Sharing my $201,221 roadmap
Marketing Breakdown: Exactly what you need to do to get to your first $50K
Good morning young and eager mind!
Today, I’m gonna share exactly what I do to earn $201,221 (2022) so you can steal the macro strategy and implement it on your own.
Gonna try and keep it brief.
At the most fundamental level, you only have two jobs: get in front of people and make an offer.
You can take two paths (not mutually exclusive) to achieve that: Warm and Cold.
Let’s start with warm:
This is what I mean when I say Farming. You plant a seed, nurture it, then you have a lot of food a year from now.
Fundamental model
It describes the “warm” process of building an audience.
Get on your audience’s radar (Not randos.)
Get them to view you as an authority on the problems they’ve got
Present them with an irresistible offer
As I said, I wanna keep this brief but I do wanna point out a few things:
An audience is not the same as an audience of buyers. You want a group of people who view you as an authority and who’re willing to pay you to have their problem solved.
In order to get on people’s radar, make content that can go “viral”.
To get them to view you as an authority, find ways to deepen the relationship. E.g. a substack allows you to be in their inbox daily.
The best way to get viewed as an authority is to GET THEM RESULTS! If I can help you package your expertise and make a few hundred dollars, you’ll immediately trust me.
A channel is merely a marketing tactic in order to get on people’s radar. Different channels work for different people, industries, and personalities. That said, in my opinion, I think YouTube is the most effective Top Of Funnel channel for expertise-based solopreneurs. Unlike every other social, YouTube actively helps you find an audience if your content is good by promoting it. In every other platform, that’s pretty much your job. (One more interesting thing is that YouTube is the only channel that has a non-trivial payout for your marketing aka your content.)
You can get to your first $100K on one channel. Forget about omnichannel marketing ( = being everywhere).
To make an irresistible offer, find out WHAT PEOPLE DESPERATELY WANT TO BUY! IT’S NOT ABOUT MAKING PEOPLE WANT WHAT YOU WISH TO SELL. That’s the difference between an artist and an entrepreneur.
Another great technique in order to build Authority is Answer bombing or Farming In Other People’s Garden (use those terms interchangeably) which I wrote about here.
Next up, Cold. Or what I call Fishing
How do you start with outreach?
You’ll need to identify a lead pool. It’s exactly what it sounds like; a “pool” full of leads.
If you’ve got 1000 leads, you qualify them and are left with 400 prospects, then you 50 become customers. So leads are the “raw ingredients” before people are qualified. These numbers are just to help you understand the nomenclature.
How do you do that?
Answer these two questions:
Q1: “Who already has the audience I wish to serve?”
Q2: “Where do the people I wish to serve hang out online?”
Example:
Q1: Daniel Vassallo has 155K followers so I can hit up his audience. That’s a cold lead pool. If I hit up all of my own followers, that’s a warm lead pool (conversion will be higher). If I hit up previous customers, that’s the hottest lead pool and these people will be the easiest to convert.
Q2: The subreddit R/entrepreneur is a place where a lot of my customers hang out. That’s where you could reach out to people.
You they stereotypical marketing question people mindlessly throw out?
“Where are your customers?”
That’s not a gimmicky exercise. You need to be able to answer that with an exact URL! This can’t be vague. This is also why your audience must be specific which we talked about yesterday in BLOW up your inbox with leads.
What do you say to them?
This methodology is called fishing because you go to a pond (lead pool), put bait in your fishing rod, and wait! And if enough of the right fish are there and they like your bait, a few will bite.
So what you do is present them with your “bait.” Fish don’t care about what you find tasty. They care about what they find tasty. It’s about them not you. Don’t give them M&M’s, give them worms.
I know this sounds stupid and yet 99.99999% of people fail because they insist on giving fish THEIR favorite food. Stop being entitled and work with the way people are instead of how you wish they were.
Bait has 3 parts:
Intro
Positioning statement
Call To Action
I wrote about the 5 positioning statements yesterday and that will be the most important part of your outreach.
Qualify/Diagnose
Next up is qualify and/or diagnose.
If you’ve got very few leads, don’t qualify. By the nature of qualifying leads, you’re gonna get fewer customers.
The reason why I qualify is that I don’t wanna jump on a call with you if your budget is $10. I don’t wanna talk to brokies, they can just use my free content or buy my eBooks. They (not always) tend to be the worst kinds of people to work with. It’s insulting to demand a Bently for Fiat prices.
Btw, one of my maxims: “The easiest way to increase your revenue is to do the exact same work for a higher caliber client.”
I wanna talk to people that got a budget of thousands or tens of thousands so they can easily afford my services.
But if you gotta eat, you gotta eat. Your priority should be to earn a lot. Fast! So you can start to be picky about whom you work with.
Strive to have 50-100% more prospects than you can handle. If you can handle 20 clients, have at least 30/40 on the waiting list. That way, you’ll never have the stench of desperation, it’ll be easier to act according to your fiduciary duty (more on that in a second), and you can exclusively work with clients who’re so fucking cool, you’d pay to work with them. Because of the situation I’m in, I’m able to reject prospects simply because our personalities don’t fit. If I can’t hang with you, I don’t wanna work with you. You can’t do that if you need 10 clients to survive and you’re at 3.
Once people say they’re interested and you’ve qualified them (or not if you decide to skip it) the next step would be Diagnosing.
This is something all noobs skip and zero experts skip.
You have an ethical, and moral obligation as well as a fiduciary duty to act in your prospect’s best interest.
Read that sentence again.
This implies that if they jump on a call with you and spend 60 minutes, that must be worth their time even if they don’t become a client.
If you do not do this, you’re committing malpractice and should lose your “fictional” license (which unfortunately doesn’t exist in our field).
What do you do during a diagnosis?
You don’t shoot the shit or try to find surface-level commonalities to build rapport.
Your job is to find out:
Where they are right now: A “What hurts?”
Where they wanna be: B “Their desired outcome”.
What they’ve already tried to get from A to B
How serious they are? Is it really, really, really, a painful problem? (Remember what I said yesterday about “They’ve tried everything under the sun and you are their last resort.”
What’s their budget. (If you didn’t qualify them.)
If they’re a good fit, your irresistible offer is the last step.
You simply offer to get them from A to B and do your best to remove as much risk as possible. E.g. a money-back guarantee.
That’s it.
Of course, the devil is in the details. But this is MORE than enough to get you to your first $50,000- $100,000 in revenue.
Don’t be an Amateur, capital A. Don’t keep consuming more and more information. Get off your fucking ass and get to work. And when you hit $50K and need the black belt nuances, then and only then, should you start to consume more sophisticated content.
You never wanna be that guy that has a theoretical black belt (ugh… the marketing mouthbreather on Twitter) and knows all the ins and outs but is still at $0 revenue because they’re too terrified to step on stage.
Don’t hide behind education and get to work.
RJY
Chop wood. Carry water.