fine wine and

dining and that, when you pay the bill, you call the shots. Never be intimidated by snooty waiters.

Then the ultimate entrepreneur Bennie Gray of the Space Organisation, who gave me my first ‘paradigm shift’, by telling me that I was no secretary but management material, who employed me when no-one else would, paid me more than I asked for, gave me the freedom to explore all the principles I was learning from Steven Covey’s ‘7 Habits of Highly Effective People’. He taught me how much more rewarding performance and profit related pay was, and let me go graciously when it was time.

My first life coach, Rachel Turner. How did you cope – I was so remedial on personal development! My second business coach Chris Barrow, who challenged and pushed me to be always better and braver than I thought I was.

Friends – what treasures without price; veterans like my ex- husband Irving Soremekun, stalwart best friend of 35 years Kim Black and newer ones such as Pete Jenkins, Andy Shaw, Greg Ballard and Peter Halm. Not to mention the many

wonderful young people, friends of my kids – bringing life to the house and mad fashions wherever they go.

Wealth Mentors, first of which was Gill Fielding, who changed my thinking totally, taught me about and daily demonstrated so well, about living by the principles of the Sea of Abundance and many of the other concepts in this book. Andy & Greg, who taught me how to think totally differently about property.

And last, but by no means least, my wonderful friends and occasional business partners. First up, Steve Watson. You resisted all this coaching stuff for years, didn’t you, but it’s sinking in slowly and accidentally. You are an amazing person, a great graphic designer and for years a great stand-in dad to Phoebe & Nelson who love you loads, as I do.

Judith Morgan, the most pink of business partners and my podcast co-host in Own It (OwnItThePodcast.com/001). Steve and I both remember the day you walked down the hallway of The Acacia as a Money Gym client – and what an effect you have had. Our ‘iron fist in a velvet glove’ you are always kind & abundant, always

loyal & tolerant and always very, very honest. A brain as sharp as a razor and a way with a (large pink) calculator that puts me to shame. Steve and I don’t know what we would have done without you.

The Money Gym clients, thousands of you now, and you are all successes in our eyes – as long as you don’t give up! Our strategic partners and those who ask me to speak for them, Neil Asher of Aussie Entrepreneurs Online, Daniel Priestley of Triumphant Events and Jacqueline Rogers of Athena Ladies Business Network.

Dan Norris who wrote “7 Day Startup’ gets a well deserved mention as does Rich Schefren from Strategic Profits.

And last but always most, my wonderful - now grown-up - children Phoebe & Nelson. What can I say, you are my greatest achievements - just by being you. You inspire me and teach me every day. Love you loads.

Introduction

Welcome, I’m Nicola Cairncross and I’m a five times author, international speaker and three-times podcast host, but the thing you are probably most interested in is the fact that I’m the founder of three self-funded six-figure businesses online.

The first was my book and training programme, “The Money Gym”, the second was a Social Media Services Agency (for someone else) and the third was my boutique Social Media PPC Ads Agency. I’m now building my fourth business, StoupaLife.com which suits my semi-digital nomad lifestyle better.

Nowadays, I specialise in consulting with authors, business leaders and SME’s on paid ads, building sales funnels and conversion optimisation. Personal brand marketing, and mentoring aspiring entrepreneurs via my membership site at ClicksAndLeadsAcademy.com.

So. all that said, why should you take any notice of me when it comes to

marketing your business online?

Well, I’ve been online for over 23 years now (we had the 25 year anniversary of the internet in August 2016) and I built my first website in 1995, using cold hard HTML coding. None of this sissy WordPress stuff in my day!

I’ve made every penny I’ve earned in the last 23 years online while bringing up my two kids, Phoebe and Nelson. I learned how to use each of the tools and social media platforms as they came along – yes! I remember life before Google, before Facebook and even before Twitter. So I know what works, what doesn’t, I’ve tested everything with my own money and if I got it wrong we didn’t eat.

So I’ll never be telling you to do something I haven’t tested myself but you have to remember, certain things work better in certain markets so my favourite expression is “test, test, test!”

In the spirit of minimum viable products everywhere, I have combined everything I know about how to market ANY business online in this 25th year of the internet.

I hope you enjoy this book but more importantly, I hope you use it!

Nicola

p.s. And if you do, please pass it on with our compliments and recommend people to my website at NicolaCairncross.com where they can enjoy the benefits of this book, just like you will.

FREE 5-Day Challenge Reveals How Business Owners, Experts & Authors Can Streamline, Leverage & Outsource Their Social Media Content In Order To Start To Attract Their Ideal Customer Or Client

Join the "Clicks & Leads 5-Day Challenge" and fix your lack of leads and prospects by using this one simple, but often overlooked strategy which is fun, easy, efficient, authentic and, best of all, will start to attract your ideal clients (while you get on with what you do best - running your business).

If you would like to join in our next FREE 5-Day Marketing Challenge, all you need to do is visit https://ClicksAndLeads.com/5days and enter your details.

We’ll automatically enrol you in the next Challenge and let you know when it starts.

Do I Really Need To Market My Business Online?

Why should you be thinking about marketing your business online? Quite simply, if you are not marketing online, your business is pretty much invisible nowadays.

Also, if you don’t have an online presence, you are making it much harder for people to refer you to their friends and family. It’s much easier to click a share button and fill in the name of the person that could benefit from your product or service than to pick up a telephone or create an email from scratch.

We all know that the internet is growing fast but many business owners are so busy working IN their business, they often don’t use the internet much themselves so they don’t really “get it” about the impact that their customers going online is having on their business and specifically on their business marketing.

Without wanting to glaze you over with figures, here’s just a few to get your attention and put them into context, too, hopefully.

In 2008 Infonetic Research reported that there were over 3 billion people online, on broadband and that this number was growing exponentially every single year.

There are more people online, on broadband, in China than there are ALIVE right

now in the USA.

Digital Buzz reports that, with over 500 million users, Facebook is now used by 1 in every 13 people on earth!

When this book was originally written Apple had sold almost 60 million iPhones worldwide, while Google’s Android OS is growing at 886% year on year and now activating over 160,000 devices a day, across 60 devices in over 40 countries.

In 2011, Google reported that over 50% of searches had a local orientation, and another 50% were done on a mobile device.

Women aged 34 – 54 are the most socially active group of users online – that means using social media and when you realise that these are the people who mostly control a family’s spending. well the implications are enormous for any

business owner!

As a business owner, you have to grasp the nettle of marketing your business online, attracting potential future customers in the form of traffic to your website, turning those customers into hot exclusive leads, turning those leads into customers.

Believe it or not, despite the widespread adoption of the Internet as a mainstream medium of communication, in 2011 around 50% of all businesses still didn’t have a website! And the other 50% don’t have a website that works.

This is hard to believe, considering everybody seems to have a Facebook account or at least an email address these days, but it is the truth. More than half of all businesses in existence today still do not have a website that customers can come and visit.

This is borne out by my business networking, where, of all the cards I’m given, most of the website links don’t work or, if they do, they link to a dull old corporate type site (often on a dark background with white writing which is impossible to read) with nothing engaging on it, no clear call to action and nothing to help me engage with the business owner and build that “know, like and trust” relationship.

Worse, when I talk to these business owners, as well as not having a website, so few of them have a digital marketing plan!

Only the other day, when talking to someone about the new business they were setting up, they actually told me that they didn’t need a marketing plan because they were getting a load of word of mouth referrals already. Fine, but what about

when that flurry of “wanting to help” initial referrals dried up? Marketing plans typically take 36 months to start showing results and need to work for you around the clock, ideally automatically, so in 36 months, what is this chap going to do then?

Without a marketing plan, how are these small businesses surviving? Can they survive? Will they survive? Most experts agree that it is only a matter of time that those who fail to jump on the Internet bandwagon will be left behind, and will lose out to their competition.

Clinging To The Old Way Of Doing Things

If you are old enough to remember the phone book and the yellow pages, then you might remember that back in the days before the Internet, the yellow pages was considered the only means to get the word out about your business.

If you did not have an entry in the yellow pages, customers might not have any way of knowing that you exist, or knowing how to contact you. For today’s modern generation, the yellow pages are an old, retired relic of 20th-century history, from the period of the dark ages.

Sure, there is Yell.com – and don’t they charge through the nose? But who do you know who actually goes and uses it? Nope, we all use Google to search for stuff now.

But by not having a website, one that is easily findable when someone types into Google their problem, pain or perceived solution (think “I’ve got spots” or “cure for acne”) you are leaving far too much money on the table.

Today’s modern generation even queries the Internet to look for local businesses.

If you are a small business owner for a local retail shop that does not have a website, you might have doubts about whether or not you really even need a website. After all, why would a local laundromat need a website, you might wonder. It’s not like you can do your laundry with a computer. You have to drive down there in person. But this line of thinking is exactly what will herald the demise of your business.

Because people will be looking for local Laundromats, checking out the prices, what entertainment there is while they are doing their laundry, is it attended so your washing is safe, or in case the machine breaks, is it clean and pleasant to sit in. you get the picture!

Yes, there are millions of businesses out there where commerce can’t actually be transacted online.

But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t set up a website. If you are a restaurant owner, for example, you will want your menu displayed online.

You will want to build a mailing list of customers who you can alert to seasonal changes, special offers for quiet nights, exclusive “customer only” parties. You will want to display your QR Code ** on your signage and menus, and in your local advertising, which will bring offline traffic online (and into your email mailing list) to claim your “free bottle of wine with every meal for 2 on Tuesdays or Thursdays offer”.

If you are an embroidery shop, you could display images of samples of your work. If you are a local pizza shop, you can have people place their orders on the Internet.

Many times, people will use the Internet to comparison shop before they step out the door. If you don’t have a searchable – by which I mean findable website, then you have the potential of losing customers.

Customers you don’t even know about!

If you still think having a website wouldn’t benefit your local business, because it’s not like you can sell to customers half away across the country, then at least consider this: Your web page can still serve as your virtual business card.

It is a place where you can advertise your business, provide information to potential customers about your business, keep in touch with potential or existing customers, and persuade them to do business with you.

If you want people to find you, and if you want people to be able to get instant access to information about your business, then it would be in your best interests to get a website up and running quickly.

But not just any website, you need a WordPress website on your own hosting which is incredibly inexpensive to set up and has the added benefits that the search engines love them and you can keep control of the content.

No more being held over a barrel by a website designer who charges for every little change you want to make.

WordPress websites can be made to look like your existing website (if you have one) or made to look super slick with pictures and videos and audio. They can look like just about any design you want, they can be online shops, gather those

all-important exclusive leads for your business and they can have extended functionality including blogs, forums and membership areas.

To put that in context, if you have knowledge or expertise that others would love to know, especially globally, just 17,000 members paying you £5 a month would add

£1,020,000 to your bottom line each year.

That’s over a million pounds of extra revenue (and mostly profit) just for sharing what you know, whether that’s how to back the best cakes on the planet, or how to run a successful business of your type.

But I’m Doing OK… Aren’t I?

So, you have been in business for a while and you are doing OK. If you are lucky enough to be in this situation, you might ask yourself “Why do I need to learn how to market my business online?”

The simple answer is, if you are doing OK in the business right now, imagine how much more successful you could be, with a strong and largely automated online marketing funnel and even an online business, selling real-world products or info / digital products?

Imagine how much more fun your life would be if your business was dependable, repeatedly, producing more profits, without more overheads, and that was happening on a largely automated basis, with no more work required from you?

You could take what you know about, are passionate about, are expert in, and create a whole extra set of revenue streams that drop straight to your bottom line because there are virtually no production costs or overheads.

And the simple truth is, many “real world” businesses are still missing out BIG TIME on this online revolution.

I regularly perform Business Marketing MOT’s that shock me with how BAD most business websites are and how clueless most businesses are about marketing themselves online.

Whatever reason they give for that, such as the current economic situation, the fact they are just starting out, the fact that they don’t like selling, don’t know how to market themselves, aren’t very techie... when you look at their websites, their marketing materials, their nonexistent USP, it comes down to one thing.

They haven’t educated themselves about what it takes to market themselves – particularly online and so their websites are taking money OUT of their pockets rather than putting money into their pockets – and that’s TRAGIC.

They don’t realise that their website can be a powerful lead generating machine – creating hot EXCLUSIVE prospects for their business. They don’t have a powerful enough offer to make that customer put their name and email in a box so that the business owner can come back to them again and again

They don’t have a compelling enough lead product to make that customer put their hand in their pocket, pull out their wallet, get their credit card out of that wallet and spend some bloomin’ cash!

Perhaps this is starting to sound like you and your business?

Well, great, because you are going to LOVE this book.

It’s all about how to create an EFFECTIVE website and online presence – one that will put money into your pocket rather than just taking money out. A profit centre rather than an overhead.

What is an effective website doing? It’s creating a strong presence online, working for you 24/7/365, making your “potential future customers” feel welcome and that they know you.

That you understand their problems and that you have the solution. It’s gathering exclusive leads so that you can go back to those potential future customers and sell them things at no more marketing cost to you.

A powerful online business marketing plan is something that immediately identifies you in the mind of your customer, a website that says who you are, what you stand for, what you believe in, what your customer can expect from you, what your customers can buy confidently from you!

Even reading that last paragraph should be making you feel excited, because that’s

what a strong website will do for you – make you more excited about your business online, and it will make your customer more excited about doing business with you!

Presumably, that is why you downloaded this book - because you are doing OK with your business but you would really like to be doing much, much better.

Or perhaps you are just starting out in business and you are want to give it the best chance of success, or you are still looking for your direction, your passion, your purpose, beyond that of just simply making money.

You might be a little bit down the road, have been to a few big seminars and have got a feel for which direction you might want to head in with your online business.

You might have a glimmer of understanding that it’s all very well to have a website, know about 10 different social media strategies, have a special report and some digital products but without a coherent business plan, a strategy to tie everything together, you will be continually going round in circles without the ability or momentum to move forward.

When you have a coherent business plan, a strong online strategy AND a strong website, nothing can stop you. There is no doubt that you WILL become successful sooner or later. No doubt at all.

Because you and your business will get a momentum all of your own, a reason to get up in the morning and the ability to know what to do when you sit down at your desk, rather than just sitting there, feeling despair and overwhelm.

You and your business will become very, very attractive, your mission and sense of direction shine through, opening doors and attracting people who want to help, even people who can open doors that were previously firmly shut to you.

Because now you can articulate who you are, what you do, and more importantly what you can do for others and which direction you are heading in.

You and your business become irresistible.

And even more than that, you will gain the ability to look at every new opportunity and say “Will this move my business forward OR is it just a nice new shiny distraction?”

You become an arrow speeding towards your destination – SUCCESS rather than a dandelion puff blowing whichever way the wind wants to take you.

With a strong online strategy and a great website, your business proposition, your marketing materials and your communications become so much more powerful and

focused.

And, by the way, when I talk about an online business presence, I’m NOT talking about a logo. If I had $1 or £1 for every hour wasted talking about logos and letterheads I would be a much richer woman!

No, I’m talking about you, your business and your marketing message.

What’s The Difference Between Marketing & Selling?

One of my business mentors says “if you have a strong offer and a compelling marketing message, you never need to sell anything again”.

What is marketing and what is sales?

Another mentor – actually a pair of them – used to use a fishing analogy and described the activities of one of them as marketing... “I’m marketing, I get them in the boat.....” and the activities of the other “he’s sales. and he clubs them over

the head. ” which is a little crude and “old school” but it’s quite funny.

I prefer to define the activity of marketing as creating a clearly defined mission for your business, a clear and concise customer journey, from the arrival at your website, the ability of your IDEAL future customer to self select themselves, through to them becoming a repeat happy customer, a raving fan and a loyal member of your tribe.

I define the act of selling as nothing more than making it really, really easy for your customer to buy your lead product first, then your front end product, then your back-end product, then the opportunity to stay in your tribe, no matter how many little steps there are along the way. And no clubbing necessary!

On arrival at your website, you are not so much selling, as demonstrating that you understand your customer’s pain, problem or passion and you are simply recommending, from the position of a trusted advisor, which of your products or services would be right for them, at first, at that time.

Treating your potential future ideal customer as an intelligent grown-up who will make their own best decisions.

So how do we actually DO all this?

And more importantly, how do we do it online, where we have the potential to reach the billions of potential future ideal customers, on broadband right now?

Well, I’ve divided this book up into two parts. Part 1 is all about finding and connecting with your potential future clients, while Part 2 is all about how to convert them into warm prospects, subscribers (leads), customers then clients then raving fans.

Let’s get started, shall we?

Part 1

My “Clicks & Leads” System

If you are a fairly experienced marketer, you can happily read on. If you are not, you will want to go and read Part 2 of this book first.

In this first part of the book, I’m going to share with you my step-by-step guide on how to “Be Everywhere Online”. By which I mean, of course, to be everywhere your customers are, when they are working, or playing online. It won’t be YOU doing all the work either, it will be a highly trusted, skilled Virtual Assistant, who will cost you $6-10 per hour, who will do all the boring, repetitive tasks that you never do, ensuring your marketing currently never gets done!

I’ll be covering how to 10x your social media marketing plan, step into the spotlight, have a greater impact, attract more prospects while leveraging your time dramatically and increasing your profits.

What you won’t be doing is working any more hours a week as this plan is completely step by step and task-driven and thus 100% suitable to outsource, once the initial content is created, That’s a quick, fun creative job that could take me as little as twenty minutes a week, but because I choose not to outsource it all, actually takes me about 2 hours a week.

Why You Need To “Be Everywhere Online”

While I built my first successful online business The Money Gym by using content marketing and attraction marketing strategies, I had pretty much given up doing my own Social Media Marketing when I discovered (and became proficient in using) Facebook Ads.

Then I started Clicks & Leads, a boutique Facebook Ads agency and as it swiftly grew to over six figures MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue), I passed all my social media activities to Inga, our social media manager at the time.

I didn’t pay much attention to what she was doing, we had a loose content marketing strategy and it was enough for me that I kept seeing our branded content all over Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus. We weren’t really using Instagram or YouTube at that time and Periscope and Snapchat were just twinkles in their founders’ eyes.

Then I experienced a bereavement and I just didn’t want to talk to anyone for a while. I let most of my Facebook Ads clients go, keeping just a few who largely left me to my own devices as long as the leads kept coming in at an acceptable cost per lead.

I moved to Greece to surround myself with peace and beauty, to simplify my life and try and find work that was more meaningful for me. I took a couple of courses and thought I would simply focus on creating books from the great entrepreneur’s interviews I’d done a couple of years before.

In the meantime, my social media manager Inga had resigned due to ill health and while I kept up my social media activities to some degree (for social reasons), the intensity of my content sharing diminished dramatically.

However, my journaling and general navel-gazing along with the healing properties of time passing resulted in the re-launch of my Clicks & Leads Consultancy & Community.

I had some money socked away and I invested in setting the new business up just right, using the best people and the very best tools that I knew worked together well; Facebook Ads driving qualified traffic to LeadPages, into a new Infusionsoft marketing funnel, Xenforo for the community area, Deadline Funnel to automatically open and close the Membership intake, I even got my own free App made so that members would be able to get my help on the go, right from their smartphones.

The membership site soft-launched to my list over New Year 2017 to my own small but usually responsive mailing list to …….a rather muted response. This was very odd indeed.

I’d been running an ASK! type survey to business owners via Facebook Ads and identified the pain points of the respondents. All of these pain points were being addressed by the Deadline Funnel follow up emails, so should have been converting better than it was.

I was even split testing my own copy, against some professionally written email copy, something I’d never done before. I was getting the odd one or two signups as people moved through the funnel, sure, but not as many as I was expecting.

I contacted a few of my previous “star” mentoring clients and ran the offer past them for feedback. The reaction I got was surprising.

Although they were all on my email mailing list, which I curated and mailed regularly and some even subscribed to the “Own It!” podcast I co-hosted with Judith Morgan, they all responded saying they thought I was still semi-retired in Greece and not taking on clients right now!

I was shocked to discover that not one of them had seen my new membership site launch emails and because my previous levels of social media activity had pretty much stopped, I was now firmly out of sight, out of mind!

Social media and content marketing is notoriously difficult to track the ROI on, but here was concrete evidence that, unless you have a strong, continuous social media presence, with multiple “touchpoints” across all platforms, you are pretty much invisible online as a business.

I rolled up my sleeves and got to work, using the social media content leverage process I’d developed a few years ago when working with Neil Asher to establish the digital marketing agency we co-founded and self-funded in 2012. This process had created traffic, authority and most importantly paying clients for the agency,

super fast. From just two blog posts a week, written by Neil, I had made sure that we were “everywhere online”.

Ironically, while reviewing and rationalising my YouTube channel, I discovered that one video I had made back in 2013 about this exact social media content leverage process, had attracted nearly 24,000 views with no external promotion to speak of.

This, it appeared, was a hot topic.

Step 1: Plan Your Content

Research Your Market

I hate research, I’m not good at it and really don’t enjoy it. So don’t worry, this is not the usual dull section on research.

In the past I’d somewhat struggled to create content consistently, relying on inspiration striking. This is not a great idea as it rarely strikes when you need it to! I am also the world’s worst at research, I’m about a 2 on the Kolbe A test for this, having to delegate the most basic research like finding the best plane ticket to my sister Sarah who’s a 7 on Research at Kolbe A.

There was a bit of a grey area here as I traditionally resist going markets that other people are already active or dominating in. I think this is a hangover from the early noughties when I was one of the earliest people making a living coaching online with my first business success “The Money Gym”.

I liked being seen as a first mover, not someone who moved into someone else’s space. I just kept reminding myself that everyone attracts different clients and that if there was someone working in that space already, there were probably a lot of people not being served by that person, just because they may not resonate with the other personality.

I already knew from my previous businesses and coaching/mentoring work, that my ideal clients for the mentoring membership site would probably be slightly more mature solopreneurs or perhaps managers at SME’s.

People who want to create an effective business or marketing plan, who recognise that the older ways of getting business were not working any more, people with a good proven product or service, integrity in what they did, but little time or manpower – but they do have some resources, they are not totally skint.

People who want to save time, ask questions, find out what tools are the best tools RIGHT NOW to use, how to outsource effectively, how to cut out most of the mistakes and go straight to GO! with marketing their business online.

Find Out The Pain Points Of Your Ideal Client

Luckily, I still had the 650 survey responses I’d gathered while running Facebook Ads to a simple survey, which was aimed at my target market and those asked solopreneurs and business owners “What Is Your One Biggest Challenge Right Now, Marketing Your Business Online”.

I had used Typeform for this as it’s affordable, beautiful to set up (and use) but most importantly, enabled a Custom Thank You Page URL, so I could track which audiences responded best to my ads and survey. This is invaluable data for later as you’ll want to revisit those audiences, survey respondents and, indeed, those

visitors who clicked but didn’t take your survey, when you are ready with your Free Gift offer.

Plan Your Content To Address Those Pain Points

I went down the local greek supermarket Katerina’s and in their surprisingly extensive office supplies section, bought myself 5 x highlighter pens in my favourite colours and thought about the three main topics I expected the client challenges to be grouped into; Mindset, Marketing and Money.

These topics also fit with a series of interviews I’d done with successful entrepreneurs I’d done previously that I was now turning into a book of the same name. I’d asked each entrepreneur for their best tips around their business mindset, business marketing and business money

I printed off the survey responses and started reading them, highlighting the first column with the main colour and adding a splash of a second colour only if the challenge really did straddle two topics. I actually ended up with around 10 key sub-topics, loosely grouped into the 3 x main topics.

These topics formed the basis of my content plan and so I moved onto how best to create my content. I wanted maximum engagement with maximum efficiency and ease of creation. For me, it had to be video, as that could be spun off into audio and transcriptions and it had to start on YouTube.

Step 2: Create Your Content

I knew Facebook Live was super hot right now so I attempted a few of those, ditto YouTube Live, but the broadband connection in Greece was very variable in the house we had rented. The quality of the picture content was pretty bad (and I’m not a perfectionist by any standard). Then a couple of things came together to combine and turn into something else, like the best ideas always do.

Since moving to Greece I’d been compulsively watching a YouTuber called Casey Neistat, who was using film-making techniques to create a brilliant daily vlog, which was ultimately designed to market his new company Beme. Gary Vaynerchuk was also starting a DailyVee vlog show, filmed by a super talented young man called DRock.

My daughter Phoebe and I had just met Gary Vaynerchuk and DRock in London and they’d made a big impression. Phoebe had been inspired to become interested in video editing. She’d created her own YouTube channel for makeup tuition and product reviews (occasional strong language warning!). This had led to her starting to be invited to create videos for other businesses locally, to review products and being invited behind the scenes on fashion shoots, for example.

I thought that, if we could work together in some way, I could introduce her to my audience and some of them might hire her too. Especially if we could work virtually, as she’s in Shoreham and I’m in Greece. An idea started to form….

Wouldn’t it be fun to create a weekly vlog aimed at my ideal target market, focused around solving their problems but also highlighting that I was now a digital nomad at the age of 55 and showing what that life was like?

Living abroad and being free to travel was something my target market aspired to, so it would provide a whole new level of authenticity to my marketing, something that’s very important to me.

Casey and Gary Vee both live fun, exciting, glamorous, action-packed lives in New York, while I was living in a sleepy village in Greece, out of season. It would have to be VERY tongue in cheek!

I talked to Phoebe and we hatched a plan where I would film some talking to camera shots, with various background / greek colour snippets and she would put it together for me each week, upload it to YouTube, then I would take it from there.

She got to work on creating some beginning credits while I ordered a new camera and started filming.

I discovered that I could only upload my new content to Drive overnight, as it ate up the broadband so much we couldn’t watch TV or use any of our gadgets while I was uploading. Overcoming obstacles like these with creative solutions are routine for an entrepreneur. There is ALWAYS an answer!

Step 3: Polish Your Content

We decided on a rough format for the new show as I’m hopeless without one. I find that creativity thrives when hung on a rough framework, so I try and start with one, every project.

I would talk a little bit about what my digital nomad life had been like that week, with Greece itself providing plenty of adventures and good stories. Then I would tackle a “Challenge of the Week” before moving into a “What’s On The Blog / Podcast This Week?” closing section.

Phoebe would then edit my rambles into something crisper and more coherent, editing out the bits when the local dogs started barking, Greeks in olive groves turned on noisy chain-saws, lorries piled high with Mani stones rumbled past, random insects dive-bombed me or I forgot what I was going to say.

She saved some of the best bits for the “Bloopers” section at the end and I gave her full permission to be creative and funny with the footage, as long as I kept some shreds of dignity! After all, this was going to be a tongue in cheek homage to Casey and Gary, while letting my future clients get to know me.

I certainly couldn’t compete with all the young guns in their 30’s and 40’s for ripped abs, fast cars and a fast-paced, luxury lifestyle.

I wasn’t as polished and certainly not as glamorous as other female content creators I admired, such as Mari Smith, Denise Duffield Thomas, Marie Forleo and fellow Brits, Nicola Bird and Bernadette Doyle.

I could only be my rather portly, usually makeup-free, 55-year-old self, in my little village in Greece, mostly wearing black as I had only what fit in one suitcase when I left, so I wasn’t even able to dress up much for filming. Besides, I wanted to be ready whenever the location was right and inspiration struck.

But I thought to myself, hopefully, doing this DESPITE all that would inspire other people to have a go, too. It would encourage my ideal clients to start creating and sharing their own social media content, warts and all. It also gave me new content to talk about too, as I was really having to push past some of these personal demons myself, in order to get the content to Phoebe in time, every week.

Step 4: Repurpose Your Content

The first videos started to come back from Phoebe and I loved them. After final approval, she was uploading to YouTube, I was downloading them from there and uploading natively to my Facebook Page and embedding on my blog using the YouTube code. I also embedded the playlist from YouTube into a Vzine page on my website.

What else could we do though? What else? What else? What else?

(This is a great question to ask yourself as an entrepreneur by the way, when you feel yourself at a loose end and feel like you could be doing more to promote your business. What else? What else? However, make sure it’s something that will sit and work for you 24/7/365 and not something you need to do over and over again)

We were already optimising for YouTube SEO, but I heard that tags were becoming less important while the Captions on your videos were becoming more important for SEO, they certainly helped with Facebook viewer count as apparently many people watched videos with the sound off.

I started getting the videos transcribed to use as show notes, captions and even new blog posts on the more writerly orientated platforms like Medium.com.

You don’t have to start with video, by the way.

You need to think about how you will best, most easily and consistently create content each week, because it must be at least weekly. If you create content weekly, it can be spun off in so many ways, to create daily “native” content on each social media platform, in a way that best suits that platform.

For example, picture led content works best on Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest, video content works on YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and especially uploaded “natively” to Facebook Pages, audio content works on iTunes and Anchor, written content works on your blog, Slideshare, LinkedIn and Medium.

Back in the days when I worked with Neil, he’d produce two blog posts a week, because his most easy and pleasurable way to create content was writing.

Then a voice-over artist would read his posts out loud, recording to good quality audio. The audio was top and tailed with previously created show idents and became a podcast on iTunes.

Then we’d pay a lady called Praveena in Pakistan to create Powerpoint slides from the posts, then Cyril in India would put the powerpoint slides together with the audio to create a video, which he uploaded to our channel, ready for our Virtual Assistant Patricia (from Portugal) to finish off and tag for SEO.

Patricia would choose the best four blog posts every month (in terms of which got the most views, shares and comments), then sent them to our graphic designer Matt (found on Upwork but living in Brighton, just down the road from me!). He

would drop them into a magazine template we’d previously created together, choose a Brighton orientated royalty-free picture for the front cover and boom! we had a page-turning digital magazine called Digital Marketing Insider.

This was shared on Issuu.com, iTunes Magazine rack, Amazon Kindle and on our blog / to our email subscribers.

Step 5: Syndicate Your Content

Much of the process of syndicating (sharing) your content can be automated but there are notable exceptions. I’ve experimented with most social media tools but sometimes your content will just perform better (reach more people) if you add it to a social media platform manually. But remember it doesn’t have to be you doing the uploading or adding!

One bit of automated software that I do like is a plugin called NextScripts that auto-shares your new blog posts to Twitter, Facebook (Profile & Page), LinkedIn and Google Plus. This just leaves Instagram & Snapchat to be done manually. Instagram MUST be done manually or you run the risk of being “shadowbanned”.

Another useful tool is Pushcrew, it’s not a plugin but an online service that gives blog visitors the option to be notified of new posts via their browser rather than email. It’s free for desktop users but there’s a small monthly investment for mobile users, which is well worth it, I think. Most online traffic is mobile nowadays.

I also use Manychat to push out notifications of my Facebook Live interviews, podcast recordings and anything else of interest. This has to be carefully set up, to work within Facebook Terms & Conditions, but as long as the person concerned keeps clicking a button to give permission for the next notification, I’ll keep letting them know when I go Live.

I can also notify users of my Clicks & Leads app of new blog posts and when they click to find out more they are automatically directed to the blog to read the post.

Remember your goal is to create one piece of content personally, ideally in less than an hour a week, which then gets spun off into many, many formats, ideally by your outsourced team, but if not, by you, following a simple system.

Then you or your team will use that original content to create daily “native” content on each social media platform, in a way that best suits that platform.

Our blog posts went onto our blog, of course, but were also uploaded to Slideshare.com, our digital magazine was shared on Issuu.com, Amazon and iTunes Magazine Rack.

Some ideas include picture led content on Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest, video content on YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook Pages, audio content on iTunes and Anchor, written content on your blog, LinkedIn and Medium.

You can create a simple social media sharing schedule using a spreadsheet or Google docs, where you set out which bit on content you are going to share on which platform on which day. You can either share on all platforms on the day of publication, or you can create a more complex schedule where you share a different piece of content on each platform, daily. I have supplied both types of

schedule for participants of my ‘5 Day Challenge’ as people have different levels of sensitivity to how often they are comfortable pushing out business-related content.

I think I proved, by the example given above, that you need to be VERY visible online, much more than you might think, or your clients think you are invisible and potential future clients will simply never meet you!

Step 6: Amplify Your Content

In property this technique is called “higher and better use” and it’s where you take a property (or part of a property) and re-purpose it to create greater value. For example, turning a large family home into individual flats or an HMO. Or taking empty space over a garage and adding a spare en-suite bedroom.

It’s a very creative and lucrative process and you can borrow the idea for your marketing, turning by-products of your business process into marketing assets, and marketing assets into extra cash-flow that drops straight to your bottom line profit. Here’s two examples for you.

Through 2012 to 2014 I interviewed a series of successful entrepreneurs, asking them about their back-story, but also asking for the biggest tips they would like to share with other entrepreneurs. Those audio interviews turned into a podcast but because I knew little about iTunes SEO at that time, it didn’t set the world on fire.

However, the content of those interviews is dynamite! I couldn’t let it languish unloved forever, so I started to get the interviews transcribed initially as being “keyword searchable” content for the Clicks & Leads Membership Community.

But while in Greece, inspired by Anthony Tilley’s new podcast “The Solopreneur Show” and his masterful leverage of that content, I started to edit them together into a book. I discovered that it only took 6 interviews of one hour long each, to

made a very substantial book indeed, so then I thought about just including the Mindset, Money and Marketing tips.

However, I personally love, and get a lot of inspiration from, hearing about how entrepreneurs overcome their personal demons and practical obstacles on the road to success, so I decided to leave that part of the interview in the book too.

There are 120 of those interviews, so even if you take out the very few that were not so exciting (because most were interesting even if the interviewee is not so well known) I’ve still got enough content for a series of 10-12 books!

Another great way to enhance the value of your content is to turn it into a podcast or a video podcast. This is something that everyone thinks is very difficult (which enhances the value in your prospects eyes) but which, once set up, is very easy to maintain. Again, it’s something that can be outsourced to a competent VA as it’s a checklist driven, task list operation.

My little weekly vzine is now a video podcast on iTunes and the audio from it makes the audio podcast version. Two new platforms, two new audiences, no extra work. We syndicated it for Android and it’s also available on TuneIn. Our “Own It!” podcast then goes onto Spotify and Stitcher.

While the rise and rise of the popularity of video content, it’s easy to dismiss audio. I’d encourage you not to do that.

For my new video and audio podcast, ‘Poke It: How Business Works’ with Pete Jenkins, we record live using Restream.io, which goes onto about 10 different platforms including YouTube while we are live, then I download the video, edit it a bit, adding captions, music and spoken credits at the beginning and end, then I upload it again to my Drive and my VA takes it from there. So we are gaining the benefits of being shown to potential new listeners while live, then the polished version lives on for ever on various audio and video platforms as well as updating it’s own website and several of my blogs. Check out the show at PokeItPodcast.com

Podcasting is a way to literally get right into the mind of your prospects and customers. It’s a very intimate medium, you can hear every nuance of emotion while listening to a podcast. Our “Poke It!” listeners are very loyal and we encourage them to join our private Facebook group community to discuss the topics introduced on the podcast each week, in more depth.

While I was there, I found this comment where Kathleen Lloyd said “Listened to this one - twice! I always get more out of your podcasts on the second listen” Where else but on a podcast would people consume your content twice?

About 33% of the population are audio orientated and even highly visual types like me need entertaining in situations where you can’t easily watch video. Walking the dog, washing up, working out and even last thing at night or when you can’t sleep, podcasts are a great alternative.

Not to mention the millions and millions of cars rolling off the production lines with in-car entertainment systems – including podcast apps – embedded in them, your prospects are sitting ducks while driving.

Then there’s podcast software hard wired into most new smartphones. There’s no deleting those little purple squares, no sir!

Sounds Expensive! What’s My Investment In All This?

Our whole content creation and syndication process, from blog to digital magazine used to cost Neil and I less than $350 a month. I have a special process that involves working with one excellent General VA, who then recruits and trains a small army of specialist VA’s, each doing just one part of the “Be Everywhere Online” social media marketing process.

Now I work with just two people and first up is my daughter Phoebe, who is my Creative Director and Video Editor. She chooses the music each week, keeps the transitions fresh, and uses my pics in a creative way to make the front screen picture, while all I have to do is create the content and do the SEO part of the show notes each week. Now obviously I pay a decent hourly rate as this is a skilled job but it doesn’t take more than a couple of hours a week, now she’s in the swing of it. I could also have found an overseas editor, there are plenty to be found on Fiverr.com and Upwork.com.

Then Phoebe saves the audio quickly, uploading to Drive for my VA, who also puts the transcription job on Rev.com using the handy YouTube hookup. My VA, who takes care of all of the rest with regards to the podcast / iTunes element of it all.

This is not expensive on an hourly rate basis as it’s task orientated with no creativity required and the more efficient your VA, the less you’ll pay, Mine costs about $12 a week for all that now she knows what she is doing each week.

She’s also in charge of the social media syndication and sharing at the moment, working to a simple weekly schedule, except for Instagram which I do myself.

When I used to do this part, I didn’t enjoy it one bit, so it was not getting done as religiously as I’d like.

What you don’t enjoy doesn’t get done, I find, but anything that is task orientated can be outsourced and I teach that in the ‘5 Day Challenge’..

Evergreen Facebook Ads Campaigns

The other thing I have worked out since is how to use your new social media content to create an Evergreen Facebook Ads campaign that never gets old and tired, never stops performing in terms of conversions, never gets more expensive and never annoys your audience because it’s appearing too often.

I spend between £10 - 30 per day on advertising, which is astonishingly low considering my system is successfully selling monthly memberships of £147 and annual memberships of around £1234.

The Big Question! Does It Work?

It works for me. I am now attracting more members to the Clicks & Leads community and they are much more engaged in the process, coming to work with me already knowing my style and feeling like they know me.

A side benefit is that I’m being invited to appear on more podcasts such as the Dublin based “Breakthrough Brands” with Joe Dalton. I also recorded a video podcast interview with Anthony Tilley for his show “The Solopreneur Show” recently, also appearing in his book of the same name. Here’s the interview. I’m getting more splendid speaking gig invitations, just like the one for The Athena Network Annual Conference and I’m off to Brisbane to speak for 100 committed Amazon entrepreneurs in June.

I get much more traction on my Facebook Page, with shares, likes and comments on the video content than anything else.

My inbox is filling up with questions, requests for help and those enquiries are coming pre-sold. One high-level enquiry recently ended with “How best can I work with you?”

You can’t ask for better than that from your marketing efforts, can you?

Not only that, but I’ve created a new source of income from teaching this process in a 6-week video course, to other time-strapped entrepreneurs, authors, coaches & consultants who are sick of being invisible to their potential future clients or customers. Many of them stay on, having got used to having a mentor / coach who actually tests things on herself first!

So my original goal of filling up my membership site and creating recurring income while being free to travel and live where I want to, is being served very well indeed.

My travels and life experiences feed into the content of the vzine each week so it’s a rather nice virtuous circle.

Does it work for my clients? Yes, it does. I have so many success stories - everyone who goes through my system and STICKS TO IT reports amazing results. Doors open, connections are made, sales happen at high ticket price points. Check out all the many testimonials my clients share here and if you want to see specific testimonials for the “Be Everywhere Online system”, just click here. Word gets around and my clients are coming via word of mouth now as well as from my own marketing.

My latest client, Roger “Dodge” Woodall, is the founder of Bournemouth 7’s, a massive sports and music festival attracting over 30,000 fit party types every year, came to me when Covid-19 hit. Obviously, his business was potentially in ruins, as the Festival was cancelled for 2020 and he’s still not sure about 2021. He had a team of twelve people and a multi-millionare lifestyle to maintain but how to do that? He had to pivot his business fast.

Worse, he’d just come off a one year social media detox! He had no personal following or brand, as such. His mailing list was all based around the festival, so very much ‘business to consumer’.

After a couple of sessions, we realised that the ‘fastest route to the money’ for Roger was to create a training course for people who wanted to go into event

organising of any kind. Club promotion, weddings & anniversaries, launch events, fashion shows, festivals, you name it, Roger had done it.

But first, he needed to build an audience online so he’d have someone to sell his course to! He needed to find out what, exactly, that audience wanted, so that he could tailor his course to suit, as well as including all the things that new event organisers didn’t know they needed.

We started from scratch, encouraging him to talk ‘to camera’ about his own entrepreneurial journey, from club promoter, to successful sportswear entrepreneur, through to setting up and running Bournemouth 7’s.

Then he reached into his extensive contacts list and started interviewing some of the people he’d met over the years from the worlds of sports and music. Eddie Hearn, James Haskell and Lewis Moody among others. This resulted, within four weeks, in Roger being invited to speak at a prestigious event at a well-known university with a prominent sports presenter. He’s never spoken in public before but he smashed it, with his enthusiasm, passion and never ending font of funny stories.

When he launched his ‘Eventful Entrepreneur’ podcast shortly afterwards, it shot straight to the top of the podcast charts, No 3, behind Tim Ferris and Gary Vaynerchuk. This brought him to the attention of someone who lived just down the road, Harry Rednapp, the legendary football player, then Manager of many UK teams, who went on to become a household name andwin the nation’s hearts in

2018, being awarded the title of King Of The Jungle in “I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here’.

Harry first guested on Roger’s podcast, after Roger told him all he’d learned about podcasting (something Roger freely admits he’d never heard of 12 weeks before!) then as a result of Roger’s freely given help, Harry and his TV Production team invited Roger to co-host Harry’s own podcast and they set up shop in Roger’s brand new Bournemouth recording studio.

That podcast launches in January 2021 so watch this space. I have seen the guest list for the first twelve episodes and it’s amazing! This can only raise Roger’s profile and help the figures on his own podcast.

Roger’s ‘Eventful Entrepreneur’ course launches in the New Year too, with promotion starting in January 2021.

Would You Like More Help?

I hope you found it useful, outlining the process we go through to take one piece of content so that I can be everywhere online in under 2 hours a week.

Throughout this book are Info Boxes which give you details on where you can sign up for my free 5 Day Challenge that goes into the topic in more detail and which gives you a step by step schedule on how to share that content to ‘be everywhere online’.

Group Coaching / Mentoring

At the end of that Challenge, I let you know how you can join my thriving community and training centre Clicks & Leads Academy which includes personal support from me via our cutting-edge app, weekly coaching calls and forum. Anyone who goes through the Challenge to the end also gets a very special discount on the Academy.

Part 2

Marketing For Digital Beginners - How To Convert Your Ideal Client Into A Hot Prospect & Then An Ideal Client

It’s All About You

When I do one of my “Marketing MOT’s” on a business website or marketing materials, one of the first things I look for is a sense of personal identity around that business.

Who is the business owned or run by?

Can I find a photo, a biography, a constantly updated blog, to give me a little bit more info about who I’m going to be doing business with?

You would not believe how many businesses have no clue about who they are owned or run by...no human identity at all, just a corporate feel that is cold and inhuman.

That just will not work nowadays; with the internet getting bigger and bigger (there are apparently more people online on broadband in China than there are ALIVE in the entire USA right now!).

There is a growing need by internet users for a sense of connection, of friendliness, of a global community divided up into small specialinterest tribes getting stronger and stronger. Blood families are becoming more fragmented but friend families are getting bigger and stronger.

We may be more distant geographically, but we are more connected emotionally than ever before.

And you need to realise that this can be “make or break” for your business – just this sense of connection (or lack of it) with your customers. You can gain a competitive advantage just by NOT being afraid to be you, by being proud to be associated with your business.

Because, after all, if you are not proud to be associated with your business, why would your customers want to buy from your business?

Many business owners are reluctant to expose themselves personally to their customers, their sense of privacy shrieks in horror at the idea of “going public” and

having their name, photo and biography on their website, much less splashing themselves all over the internet.

But you have got to get over yourself – that or create an alter ego as the face of your business. Not something I recommend, by the way, unless you really have a good reason to keep your own identity a secret (like personal safety, or confusion if you are already a public figure for example).

You might have a business partner who would feel more comfortable in the limelight, being the face and heart of your business.

But find one you must, as you will need one identity to create profiles on the social network sites and to interact with your existing customers and your potential future customers.

To sum it up, all of your social networking activity should be about building your personal website, which then attracts people to your online presence, where you deliver even more value.

So where do you make your money then, you might ask?

By advertising your own products – specifically by advertising your LEAD product around the outside of the value-driven content.

Banners, text links within your copy, sidebar ads work well, especially with graphics and you should experiment with using all of them.

You can also advertise other people’s digital products and services – and you should, in the early days while you develop your own, but you should follow certain guidelines and I’m going to go into that in a later section of this book.

As soon as you have your own products or services to sell, you should consider moving the ads for other people’s products or services down the page, below the fold, or to a “Recommended Resources” page.

You will also make money from promoting your own, and other people’s products and services to your mailing list, that will grow from people exchanging their name and email for something of value on your website.

It’s All About Your Business

If you are starting from scratch and educating a new market about a new product or service, then attracting actual paying customers can be more of a slow burn. This can be frustrating for some, especially if revenue is needed immediately.

On the other hand, if you have an existing product or service, for which there is already a demand from an educated market, you can generate more revenue online very quickly using this Business Success Secrets system but you need to make sure that all of the parts are in place, and that as much of the process as possible is automated.

This might mean that you are going to be the person who puts it all into place or there needs to be a person at your company who is a bit techie, or a bit design orientated, and who loves to learn new skills in which case they can learn to do all this for you.

Or there needs to be a bit of an investment, and someone at your company who is willing to liaise with a company who can put all this together for you.

I warn you though, it’s a bit of an uphill learning curve and it’s not for the

faint-hearted! There are work and dedication involved but once learned, the system and skills can be used over and over again.

You could use our online marketing system for just one area of your business, then roll it out to other areas if you like your results.

And when you see the results dropping straight to your bottom line, in the form of profit with minimum overhead, you will be so pleased that you learned this new 21st Century way of doing business.

Your USP

Taking your business online is an initially complex but fascinating process and one of the first steps is to develop your USP (unique selling point or unique selling proposition).

What makes you different from the other people doing what you do? What will make your Ideal Future Customer want to do business with you rather than anyone else?

Ideally, your USP should be articulated in 10 words or less, and this phrase is

sometimes called your Mission Statement or Elevator Pitch.

To give you an idea, while it changes regularly, mine is currently:

“Your 21st Century outsourced online marketing department for less than the investment in a part-time secretary”

Your Ideal Future Customer

When you first go into business, either on or offline, in order to make successful sales, you need to ask yourself some crucial questions. I got a few of these from the EXCELLENT business book “Ready Fire Aim” by Michael Masterson and added a couple of my own.

Who is your IDEAL customer?

By which we mean the person who has a burning pain or problem, that your product or service solves or soothes. They must also be able to afford your product or service.

What do they look like, how do they make their money, how do they live their lives, what do they like to do in their spare time?

Where are you going to find your ideal customers?

If you have answered the question about the ideal customer fully, you should have a pretty good idea of where you will be able to find them, but I want you to think specifically where they hang out online. You can reach a great number of people online, whereas if you limit your customer base to your hometown. well, it’s not

going to be so profitable.

If you think that your ideal customer will be hanging out on Google, looking for a solution to their problem or pain, that’s the first place for you to look too.

You may have come across the Google KeyWord Planner Tool , but here it is again for your convenience

https://adwords.google.com/ko/KeywordPlanner/

People either search by the problem or pain, or their perceived solution to the problem or pain.

For example: I’ve got bad spots (keyword “spots” or “bad spots”) or “cure for acne” or “how can I get rid of my spots” or “spot cream” “fast spot relief” (new keyword “acne cure”, “spot relief” “spot cream” or “fast spot relief”)

Google will tell you how many of your ideal customers are searching for you right now and what words they are using, specifically, to search with. You might find that quite motivating!

Which product will you sell them first?

So, by looking at the phrases that are getting the most searches per month, globally or nationally, you will be able to think of things to sell them – and the first one of those is your lead product.

You might have a few free products to give away first, but the important one is the first paid product.

Michael Masterson, in his superb business book “Ready Fire Aim” says that “until you have a lead product that you can sell profitably, to your ideal customer, you don’t have a business.

How much will you charge them for it?

This is an easy one to answer – you test three different price points, and you do that using a simple bit of code, that fires one third of your customers at one sales

page, with a price at X, the second third at a second page with a price at Y, and the final third at a third page with a price point of Z.

How will you convince them to buy it?

Now, this is getting a little more complex, but once you know the elements of a sale, you will do very well.

First up, you will need a longform sales page – and before you groan and say you hate them. we have all tested them and they sell the most so GET OVER IT.

Even if you are going to make one of those gorgeous funky videos to walk your prospect through your offer, you will need to plan that out first and a bit of sales letter writing software is very useful for that, as it makes sure you cover every element and don’t miss anything.

When I’ve written mine, I give it to someone else to pretty it up and get it online, then we link to it from emails, from our website, in our ezine.

Then I read it out loud, turning it into a video with audio, for those who like to watch or listen.

The most important elements are:

Social Proof – this means testimonials from happy customers – video and pictures prove that they are real people and if some of them are well known...so much the better!

Proof - this means specific proof that your product or services do what you say they do.

Reciprocity – If you do something for someone else, like give them lots of great free stuff, they tend to want to do something for you. It’s human nature to want to return the favour.

Risk Reversal – this is your crucially important guarantee and it needs to take all the risk away from the customer and put it onto you.

Scarcity / Urgency – people need a reason to buy now or they will never make a decision.

Sales Aversion

Many business owners suffer from an aversion to selling!

This is crazy as, without sales, your business will die. And if your staff don’t see the boss devoting himself to bringing sales in the door, what will that do to their motivation to sell too?

Everyone in your company should be focused on sales but, as I said in my introduction, if you also focus on a brilliant marketing strategy that includes a strong online presence, then sales will become effortless and almost automatic.

It’s All About Your Social Presence

Isn’t “Social” big news right now. Anyone organising a social media seminar needs to stand back for fear of being buried in the crush. However many are teaching outdated techniques so do beware.

It seems like just about everyone in the business world wants to find out how to harness the power of the millions using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, ideally for free.

Whereas even a few years ago, any “serious” business person would have laughed at you if you had suggested using Social Networking in a business context.

Now, just about everyone uses one social networking site or another, even if just to keep up with distant relatives overseas.

Which social networking sites should you get started with, building your business online?

It might help if you think of each social networking site as a separate community or world if you like, with the inhabitants of that community only rarely venturing outside their own little world.

The great news is that you can hook up each of those separate worlds to reach all of them with your business website message, effortlessly, by using the power of online leverage.

The better news is that you can get started building your business online before you even have a website, product or service of your own!

First of all, you will definitely need a Twitter account, because your Twitter activities are the easiest ways to leverage your online activity. Twitter connects every other social networking world in a very simple powerful way.

You hook your blog/website up to your Twitter account and Twitter updates your

Facebook page, your Linked In profile.....the possibilities are endless. Especially when a tool like Zapier or IFTT gets involved.

That’s why I jumped on it, in about 2006, because I realised the power of leverage – you Tweet once (often from your mobile) and it updates all your other social networking profiles. Of course, they all have their own Apps now.

I would still recommend you put a Google Plus button on your site – it may still affect your Google listings if you don’t have one.

Which social networking profiles do you need initially?

I recommend initially creating a personal Facebook profile, a Facebook Page, Twitter profile and a YouTube profile (called a Channel) and if you – or your ideal future customer are in the corporate / business world you will want a Linked In profile and depending on whether your business lends itself to pictures, Instagram and/or Pinterest too.

Just to give you an idea, here are some stats on Facebook (as of 2016)

With over 500 million users, Facebook is now used by 1 in every 13 people on earth, with over 250 million of them (over 50%) who log in every day. The average user still has about 130 friends, but that should expand in 2011.

The 35+ demographic is growing rapidly, now with over 30% of the entire Facebook user base.

48% of 18-34 year olds check Facebook when they wake up, with 28% doing so before even getting out of bed. The core 18-24 year old segment is now growing the fastest at 74% year on year. Almost 72% of all US internet users are on now Facebook, while 70% of the entire user base is located outside of the US.

200+ million (1/3 of all mobile phone users) access Facebook from a mobile device and 91% of all mobile internet use is “social” related.

Over 700 Billion minutes a month are spent on Facebook, over 200 million people access Facebook via their mobile phone. 48% of young people said they now get their news through Facebook. Meanwhile, in just 20 minutes on Facebook over 1 million links are shared, 2 million friend requests are accepted and almost 3 million messages are sent.

Here are some tips to get you started.

Twitter

1. Put your picture on your profile, include your main keywords or phrases in your description and don’t forget to include a link to the specific page of your website that you want your potential future ideal customers to see first.

   
   

2. Set up your mobile phone so you can Tweet on the go, you will be more likely to use it if you are more of a phone person than a computer person or if you spend lots of time away from your computer.

   
   

3. Tweet on topic – using variations on your most searched keywords or phrases about 80% of the time but don’t sell from Twitter. Include links to your value-driven content on your main website. Occasionally give stuff away via links in your Tweets but concentrate more on using Twitter as a traffic generator and list builder than a marketplace.

   
   

4. Around 20% of the time, share stuff about your personal life, hobbies or interests. You never know when you might attract a customer with the same esoteric interest in feminist scifi, raw food or Texas “No Limits” Hold’em poker.

Facebook

1. On your personal Facebook profile, don't’ accept everyone as friends but direct them to your Facebook Page, this is where you will talk about business.

   
   

2. Create a Facebook Page for your Lead Product, or if you ARE your lead product (such as a speaker or consultant) create a Facebook Page for yourself as a Public Figure. Create an incentive for folks to “like” your page and then sign up to your mailing list. This will be your main focus of activity on Facebook, as you will have the ability to easily contact everyone who “Likes” your page, whereas you can’t do that with your personal profile friends.

   
   

3. Find out how to link your Facebook Page with your Twitter account so it gets regularly updated, as well as importing your new blog posts.

   
   

4. If you can, start sharing business tips using Facebook Live, the easy to use (from your mobile) publishing too. You can download these videos afterwards and upload them to your YouTube channel, get them transcribed in YouTube and then upload the text as captions to Facebook again. Then you can use them as ads, very cheaply indeed.

YouTube

1. Start looking for great videos in your niche and “favouriting” them and adding them to your playlists.

   
   

2. Hook up your YouTube channel to your Twitter account and Facebook page, so that every time you favourite or playlist a video, it gets broadcast to your followers in the other communities.

   
   

3. Create a really great channel profile, and either choose a channel name that says what it does on the tin. (mine is YouTube.com/UKMarketingMentor) or you use your own name.

   
   

4. Start adding client testimonials, interviews with your favourite experts or clients or even “how to” videos of your own. Some of my simple “how to” videos have been viewed up to 25,000 times.

It’s All About Your Website

What do I mean when I talk about your website? Many people are getting confused now as we are largely using blog software to build all of our websites. Is it a blog or is it a website? Whatever it is, it’s the place where all of that traffic, generated by your personal online activities on social networking sites, comes to first.

This is why I called one of my now-defunct consulting companies wheelhouse.marketing – because I do still think of your website as the hub in the middle of your cartwheel of marketing activities.

Your website should be the centre of all your activities online, it’s your business shopfront if you like. It’s your business address online.

1. The first point of your website is to collect the contact details of your potential future customers.

   
   

2. The second point of your website is to set out, clearly and simply, your solution to the challenge or pain felt by your ideal potential future customer.

   
   

3. The third point of your website is to allow your potential future customers to have a chance to get to “know, like and trust” you via your blog and by linking out to your

social media profiles.

People buy from people, and they especially like to buy from people they know, like and trust. As I’ve said before, so many websites are impersonal, cold, impossible to navigate and even downright distant. It’s almost as if the owners are scared to be associated with their own products or services.

You need to be brave about letting some of your personality and character shine through your website.

The internet is popularly thought to distance people – stop them using the phone and face to face meetings, and many traditional business owners or salespeople don’t like it for that reason, use it that much or trust it particularly.

However, 35 million people on broadband can’t be wrong (Sunday Times, March 2006), and it is growing exponentially.

The same article said that it was predicted that there would be 35 million Chinese people on broadband within 5 years.

In 2007, the value of online business was estimated to be worth $7.6 trillion, but with the exponential growth of the web overall, especially with the advent of

web-enabled mobile devices, the value of that business in 2011 is nearly impossible to calculate accurately so how do you get your hands on some of that revenue?

How do you differentiate your business from all the others?

By being uniquely you, by showing your “youness” in your business and allowing that to show through via your web business and blog.

Many people feel that by showing their personality they are somehow being less professional. But consider this, many huge corporations now run blogs. Google even allow Google staff to contribute on their blog.

Richard Branson has a blog, Stephen Fry has a GREAT blog. Both have huge followings on Twitter. Do you think that when Stephen goes to negotiate his next TV or book deal he’s at an advantage due to the huge amount of attention he can command? Of course he is. Check him out at StephenFry.com or Twitter.com/StephenFry

Blog software when used to build your website, allows your customers to get access to you and your company in a very friendly informal way. It enables them to comment on your company (you can moderate comments) and reply to those

comments.

Your website might be your existing business website, except that most traditional business websites will not be capable of acting as a powerful online presence just yet. Websites like this will need a blog bolted on the side, as it were.

(And be warned, most traditional web designers neither see the need for such a presence or want to get involved in setting one up (and often don’t know how to)).

One way around it might be to have a personal blog website, that is then linked to your business website and back again.

It might be a blog installed in a subdirectory of your business website, linked via your sites’ navigation and back again.

I’m not going to go into the details of how to install a blog website, either on your own name domain, or a subdirectory of your site, because there are many videos on how to do that on YouTube and in the Resources section at the end, I’ve recommended someone who can do it all for you.

If you are going to do it yourself, I will just recommend you use the free software available from WordPress.org or you can quickly install your WordPress blog via

the Control Panel of your existing hosting (look for WordPress, Blog Installation or Fantastico).

Why do you need a WordPress blog website?

The variety of looks that you can achieve (via plugin Themes) is amazing and your blog can easily be customised to look like your existing site

The search engines love blog websites due to the “constantly updated relevant content”

Blogs enable you to express your personal opinion – and you should! This enables your potential future customers to get to know like and trust you.

Blogs enable your customers to interact with you, using the comments box on any individual blog post. This creates a powerful connection with your business and you get valuable feedback.

You can integrate a WordPress blog with a mailing list effortlessly

You can find a Plugin that will give you just about any functionality you desire on your blog website. From Google Analytics to contact forms, from sidebar widgets to

revolving 3D clouds of topics, from Sexy Bookmarks that enable your readers to spread your content around the web (gaining you valuable backlinks) to Twitter toolbars that enable you and your visitors to tweet from your blog.

Because when it comes to building your tribe (Step 7), you are going to need some membership site software and in our opinion and after extensive research and heartache with trying all the software out there, that is WP Wishlist, that bolts right onto your existing WordPress blog website.

Social Proof

Your website should have examples of what’s called “social proof”, real live case studies and ideally testimonials of real live people who have benefited from your product or service.

Make them specific stories and not only include outcomes but how those people felt about the outcomes.

It’s best if the folks that supply testimonials are willing to be contacted – it’s a bit of a challenge with the Money Gym as members often don’t want people to know

about their money and how much more of it they have!

Always include full names if possible, website addresses (it’s also nice way to drive traffic to your clients’ websites too) and contact details if the customer is willing – the phone is best rather than email as it minimises the spam problem.

You can include testimonials and case studies in your ezine, on your blog, on your site, in your LinkedIn profile, in your press releases. maximise everything you do.

Traffic, Traffic, Traffic

The next thing you need is traffic to your website. There are many easy and affordable ways to drive traffic to your website without spending a fortune on any of the overpriced services offered out there. I get over 500 ++ potential customers every week visiting and it’s growing without spending a penny on SEO (search engine optimisation).

Offline

Offline, you can do various inexpensive yet effective things to promote your website and drive traffic to it.

Use your Business Stationery – particularly your letterhead, invoices and business cards. Make sure your business card addresses the pain that your ideal client is feeling. Make sure it speaks to them not shouts about you. Put your photo on your card – that really helps people remember you.

Put something on the card to intrigue the reader and encourage people to go to the website – like “Visit our website for a free “White Paper” PDF report on. ” You

don’t even have to write the report yourself but can also use a ghostwriter from www.Upwork.com

Make sure your business stationery is current. You would be amazed at how many networking events I go to, where people give me their cards, and the first thing I do when I get home is to look at their website to find out more about them, and it’s not there! Or it’s the wrong web address! Or there is just a holding page or even worse an “under construction” sign! And you need your QR Code on your business card now.

Networking is great for building advocates for your business. It’s a bit

nerve-wracking if you think you are going to get a sale but if you go into each event, thinking that your only goal is to add value, help other people and share resources, it becomes a lot easier.

Your ideal outcome from networking is to enable people to know what you do and who your ideal client is, and for them to have experienced some of your expertise. However, networking is very time intensive considering the numbers of people involved, so you need to remember that each of those people knows another thirty odd people, then it will feel more worthwhile.

Speaking to crowds of your ideal clients is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your site. It’s the USA’s most popular phobias incidentally, but if you can overcome that fear, speaking in public is a great way to become a perceived expert, to get in front of a lot of people at once, and you can offer an incentive from the stage to encourage people to visit the site and subscribe to your list.

PR is even better – reach large numbers of people, very inexpensively. You can learn how to do it yourself, very effectively. Paula Gardner from www.DoYourOwnPR.com is brilliant at this and you can put a Press Release up online at www.PRWeb.com for free.

All the newspaper, magazines and tv researchers use PR Web when they are looking for ideas or experts – it’s indexed by the search engines on an hourly basis and keyword searchable. One of my Money Gym clients was invited onto a Channel 4 programme as an “expert” within 3 weeks of putting up her first press release on PR Web.

Online

Moving online now, most people would say that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is essential. And they pay heavily for the service.

I largely ignore most of the traditional methods espoused as essential – as far as I’m concerned SEO is a bit of a black art, the search engines are always changing the way they index sites, and it’s all too slow and time-consuming. I would never dream of paying hundreds of pounds a month for such a service.

We ensure quick traffic by using social media Pay Per Click (PPC) while setting the website up for efficient indexing by the search engines by utilising the following tried and tested methods.

Meta tags are small bits of code that sit in your index page HTML source code and tell the search engines what your site is called, what it’s about, how often to come

back and crawl your site, and what your relevant keywords are. Google apparently has stopped paying attention to tags but the other search engines certainly still do.

The little entries you see when you do a search on Google are exactly what those sites have entered in their metatags and it’s one of the most overlooked areas when getting a website built. Then people wonder why they are not listed in the search engines.

Just go to any website and click on the background part of the site, and click “view source”. You will see meta tags there (if the site has them). If you have a site yourself, right click on your index page to see if you have meta tags, a meta description or not, and if not, fire your web designer!

Try a search on Google for Nicola Cairncross and you will see how powerfully my sites have been indexed over the years due to having simple metatags and constantly updated relevant content.

Frequently updated and relevant content also drives your site higher in the search engines.

Even if you have an e-commerce site, we find that attaching a Blog (the word actually comes from the phrase “web log” and just means web-based diary) to your

site, and linking back from your blog to your site, creates a virtuous circle that the search engine spiders can move around. Every time you create a new “post” on your blog, the blog software “pings” the blog directories, alerting them (and the search engines) that there is new, relevant content on your site.

Local Business

Most town halls have a CDRom or DVD based directory of local businesses which you can buy for a very small amount of money. You can then send a personal and direct email to each of those companies, with a short textonly message, telling the recipient what you can do for them (think benefit or outcome to the recipient rather than the dull old features of your product or service).

Encourage them to click through to your site by offering a free “White Paper” report, to be able to attend a free teleseminar or preview evening or even to enter a competition. Team up with another local business to offer a prize of a meal out, a case of fine wine or a weekend away – it benefits both businesses and costs pennies.

Google Local / Maps

Google is aiming to make their search results even more relevant by making them more local.

You will have noticed if you do a search – perhaps “business marketing Brighton” that they are starting to show their Google Places Pages first, even above the organic search results.

Google Places have merged with Google Maps and, as Google know where you live/work from your ISP address (try scrolling down the search results page and look on the left – you will see your location listed!) they are aiming to deliver relevant LOCAL results for you.

It looks like Google are aiming to be the Yellow Pages of the online world, however most businesses have not even claimed their Google Places page, much less optimised it.

Going Mobile

Digital Buzz reported in April 2011 that over 1 x billion of the worlds’ 4 billion plus mobiles phones are now smartphones.

In 2014, it was estimated that mobile internet usage will overtake desktop internet usage and already in 2011, more than 50% of all “local” searches are done from a mobile device.

Smartphones are replacing desktop computers and laptops while people are on the go, but by watching my teenagers (who both have and use constantly their smartphones) I see them still using a desktop to play online games and a laptop to sit and watch TV, chat and upload pictures on Facebook.

So the “old fashioned” internet content is still very much relevant – as it is for people like me, approaching 50, who find it too hard to browse the internet on a smartphone for any length of time.

However, age apart, 86% of mobile users are watching TV and video while using a mobile phone, 200+ million (1/3 of all users) access Facebook from a mobile device and 91% of all mobile internet use is “social” related.

What does all this mean for you? You need a “mobile friendly” landing page (easily created if you have a WordPress blog site) which gives the smartphone user an easy way to give you their details in return for a special offer. Then you can market to them again when they are out and about, or at home on their laptop.

Pay Per Click

Pay per click is the “big daddy” of driving traffic to your site. It’s a cross between an art and a science and the good news is that it’s very easy to learn how to create an effective ad campaign. I recommend “The Definitive Guide To Google Adwords” by Perry Marshall.

If you want to learn how to do Facebook Ads, I have a great video training course which is constantly updates and which you can invest in at ClicksAndLeads.com

And then you can attract traffic to your site within 15 minutes and you typically pay about 5 cents per click (always set your campaign in US $ rather than UK £ it’s much cheaper!

So if you start from the average well-performing website statistics; your site needs in excess of 1000 visitors to convert 100 of those visitors to your mailing list and make 1 sale of a low priced product – perhaps an ebook at around £30.

If you are paying 5 cents a click, 1000 clicks will cost you $50 (around £27) so one sale will cover your advertising costs.

But the real sting in the tail – and the part that most website owners miss is that you have acquired 100 warm leads to follow up, essentially for free!

One of my Facebook Ads clients is enjoying clicks for 7p and leads for around 1012p right now. £30 a day is bringing her over 2000 leads a week!

Turning Visitors Into Potential Future Customers

The real challenge with most websites is that they are just too confusing for the visitor.

Couple this with the fact that most sites shout “me, me, me” when all the visitor wants to know is “do these people “get” my problem, can they help me and what will it cost me?” you have a recipe for disaster.

Most websites are either created by web designers (who are often ex-graphic designers obsessed with design or worse, Flash!) or by techies (too hung up on the software). They are not created by internet marketers and they are NOT making

money online.

So they don’t know how to do that or how to help you do that.

Internet marketing is a lot like direct mail, except that it’s much cheaper and instead of converting at an average of 1% it converts at an average of 10%. Like direct mail, it requires a knowledge of basic buyer psychology, copywriting skills, technical skill and the ability to track and test results.

Your website should speak directly to your ideal client. Not any old visitor, but to your ideal client. Your most profitable client, defined as one who not only needs your solution to their problem, but who can afford to pay for it.

Your web business should offer a short list of options on each page – no more than three. “Give us your name and email” or “buy something” or “click for more info”.

This is called the “most wanted response” online.

Your visitors should be very easily able to find what they are looking for – within five clicks ideally. They should be able to discover your range of products (no more than three initially) find out what they cost and get very clear instructions on how to buy or what to do next.

Your “Terms & Conditions” should be accessible easily from your site and you must draw your customers’ attention to them prominently, with a notice to the effect that, by buying your product or hiring your services, they are agreeing to those terms.

Your web business must be “sticky” thus encouraging the 90% of visitors who left without taking action, to return again, giving you another chance to capture their details.

Stickiness can be achieved by adding Free Resources, Articles, relevant new content and making it interactive. Again, blogs are brilliant for allowing you to add all of the above easily and regularly – thus helping in your search engine positioning again. Even large corporations are adding blogs to their sites – it gives the CEO to have a unique insight into, and feedback from, the customer on the ground.

Creating a community around your web business is a very sticky thing to do.

Set up a free Google Group for your visitors and many will join that, rather than giving you their name and email, giving you another chance to interact with them and let them know that you have the solution to their problem.

Connect your ideal customers with a group of likeminded people and they will thank

you and your good standing will be enhanced in their eyes.

Email support and discussion groups enable people to interact, swap resources, hints, tips and recommendations.

It’s All About Your Product & Sales Funnel

Most businesses start out with just one product or service and then develop further offerings down the line. By having a simple “Product Funnel” which moves from Free to Low Cost to Medium Cost to High Cost, you can move your list gently through the process, enabling them to say yes, and yes, and yes again.

You need a product funnel, to move folks from “free to fee” products, in order to take these new leads you have generated and turn them into customers.

People are very scared of committing themselves to a meeting or a purchase straight away, especially a higher ticket so you need to make it a gentle effortless process with the customer choosing when to move forward to the next stage.

The whole purpose of a product funnel is to move your mailing list subscriber gently from suspect to prospect to customer, in a series of natural steps, where the person at the other end is in control of the process.

They self-select themselves as your ideal future customer!

The components of the product funnel are often similar, even for very different

businesses.

Here is a suggested sequence of products for consultants or authors for example:

1. Downloadable PDF or audio report

   
   

2. Regular ezines and blog entries

   
   

3. Eprogramme delivered via autoresponder

   
   

4. Social proof in the form of testimonials

   
   

5. Video recordings of powerpoint presentations or workshops

   
   

6. Personal contact via a Free TeleSeminar or real world Seminar

   
   

7. 1:2:1 Complementary Call – call it a Strategy Call or Consultation

   
   

8. Product, Service or Weekend Workshop

   
   

9. More expensive Product, Service or Weekend Bootcamp

   
   

10. Membership site or Inner Circle type continuity programme

The product funnel can be spread out over your chosen time frame, so it can be as short as a month, or as long as a year.

We once calculated that it took our Money Gym Gold clients an average of 10 months to move through our product funnel, from the moment they subscribed to the moment they became Gold clients. Some bought immediately, some took 5 years but the average was 10 months.

And, of course, an extended product funnel increases the life of your ideal customer and their value to you.

It’s All About Your Greatest Asset

What your business needs to succeed is a mailing list. An ever-growing, personally owned, responsive, great, big, fat, targeted mailing list.

A mailing list of many thousands of people is the goal.

Having said that, some people say that email marketing may be dying and looking at the way my young adults behave around email, I would not be surprised at all. They only interact with email when they absolutely have to.

So I’m turning my attention to building a list of people who subscribe to my Free App and I’m also working on learning how Messenger Bots works.

This list is not only the place that your future business is going to come from, but it’s an asset in its own right. People in business regularly rent or buy leads for anything from £1 a name to upwards of £50 a name depending on the market sector the list is in.

Not that you will be renting or selling your list of red-hot responsive potential ideal future customers – oh no!

It’s far too valuable to YOU for that.

A responsive large mailing list adds to the intrinsic value of your business, along with your systems; making your business more appealing to potential investors, or your exit strategy more attractive to any potential purchaser.

(You do have an exit strategy, don’t you?)

Ownership of your own list not only ensures that you never have to pay for leads, but you can create another source of income by crosspromoting to your list offers from complementary, noncompeting businesses.

Almost best of all is that by creating your own list, you can market any future products or services to them, completely free of charge.

That’s free marketing and advertising and it is almost unheard of in traditional businesses.

Building a Great List

The first thing you need to do is collect names and email addresses of your suspects (or “potential future customers” as I prefer to call them) in return for something of value. This is called “subscribing to your mailing list”.

Free reports, audio, webinars or even free teleseminars are great for that.

You probably gave me your name and email in return for this book and I really hope you enjoy it, as I put a lot of work into it, to make it as valuable to you as possible.

You have to deliver real value or people feel conned and unsubscribe.

This subscribing process needs to be effortless and easy, for you, as well as for your “potential future customers”. They need to be able to subscribe easily, change their information easily (people do change emails regularly) and unsubscribe themselves easily (people do change jobs).

Trust me, you do not want to be doing this manually and it puts people off subscribing and annoys them intensely when they can’t unsubscribe automatically.

The other thing to think about here is your Privacy Policy. You need one, it needs to be public on your website (apparently if you have one, along with a Terms of Use, it helps with Search Engine Optimisation as well) and it needs to be carefully worded.

The next thing you need to do is to collect more contact information such as addresses and phone number, in return for something of even greater value but still being offered for free.

After someone subscribes, you need an automated follow-up system and this can be done with a series of prewritten emails called autoresponders. They go out to the subscriber at predetermined intervals and can be customised with the customer’s name for example.

Our top tips for autoresponders are to send a message containing information of value every day for the first two weeks, then every three days, then every week.

Only market one thing to the subscriber in the first series of auto-responders, and this should be your next free product.

Keep things simple. When people “buy” your free product, you can set it up so that they are unsubscribed from the first autoresponder series, and subscribed to the next one, marketing the low price item next.

You can also schedule automated broadcasts to go to some prospects or to all of your mailing list. Weekly ezines are sent this way, and special offers.

Follow Up

How frequently should you contact your potential future customers?

A lot more often than you will feel comfortable with at first, that’s for sure. The key

is to be sure you are delivering value rather than selling to them.

In The Money Gym, my previous business, I created a 101-day Financial Intelligence eprogramme which I sold from my site initially. It was what turned out to be a lifechanging programme, distilling the wisdom of many, many wealth creation books, woven in with my own experiences on my wealth creation journey and scattered with little exercises to do along the way.

I was looking for a way to set up an autoresponder series for new visitors to the site, without doing any more work myself, and suddenly realised that I should just give away the Financial Intelligence 101 series. 101 emails every three days. wow! That would remind potential future customers about the Money Gym

for nearly a whole year!

Popular internet marketing wisdom says that, in the early days, a series of autoresponders should go out contacting new subscribers every day for the first 14 days, then reduce the frequency to every three or four days, then every week, then at least once a month.

Then you can add in broadcasts, at least fortnightly and ideally weekly, with an ezine full of value, or at the very least a snippit of an article of interest to your ideal

future customer, featured on your blog, linking back to your blog.

You could also be adding content to your blog at least weekly. You don’t have to write it yourself, you can use free online resources such as www.EzineArticles.com or even link to articles in the online versions of the daily newspapers.

As long as you link back to the source site and credit the author, there is not usually a problem. The more links incoming from other sites a website has, the more “important” a site is deemed to be by the search engines, so you are actually doing the other site a favour!

If you can create original content, or pay a ghost-writer from www.Upwork.com to do it for you, and your content is picked up and used by other sites, this will also improve your site’s search engine ranking.

Which format should your broadcast be sent out in?

We have recently conducted a very interesting survey of our 5,000 odd subscribers. The results were very interesting and flew in the face of internet marketing wisdom. They wanted an HTML magazine format ezine.

Bear in mind that there are over 5,000 subscribers, divided up into three mailing

lists covering wealth creation, internet marketing, restaurant owners and work at home mums.

The ezine has been going since 1999, it’s been businesslike, it’s been very personal, it’s been through several rewebsites and even stopped completely for six months. However, whenever I go to events, several people always come up and introduce themselves and tell me that they how much they love the ezine.

I regularly make thousands of pounds in commissions via the ezine, by gently recommending events, products and services that I already use or intend to go to myself.

To date, in 23+ years, I have never rented or sold my list to anyone else, but I do often recommend suitable products or services and often earn a handsome commission for that.

It’s All About Your Tribe

Membership sites are big business online. Eventually, you might be able to turn your community into a membership site – if your customers have common interests and concerns for example.

You offer a free entry level, then two further tiered membership levels. One at anything from £5 / $100 a month, and one at around £49 / $497 per month.

Membership software comes in many forms – paid for and free and our favourite is a WordPress Plugin called WP Wishlist. If you can build your mailing list to 10,000 plus, then it’s time to think about a membership site.

17,000 members giving you £5 a month = £1.2 million per year. That’s an extra stream of income not to be sniffed at.

But more importantly, it speaks to those of your customers who want a community and who feel really connected with you and you will find that they turn into an army of raving fans if you deliver value within your membership site.

Lots of people worry about the amount of content that they will have to deliver to give value, but it can be as simple as picking just one or two of the following suggestions:

1. Monthly ezine or printed magazine

   
   

2. Membership of a Facebook group or a Google email group

3. Membership of an online private forum (another WordPress plugin)

   
   

4. Q&A / How To video a month, using a camcorder or Camtasia to record your screen

5. Telephone interview a month, with an expert of interest, recorded for download as MP3

6. Transcripts of any of the above (for people like me who can’t handle audio and like to read)

   RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

   
   

   ** Disclaimer: Some of these links are affiliate links, you'll pay no more but I might make some commission if you buy. I use all these tools myself so can recommend them personally.

   
   

   All you need to do, in order to create your own automated marketing machine online, is the following steps, in pretty much this order:

   
   

   • Buy a domain name at Namecheap.

     
     

   • Buy the best, low cost hosting at BlueHost (it’s always good to keep your domain & hosting separate) and BlueHost is one which I used to use, before I moved to the "Rolls Royce" of WordPress hosting, WPEngine.

     
     

   • Install a WordPress blog on your new hosting, in one click, from the control panel in your hosting (ask Support, they'll help you do it on the spot)

     
     

   • Buy a nice premium theme from somewhere like StudioPress – your site will look more professional.

     
     

   • Add valuable content to your blog regularly everything from YouTube videos to podcast content, repurposed and leveraged, in the way I share in this free video.

   • Connect up Facebook Page, Twitter & Instagram accounts and share links to your blog content on them (use Buffer)

     
     

   • Create a Lead Magnet (free gift) or buy a PLR (Private Label Rights) one to use.

     
     

   • You'll want to be looking at ClickFunnels now, to go through their “One Funnel Away” training before you create your Optin Pages, Thank You Pages, Sales Pages and Webinar Registration pages. Nothing I have ever used converts as well as ClickFunnels does.

     
     

   • Set up a mailing list using the very sexy list-host / automation software GetDrip which at only $1 a month for up to 100 leads (it trounces MailChimp as it has so many more features based on what actions people take).

     Both integrate with ClickFunnels.

     
     

   • Get a pop-up lightbox on your site (GetDrip makes it easy if you use them!), or you can use the excellent OptInMonster with other mailing list hosts, then build and nurture that mailing list with great follow up emails.

     
     

   • Create a low-cost product of your own ($7 to $27 usually audio or video content is quick and easy) or recommend other people's products (this is called affiliate marketing). This offer weeds out the people who are willing to buy, from those who are just seeking free stuff all the time.

   • You can get a great starter training in affiliate marketing specifically here (5 free videos), by going through the ClickFunnels “One Funnel Away” traning - yes, they teach you how to learn how to become a great online marketer by promoting their own software first. I recommend this training very highly.

     
     

   • Create a higher ticket item product (or find one to sell as an affiliate) and offer that to the people who buy Product 1.

     
     

   • Create a series of follow up emails for those who don't buy, offering them great low-cost products from other people. Create a series of follow up emails for those who did buy, offering them your next product.

     
     

   • Start split testing the headlines and calls to action on your own key opt-in and sales pages (without having to change your own web pages) using a tool like Improvely

     
     

   • Share your learning, which boosts your own online income from sales by teaching others to make money online in the way that you have. People want to learn from people they know, like and trust.

CONCLUSION

I really hope that you have found this book useful and that you will put some (or all!) of the strategies outlined into practice.

I’ve poured my heart and soul into this book but if you find any mistakes, or you have any suggestions on how it could be improved, I would love to hear from you

Especially if you take action on any of my suggestions – I want to hear how you get on.

Email me at Nicola [at] NicolaCairncross.com and tell me all about it.

What Next?

Well, obviously, I wrote this book for a reason, above and beyond the desire to share some (hopefully) valuable information. I would be failing in my job as a marketer if I did not mention that reason. So here it is. If you like what you read here, and you would like to work with me further, then, of course, I would love to work with you.

FREE 5-Day Challenge Reveals How Business Owners, Experts & Authors Can Streamline, Leverage & Outsource Their Social Media Content In Order To Start To Attract Their Ideal Customer Or Client

Join the "Clicks & Leads 5-Day Challenge" and fix your lack of leads and prospects by using this one simple, but often overlooked strategy which is fun, easy, efficient, authentic and, best of all, will start to attract your ideal clients (while you get on with what you do best - running your business).

If you would like to join in our next FREE 5-Day Marketing Challenge, all you need to do is visit https://ClicksAndLeads.com/5days and enter your details.

We’ll automatically enrol you in the next Challenge and let you know when it

starts.

We also offer a Mentoring Programme at Clicks & Leads Academy at two levels, to suit all budgets.

I’m really looking forward to hearing from you!

Warm regards, Nicola

P.S. In the meantime, you might like to check out my first book “The Money Gym”.

It’s been described as ‘...the Kiyosaki for Brits!’ and has changed many people’s lives around their personal finances, beliefs and attitudes to money.

Turn the page to see the front covers of all of my books.