Ch. 13: Conversion: How Will I Help Them?

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Transcript

0:40

Hello, and welcome to the market. Your message show. I'm your host, Jonathan Milligan and author of the most recent book coming out in just a few weeks. Launch your platform. But we're still in a series on the last book or book one in the series called discover your message. If you're a writer, teacher, speaker, coach. Then you definitely want to pick up this book because it will help you. To narrow in on your purpose, your people and your passion. And we're currently doing a book club series. And today we're going to talk all about chapter number 13. How will I help them? Now this particular chapter is the topic of conversion. And if you've been following along, I talk about. That there are three. Primary levers that you need to pull in order to have a successful writing, coaching, speaking, or teaching business. Those are number one awareness. How are people going to find out about you? Number two engagement. How are you going to build a relationship with them? And we talked about this just recently, last episode. And today I want to talk about conversion. How will I help them? And in this chapter, I want to explore the concept of validation offers. Now here's what often happens. Somebody works hard, gets up a website, they have lofty goals and ideas about what they want to accomplish. And then they just get overwhelmed. Because writing a full length book and trying to get a traditional book deal is a lot of work or putting together an entire course from a to Z that you want to sell may take months. Or maybe you want to launch a membership site. And you're trying to figure out how to get hours of content in there before you ever launch. This is what stops a lot of peoples. They simply just get overwhelmed. And that is why I teach in all of my programs to validate first. The concept of the validation offer is powerful. In fact, coming up in book number three in the series, there's going to be an entire book dedicated to this concept of validating your offer. Once you define the message. Now let's go test the market. Or why not sell before we actually create that's the concept of a validation offer? Now there's four primary validation offers that I think are great. So when you're first starting out, What's the easiest, low tech. Quickest fastest thing or offer. We can create to go test the market. That's the concept here. And the four validation offers. Go along with the writer, teacher speaker, coach. Personality types or brand voices or. Influencer voices. However you want to define it. If you've read any of my books, I talk a lot about this concept of writer, teacher, speaker, coach. Not that you. Oh, not that you have to do just one. Truth is I've done all four in my career. But. More times than not. There's one that you lean into, especially in the beginning that comes a little bit more natural to you. So let's talk about these and I cover this starting on page one 12 in the book, by the way, if you don't have a copy of the book, you can go to platform growth books.com. Platform growth books. Dot com and it will show you all the places that the book is available. Bookstores everywhere Amazon. Wherever it is that you want to get the book and definitely go back through and listen to this podcast. Book club series with the book in hand, if you don't already have it. So again, I am on page one, 12, but I want to talk about validation. Offer number one. A short. Kindle book. Now, if you consider yourself to be a writer and you're trying to validate your market. Why not just write a small Kindle book. Now I'm not talking about figuring out how to create the print version and the audio book and the hard cover. Book, and I'm not talking about your typical 60,000 word book. My very first book that I wrote back when I started as a career coach was only 15,000 words. And the reason I did it that way is because. I was procrastinating. I was overwhelmed with the concept of writing a book. And finally one day I was like Kindle books. Can be shorter. Obviously I did not price the book at 1295. For a 15,000 word book. Priced at 2 99, but for years I sold that book. Until I decided to finally take it down because I was no longer doing that anymore. And what's funny is. Even that little 15,000 word book, there was one person who left a review that it just made me smile because it was a professor. Who said I make my freshmen students. In my class about understanding your personality type. I make them read your book. It's required reading for my class. And I just chuckled inside because it's like, who am I? I'm just a high school teacher. I'm somebody who's just trying, back then I was just trying to get something started. Was making a little bit of headway, but I really want to do a book. And finally, I just did a short book, 15,000 words, and I told myself back then my blog posts were about 500 words. And I told myself, Jonathan, just write 500 words a day. Over the next 20 to 30 days. And you'll have a 15,000 word book. Let's publish it as a candy Kendall only book. And price it at 2 99. And that's how I got my start. And that's something you can get up and running in 30 days. And that's exactly what I did with my first book. If you're a writer. Then you want to follow that? Idea let's just go test the market with a shorter book. That's Kindle only. And get it out there and get it helping and serving people. All right. Validation offer number two. Is to launch a four week boot camp. Now, this is for the coach influencer. So if you're a coach, a four week boot camp is the perfect validation offer. And here's why. Because it has a deadline, you're going to be starting it at a certain point. So you're putting it out there. You're not. Having to do a bunch of prep work to get this four week bootcamp going. It's not like a course where you have to go record all of the content or a membership site. And it's just simple. You can also limit the number of participants in it. And here's the little secret. About doing a four week group coaching program. You get paid. To have them. Be your focus group. In other words. Before you go create that long, big flagship course. Why not take a group of five to 10. Coaching clients through the process first. And see what questions. They generate. And those questions will help you to fill in the holes of your content. That you can then go and deliver an amazing course. So it's amazing what you will learn. By just having them in a four week group coaching program. But you also get paid too. Oftentimes you can charge. Anywhere from 250 to a thousand dollars for a four week group coaching program. And if you get 10 people in that program or five people in the program, it makes it well worth it. For the hour or two you spend per week. So I love the four week group coaching program because you can sell it before you create it. You can literally put up a sales page or just a place for someone to submit their payment and the launch that and get it going. All right. Validation offer number three. Create a mini course. Now, this is for the teacher influencer. A mini course can be a fantastic way to share your knowledge. If you're a teacher. Now there's several reasons. I love a mini course. I love him any course. Because it can be done very fast. You could do this over weekend. If not even on a Saturday. Typically, I like to see somewhere between. Four to eight videos. Those videos can be five to 10 minutes long. And here's, what's great about a mini course. You can tackle something very specific. So you can get really specific. On that mini course topic, you can also go more broad. For example, you may have seen this in inside the discover your message. A book, but I talk about the very beginning before someone starts reading through the book, Hey, how would you like to have the discovery or message accelerator course? Now what it is I took the four big parts of the book. And I did one video for each. Now, this course, this accelerator course is completely free. I do it to get email subscribers from book readers. But I've done plenty of courses like that. Where I will take some things specific. Record five to eight videos. And upload it. Sell the course. It's a way to test it before I go build the 40. Video course. Let's start with something sample. So you teachers out there, this is a fantastic way to do it. You can literally do it over the weekend and have something up for cell. And you get to test your market. Validation offer number four. Host a one day virtual workshop. This is for the speaker influencers out there. Those of you who love to speak. You're going to love having a group of people. We're going to do this virtual on zoom. And I love this because just like the four week group coaching program. It has a deadline to it. So literally what I teach. Is. To talk about it for two weeks. So the first week is about, Hey, I'm thinking about doing this. Let me know. Is this something you'd be interested in sharing that on social media or with your email list? So you're getting engaging some interest. And then that second week you're opening the doors and having people. Pay to be a part of this one day virtual workshop, which typically is anywhere from one hour to four hours. And people pay to be a part of this. Now what's great about this is you can charge. Very little. You can charge anywhere from$10 to a hundred dollars. I've done it on the full spectrum. And think about it$15. If you get a hundred people signed up. That's$1,500 for two hours of your time. On a Saturday. And it allows you to do what you love to do to have an audience in, to teach them through a process. Now, I won't go into details here on how to actually structure that one day virtual workshop, because you definitely don't want to be just talking for two hours. That is not the point. There's a rhythm. There are exercises. There are potential breakout rooms that you can do on zoom. There's breaks that you need to take. There's a specific formula I use so that things keep moving, but people enjoy the learning process. And guess what. It allows you to sell before you create it. So think about this, let's take the worst case scenario. You shouted from the rooftops about this workshop you're going to do. And no one buys. Let's think about this, first of all. Everybody who saw it doesn't know that no one bought. They don't know anything other than. That there is a workshop that probably happened, and. You got to test a process, test an idea, and maybe it was the hook of the idea, not necessarily the market you chose, so you can give it 30 days and you could try again. Try with a new topic, a new idea. And here's the thing. If you actually put it out there and you do a little bit of work and no one buys. You don't have to teach it. You don't have to create the thing. You just get to try something else. I love those low risk, high reward opportunities. And that's what validation offers can do for you. And validation offers are great. Now I'll be talking about this in the upcoming book, validate your offer, but you can also stack the validation offers. So for example, an easy one to understand. Is, you could start with a one day workshop, get, let's say you get a hundred people on that one day workshop. And at the end of the workshop, you say, Hey. Now. For those of you who really want to implement what we covered over the last two hours. I want to invite you to join me for four week bootcamp. It's just$250. And it's only available for the first 10 people. I have done that process for the last couple of years, then do it about every 90 days. And I have yet to have no one take me up on the bootcamp. Y. Because they're there because they're already interested. In the topic. And you're going to have people who say yes, I want to implement this. And they're going to join you for the bootcamp. So there's a little bonus for you. I absolutely love this chapter. Go through and read chapter 13 day 13, and you'll really understand this concept. And it's such a powerful concept. Like I said, I'm dedicating a whole book to it. That's going to be out later. This here. All right. So hopefully you enjoyed that. Enjoyed that chapter. And the next episode, we're going to be wrapping all of this up. Put a nice little bow on it. Just in time for the second book, in fact, it's actually available for pre-order right now. I've not really announced that to my list or anywhere in social media. You podcast listeners are the only one who knows. It's actually I believe it's just a Kindle book. That's up right now. That you can go. Pre-order. For only 2 99 and you can get the next book, which is the next step in this process. So if you've been following along on the discover your message and you want to know what to do next. It's book number two, launch your platform. And in that book, I walked through a 21 day launch plan to build your personal brand and share your story online as a writer, coach, or speaker. You know exactly how to structure your website, how to do the story branding on your website. How to create an automatic. Funnel of prospects who could become clients for you. All of that. Is in the next book, number two, launch your platform. That's it for today. I hope you've enjoyed this today. Let us know if you're enjoying this show. Give us a feedback. Go radar show. Give us a review. It would mean the world to us and also share it. If you think this is valuable. All right, that's it for today until next time. Never forget your message matters.