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January 20 - January 29, 2020
You need to decide if you’re starting content first or offer first? In Method 1, you start with no product or service and create content to attract, grow, and nurture your audience. Your blog serves as a content hub to get people in the door. You get permission to be in touch with them via email. You find out what type of content makes your audience tick. Once you start attracting an audience, you promote your own digital or affiliate products or offer the services that are most aligned with their needs and your skill set or expertise.
Remember that people are more likely to be influenced by someone they like and can relate to—someone who’s at a level that seems attainable.
Your niche needs to have recurring income potential. You don’t want to solve a problem that people only seek help for once. You want a niche where people have the opportunity to advance and fulfill their potential at various stages.
Your BRAND isn’t the logo or color palette you choose. Rather it’s the experience someone has with you. What experience do you want to create? That’s what should influence your color palette. That’s what should influence your choice of font or logo.
A solid brand creates trust, recognition, and consistency. Visual aspects are important. But beyond visual branding, your name has to evoke certain emotions.
Andrew Davis, author of Town Inc.,11 calls this “the hook”—a simple pivot or deviation from something familiar meant to get your audience’s attention.
Everyone who comes to your site is at a different place in the journey. Some may be aware of the problem your service or product solves. Some be actively shopping for a solution. Others may be at the very beginning and have no idea that they even have a problem to solve in the first place. Depending on the stage your reader is at, they require different pieces of content to move them from one stage to another.
To effectively move your readers from one stage to another, answer the following question: What keeps my audience stuck in this phase and what do they need from me and my content to move forward?
Create different pieces of content to fuel the reader journey.
If you educate unaware readers on why they should solve the problem, or why you’re promoting a particular change, you will inch more readers toward your products or services and get them motivated about the “change” you want for them. This is how you bridge the content gap.
Always determine how each piece of content is going to fit into your entire blog and business. Ask yourself what’s the goal of the post.
What pain point are you hitting at in the post? Knowing this will help you with writing the introduction and conclusion of your posts. It will also make it easy for your audience to identify with and relate to your post.
Your opt-in has to serve your blog and business as well as your audience. So if you offer an opt-in that has absolutely nothing to do with your blog and business, you're going to be attracting the wrong people onto your list. This is why your opt-in incentive has to act as a primer for a related product or service that you have to offer.
The best opt-in incentives are quick to consume. They provide instant gratification and your audience should be able to immediately identify with the pain point that the incentive helps solve. You do not need to create a massive guide to get subscribers.
Did you know that the first forty-eight hours after a subscriber opts-in is when they are most engaged with your brand?
I advocate having a series of 3–5 emails in a welcome email series on top of your single welcome email. Each email builds off the other to help reinforce your brand and get them acquainted with your best content, what you have to offer, and why you’re the best person to help them.
People need to land on your site and know within five seconds if your site’s for them.
When in doubt, remember that your aim should be to get people onto your email list. So rather than feature all your products and services, let the focus be on getting someone onto your email list, and from there you can carve out a pathway (i.e., sequence of emails) to get their eyeballs on your products and services.
Your about page is one of the biggest pieces of real estate on your website.
These are the pages that make you feel like the writer is right here in the room with you having coffee…They make you want to high-five the person and say, “Heck yes!”
You will get your space to tell your story in a while. But you should make your reader or customer the focus of your about page.
Your readers are not coming to you because you have the best parenting advice or the best design tips. Yes, your content has to be great. But it’s nothing that they can’t find themselves through other blogs or Google. Your readers want to buy into YOUR story.
You’re selling them your story and the possibility of a journey.
When you don’t operate in your zone of genius, you get subpar results even when you do the work.
Play to your strengths and do more of what's working for you even if that may not seem like the fastest way of growing your business…Even if that other shiny thing looks better.
Your first goal should be to give your audience a taste of your paid content. Because once they get a taste and they enjoy it, the chance of them coming back to buy more increases.
A tripwire is a small-ticket item that you offer your subscriber as soon as they subscribe or early on in your email sequence. The idea isn’t to profit from that product but to quickly turn a subscriber into a buyer. Because people are more likely to open their wallets and purses for you a second time if they’ve already crossed that first sale hurdle.
One question I always get is… Meera, should I run surveys and ask my audience what they want? Do your audience really know what they want? No, they don’t.
Instead of forcing your audience to discuss solutions that they don’t yet appreciate or fully recognize, get them to discuss problems or symptoms they have. You may also get a situation where people will tell you they want it, but they won’t buy it.
Once you have certain ideas for the type of product you want to create and you’ve validated them, write targeted blog posts that show your expertise on the topic. You want your readers to associate you with the topic of the product. You want to establish your authority and expertise in it so that readers trust your views and teachings with regard to that topic.
But did you know that you could potentially ignore the majority of information out there about building a business online. You only need to focus on what you need for your current stage of growth.
Always look back at the milestones you need to hit for your current stage of growth.
Not sure of a product or lead magnet idea? Share it with your mastermind group (if you have one) or a group of repeat customers and clients, but resist asking the world.
Switching between tasks sucks up time and energy because the brain has to recall instructions on how to do a previous task before getting into the swing of things. Our brains are simply not able to cope with this context switching, and it can “add up to a loss of 40%” of our productivity.
Many solopreneurs and bloggers have goals, but here’s where it goes wrong. Most of them focus on metrics and statistics such as page views, followers, and likes. While metrics and stats are no doubt important, these will often leave you feeling demoralized and jaded. These are numbers that you cannot directly influence.
But here’s what you can influence: • Create a specific lead magnet aligned with each post you write. • Pitch one site a week to guest post on. • Focus on building one social media platform where your target audience hangs out. • Run a paid ad campaign.
It’s tempting to want to consume as much information as you can, but if you can’t implement it, then there really is no point, is there? Put a cap on the number of podcasts you will listen to a week. Put a cap on the number of webinars you sign up for in a week.
Consuming information in many cases is a way of stalling. The faster you recognize that, the easier it is to move on and take action.
With every milestone you reach, you face something new to overcome. And rather than the tech or the strategy, your mindset will be the biggest challenge.
You’re building a business, and this takes time. Likewise traffic is a long game. Any product you create needs a few iterations before you get the messaging correct. So don't shelve anything without giving it a chance to work for you.
You don’t have to come across as a know-it-all. That’s not what authority is about. Authority is your audience knowing they can trust you.
Showing up regularly, at least in the early years, is key. But remember to also give yourself grace. Everyone’s timeline looks different, even if they implement the same strategies.
It takes courage to chase your dreams and determination to show up every single day. It won’t be easy, but your work will inspire and touch several others.
When you find yourself detracting from your goals, slipping into your old routines, or if you’re feeling overwhelmed, keep your why front and center.
