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Your Step-By-Step Formula to Landing Page Optimization and Profitable Facebook Ad Campaigns

Micheal O'Neill

Your Step-By-Step Formula to Landing Page Optimization and Profitable Facebook Ad Campaigns

Table of Contents

Your ability to optimize your opt-in and your offers is one of the key skills that you need to develop as an online entrepreneur. Very rarely you will ever hit a home run. 

Without the ability to optimize your landing pages, your cost per lead will be high, meaning your Facebook® ads won’t be profitable, and you won’t be able to attract fresh, Perfect-Fit prospects into your world. 

This will result in list stagnation and ultimately your online business will falter and you won’t succeed in spreading the transformation that you know you can help people achieve in the world. 

But when you nail your conversion rate optimization, you will be able to profitably attract Perfect-Fit Clients into your world. You will be able to attract leads and recover a positive ROI in the short term and those leads will then be primed to convert when you promote your primary offers to them. 

And the result of all this is that you’ll be able to invest with certainty in your lead generation process, attracting streams of Perfect-Fit Clients into your world and ultimately amplifying your message and impact.

If you’re an online course creator or a membership site owner who is about to launch a Facebook ad campaign, who has a Facebook ad campaign that’s underperforming or you have a Facebook ad campaign that’s working well and you now want to scale well, this post is for you. 

Today, I’m going to look specifically at your landing or opt-in page optimization, but the same basic principles apply to sales or offer pages. 

I’m going to look at three core elements of landing page optimization. 

  1. Page layout and the key elements to be included. 
  2. The five core elements of landing page optimization. 
  3. How to approach conversion rate optimization.

It isn’t always evident just how important landing page optimization is until you analyze the figures. Let’s say you have a Facebook® Ad campaign driving traffic to an opt-in page and that page is converting 20% of people who visit.

At a 20% conversion rate, each lead is costing you $10.

If you optimize your landing page and take the conversion rate from 20% to 40%, with everything else remaining constant, your cost per lead will drop from $10 to $5. 

A 40% conversion rate is ok but it is possible to do so much better. In most campaigns, this should be your starting target rate. So what if we were to go a bit further, and optimize the  conversion rate from 20% to 80%, 

At an 80% conversion rate, with everything else remaining constant, your CPL will drop from $10 to $2.50. 

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a powerful tool in reducing your cost per lead. The reason why I place so much emphasis on CRO is that it’s next to impossible to get the sort of improvement possible through CRO  from tweaking your Facebook® Ad audience, or creatives. 

CRO It may not be the most glamorous part of Facebook® advertising, but it’s the part that will provide the greatest return on investment, especially in the early phases of your campaigns.

Key Components of a Landing Page

Often, we want to get as much stuff as possible onto our landing page to convince somebody that they should sign up. But what I have found in practice is the simpler and more straightforward your page is to start with, the more effective and higher converting your landing page will be. 

Over time, when you start applying these optimization concepts, you will be able to add more content because you will know what to test, how to test, and how to track people’s reactions.

When designing your opt-in page, especially for a free lead magnet, a key concept is; less is more. When starting out make sure you keep your opt-in page to the depth of a single screen. Focus on getting all relevant information onto this one page while leaving lots of “white space”. 

Here are the elements you want to include on your opt-in page. 

Headline

First, you have a headline, which is probably the most important element of your landing page. Your headline is a couple of words, six to 10 words max, which describes exactly the premise of your lead magnet, in order words, what your Perfect-Fit Client can hope to achieve or avoid when they implement your lead magnet.

Subhead

Then comes your subhead which gives them some further qualification on your headline. Your subhead will be 1-2 lines of text max. The purpose of your Headline and Subhead is to outline the key benefits of your offer and how their life will be better once they have put what you have to offer into action.

Body Copy

Then you’ve got your body copy, which is normally 3-7 bullet points underneath your subhead. When you are drafting your body copy don’t just tell people what is in your lead magnet. Tease them with the opportunity of what is possible for them once they have the knowledge you are about to share in their life.

Image

Every landing page should contain an image. The image should connect with your Perfect-Fit Prospect. Either it should represent their struggle, their opportunity, or what they are going to get when they give you their email address. 

Another approach is to build the bond between you and your prospect by using a photo of you which in some way supports the transformation that you have to offer through your lead magnet. 

Registration Button

The registration button speaks for itself. This is the button that someone will click to enter their details and register for the lead magnet. But don’t discount the impact that the button has on CRO. I have seen simple tweaks to button color and text bring about 10%-15% conversion rate improvements on landing pages that were already converting highly. As we see below in the Call To Action section the impact on your CRO also have a registration button and an image. 

Keep your landing page as simple as possible, to begin with. The best way to think about is. If you don’t know that a specific word is moving your prospect towards opt-in, there is a chance it will repel them. Individual or lose words can have a detrimental impact on conversion rates so the best approach is to start light and over time as you learn the language, phrases, and words that drive conversion you can start expanding your copy. 

What’s The Goal of Your Landing Page?

The goal of your landing or opt-in page is to connect on an emotional level with your Perfect-Fit Client. You want to be very specific about what they will experience when they get your lead magnet into their hands and in particular how their life will look, sound, feel and in very quantifiable ways be better than it was before they signed up. 

In addition to the emotion, you also have to give them some hard logic to back up their decision. 

As humans, we make decisions based on our emotions, but we need to have the logic to justify our decision.. We want to believe that we are logical beings, so you need to give some logic for our Perfect-Fit Client to cling to. Enough logic that they say, “Yes, this makes sense”

But be under no illusion what drives our decision-making process is our emotions and this is where the majority of underperforming landing pages fall down.

If you can imagine a better future for your Perfect-Fit Client that even they themselves have not seen and paint a vivid picture for how they can achieve that through your offer that is when you have dialed in a knock-out, no-brainer offer.

You can 

There are two different approaches when it comes to painting a better future for your Perfect-Fit Client. You can go positive and  move them towards attaining some pleasure or you can help them move away from something negative or some pain point., 

An unfortunate fact of human nature is that we will do more to avoid pain than we will to gain pleasure. Many people try to resist this but 9 times out of 10, when you test it, avoidance of pain or highlighting the negative will tend to get you slightly better results. 

But still, I am an eternal optimist so I always run positive v negative split-tests to find out which one performs better in a campaign.

When it comes to the order of optimization I always work in the order listed above:

  1. Headline
  2. Subhead
  3. Body Copy
  4. Image
  5. Registration Button

4 Core Elements of Landing Page Conversion Rate Optimization

Design

There are certain tried and tested, proven design features that increase opt-ins and those that decrease opt-ins.

One of the big ones that I shared above was getting the majority of your key information above the fold. People need to have all the information they need to make a decision and the ability to enact that decision without scrolling. 

The only reason you should have information below the fold is for people who are sitting on the fence and need a little push over the edge before signing up.

Far too often, I go to opt-in pages and the button to register is below the fold. Most people land on a page and then they just bounce off it. If they don’t see that there’s some action that they’re being guided to take, so guess what they take the easy action and just leave the page.

Now putting the key information above the fold isn’t an excuse for shoving hundreds of words into a small space. It is a distillation process. What are the fewest words which can have the maximum impact?

From here it is a matter of how the key information is highlighted? You want to have your headline in a larger font. Your headline should be the most prominent thing that people see on the page. 

Then their eyes should be drawn to the subhead. Your subhead will be in smaller font but bigger than your body copy. The headline and the subhead should be the most prominent elements on the page. The acid test is; if the page was to be flashed in front of someone for only 3 seconds would they be able to recount the general gist of the headline and subhead?

And remember simple designs are going to win the conversion battle. People need to be able to see the key information on the page and not be distracted by overly distracting elements or difficult to make out elements. 

Make good use of contrast, don’t place light fonts on light backgrounds. No matter how good something looks, if someone has to grapple for even a second to read it you have lost them. Make sure your message jumps off the page and hits them between the eyes.

And when I say landing page design, effective landing pages don’t have to be beautifully designed.. Very often plain, ugly landing pages convert at a higher level. 

The most important thing is not how beautiful the page looks but that a visitor knows exactly what they are going to get, it answers the question of what’s in it for me?, how their life is going to be improved and tells them clearly the action that they need to take.

Copy

The second key Conversion Rate Optimization factor is your page copy. The most important element of your opt-in or landing page copy is your headline quickly followed by your subhead. You have to be specific, you have to verbalize your promise in concrete terms. Your copy has to future pace your Perfect-Fit Client into a world where they can experience in real terms the transformation that you are offering. 

Broad promises like “follow my method to improve your guitar playing” or “become a better guitar player” just won’t cut it. You have to promise people a specific outcome like “learn to play 10 songs, back-to-back, in front of an audience, within 3 months, while practicing for just 10 minutes a day”.

What difference do you think the above would make to your conversion rate?

CTA – Call To Action

The third key Conversion Rate Optimization factor is your call to action. If want to get somebody to click a button and to open up the opt-in and submit their contact details. The placement of the button and the copy on the button are hugely important. 

First off the button has to be above the fold or visible on the first screen of someone who lands on the opt-in or landing page. And remember, the majority of traffic coming from Facebook® ads, will visit your opt-in page on mobile. 

This means that it is even more important that the opt-in button appears above the fold on mobile. In fact, I would go so far as to say that you should be designing from a mobile-first perspective with the desktop design a secondary consideration,

But it isn’t just about button placement. You also have to make sure that the CTA on the button or button text is benefit-driven. CTA’s like “register now” or “sign up now” are not very effective. Instead, link it to the benefit or transformation that you can provide.

Continuing my guitar example above, one possibility for the button text could be “Discover The Easy Way To Learn 10 Songs In 3 Months”

Bonus points if you can add scarcity to the CTA.

Registration Form

The fourth element is your registration form. Every opt-in page will have some type of form which enables people to submit their details. There are two distinct approaches to opt-in form design which I test on every campaign I run. 

The first is where all the fields that someone needs to fill out are visible on the opt-in page and the second is where the fields of the opt-in form are not visible until a visitor clicks the button to register. Both of these are valid options and I have yet to find conclusive evidence across multiple industries and avatars as to whether one converts at a higher rate than the other which is why I always test each format.

For every extra piece of data that you ask for on your form, you are going to reduce your conversion rate. 

For example, if you ask for the first name, last name, email address, company name, address, phone number, then you are going to have a lower conversion rate than if you only ask for an email address. 

In my own email marketing, I like using somebody’s first name. So I will always at least ask for the first name and email, however, some hugely successful marketers don’t. They just ask for the person’s email address, because it increases their conversion rates.. 

You will need to find the balance in your business and figure out the information that you specifically need from your opt-in form. In the majority of cases, email addresses and first names will suffice. 

However, if you wanted to add in additional data fields, let’s say you’re doing a webinar and you want to improve your show-up rate, you could ask for a person’s cell number. In this instance, a multi-stage form could be a good idea. 

If you do want to ask for multiple data points, you can show the email address and first name fields on the first screen. When they click submit on that, then they get presented with a second screen where they are asked for further information, in this case, their cell phone number. 

This approach works because you are evoking an escalation of commitment. Somebody puts in their email address and their name then they click submit. They think that’s job done. And now they get asked for additional information. At this stage, they’ve already committed to the process and they feel compelled by their need for consistency to finish out the process. That’s why the multi-stage form works so well.

How To Practically Implement Landing Page Conversion Rate Optimization?

 

It’s very important to be methodical with your Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). That means documenting as you go, because on longer-term projects, you’re going to make a round of optimizations, and sometime later, you might end up trying the same or similar optimization again. 

If you don’t have a documented approach to your Conversion Rate Optimization, you’re going to end up redoing things and losing the outcome or learning from the optimization. Start an optimization diary and document every change you make.

The cycle that I like to follow when it comes to CRO is as follows:

  1. Analysis
  2. Hypothesis
  3. Prioritization
  4. Test
  5. Feedback & Implement

The first thing is an analysis which will normally start with your stats. If you’re running a Facebook ad campaign, have either a Google Sheets or an Excel doc set up where you can track the daily performance of the ads and the daily performance of your opt-in page. It is hugely important not to rely on the stats from Facebook alone. You need to track the actual registration through your opt-in page or your email platform. 

Due to the iOS 14 update, Facebook® isn’t going to be able to report on everybody, who registers through your opt-in page so you’ll be presented with a  cost per lead in Facebook® of a  certain rate. Often, however, you will find that you end up with more email addresses than Facebook® reports, which will have an impact on your real CPL. 

Based on the analysis of your stats you can then start to build your hypothesis. 

For example, I had a Facebook® Ad campaign that was underperforming. Our cost per lead sucked, to put it mildly. This was a campaign that we had spent months on with a significant upfront investment, and it looked like it was tanking. 

But a change to just 33 words not just brought the campaign back from the brink, but turned it into a wildly profitable and successful campaign. We were launching a webinar series on which an offer was to be made for a digital product. We ran this campaign by the book even hiring a top copywriter with serious chops to draft the promotional content for the webinar, including the webinar registration page. 

When it came to launch, we were so excited to see this take off, but it stuttered badly. We struggled to get leads from our Facebook ads and the ones, we got were far too high a price to make the campaign work in any way and be any way profitable.

We looked at the Facebook ads and the stats. The click-through rate was okay. We’re getting traffic to the page, but that’s where the campaign was breaking down, it was clear that the biggest issue was not the ads themselves, but the conversion rate of the opt-in page. 

Having analyzed the stats we formed our hypothesis. There were many changes and optimizations that we could have made but we had a feeling that the headline and subhead were causing the majority of the problems.

So with that information in hand, we Prioritized the optimization of the headline and the subhead and moved into the testing phase. We ran a split test between the original page and the revised one, and instantly we saw a result.

Within 3 iterations we had boosted the opt-in rate from just under 20% to 78%, bringing the CPL from $28 to just $7. But the benefits did end there because we took our learning from the opt-in page optimization, fed it back into the optimization process, and applied it to the ads which drove our CPC and ultimately our CPL even lower.

And remember, landing page optimization is a process. It’s not a matter of getting it perfect, it’s just a matter of getting it started. Because 90% of marketing is your ability to plan, act, reflect and refine. Plan for what you want, take action, reflect on your results and then refine your approach. 

And remember, if you ever have a campaign that is not performing how you would like, or the conversion rate of your opt-in page is struggling, we are here to support you, simply book your FREE Focus Strategy Session today.

 

 

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Profitable Facebook Ads: Crafting A Knockout Offer

Micheal O'Neill 2 Comments

Profitable Facebook Ads: Crafting A Knockout Offer

Table of Contents

If you’re an online course creator, or a membership site owner, and either you’re about to launch a Facebook ad campaign, have a Facebook ad campaign that’s underperforming, or one that is working well and now you want to scale it, then this post is for you. 

In this post, we are going to look at your offer and specifically, as it relates to your Facebook ads and your downstream funnels, whether that be a lead magnet, opt-in, webinar registration, or direct-to-sale ads.

For me, your offer is one of the most important elements in any marketing campaign. Most people spend ages coming up with beautifully architected marketing copy and yet throw together an offer in a rush which is a real shame because every time you do this you are leaving lots of money on the table after doing all the hard work.

But before we jump into this, I would like to challenge your thinking around offers. When the word offer is mentioned, most people automatically think in terms of the description of the deliverables for a paid product or service. 

And this certainly is true, but I would like you to start thinking of an offer in terms of any time you ask somebody to take an action. In essence, this means that every piece of marketing contains an offer. 

Whether you want to challenge people to change their opinions or their mindset, whether you want them to visit a landing page or whether you want them to register for a lead magnet or even buy a $7 product or a $4,997 product. In every instance, you are making an offer. 

And the beautiful thing about offers is that they are fractal. In any marketing campaign, you’re going to have these stacks of offers to get somebody from the beginning of a campaign to the end of the campaign.

Both micro and macro offers follow the same approach and the principles that we’re going to discuss today will apply equally. 

Without a strong offer, your Facebook ads will flop, your campaigns will struggle to get off the ground, your business growth will be slow and painful, you’ll continuously feel like you’re pushing a boulder up a mountain. Your promotions will be inconsistent. Sometimes you’ll strike it lucky, other times you’ll struggle. Ultimately, you will fail to have the impact that you know you can have in the world. 

But if you nail your offer through your Facebook ads to your promotions, then you’ll consistently outperform your expectations for both ads and campaigns. You will attract streams of Perfect-Fit Clients with ease, your business will go from strength to strength effortlessly, your Facebook ads costs will drop and your cost per lead along with your cost per acquisition will be slashed. 

So ultimately, your profitability will go through the roof.

The Role Of The Offer When It Comes to Launching, Optimizing, And Scaling Profitable Facebook Ad Campaigns

Offers are one of the key 80/20 levers in your business. Focusing on honing your offer will produce more revenue and clients than almost any other single aspect of your business. A knockout offer will carry poor marketing, but the best marketing in the world will never overcome a poor offer.

One of my clients had been struggling in his online business for years. He had an amazing product that got fantastic results for anybody who followed his process. 

The testimonials from people who went through his course were simply astonishing, and he knew when somebody experienced his course, they’d be hooked for life. But he struggled to gain traction, build his list, and get people to register for his course. 

He knew his business could be doing so much better, but he just couldn’t figure out what the problem was. When we sat down and analyzed his business, then the issue became clear. He was lacking one of the key ingredients needed to fuel an online business, and that was a knockout offer. 

And while it was clear that this was the issue with his primary course, what amazed him was how this issue permeated through so many other areas of his business and his funnel. He was struggling because he didn’t understand the power of a knockout offer.

One thing that cannot be highlighted enough is you have to know your avatar before crafting a knockout offer so that you can speak the same language and answer your Perfect-Fit Clients’ questions and objections with your offer. 

You have to be able to read a page in your Perfect-Fit Client’s diary to them in such a way that they feel you are looking over their shoulder. One way of getting to know your avatar better is through surveys. This is possible if you have an email list or a following on Social.

Ask people specific questions about what problems they’re having, what pain points they experience, what do they want their life to be like? Another source of information is Reddit. Go find the Reddit that specifically deals with your core topic in your business, spend time, research, pick out the specific language people use, copy and paste their words from Reddit into a Word doc. 

What are their pain points? What do they want? What are their goals? What are their ambitions? What are their fears? Where are they feeling disrespected? 

I also love the strategy of getting involved in communities, like Facebook groups. Get in there, ask questions, participate, observe, look at what other questions people are asking, look at the answers that people are giving. All of this will help you build a very detailed profile of who your avatar is, what they want. 

Once you are armed with this data, your job is to then link both the attainment of the positive and avoidance of the negative to your product, course,, membership or coaching program. 

Hopefully by the end of this post, you will be inspired to see every step along your Value Ascension Roadmap as an opportunity to craft a knockout offer to help your Perfect-Fit Client achieve their ultimate transformation, one step at a time.

Your First Job Is To Answer The Question: What’s In It For Me?  

When it comes to offers, the first thing you have to do is make sure people can answer the question,  what’s in it for me? 

Your offer has to answer a very specific problem or pain point.

For example, if I was to put an offer to you, “Hey, please donate $5 to UNICEF.” Sure, that’s just a noble thing to do, and maybe some of you might take me up on the offer. 

But if I was to put a slightly different offer to you. “Please donate $5 to feed a family of three in Ethiopia for a week.” Now that is a different proposition. 

The difference was evoked by the specificity of the second offer. It answers a very specific problem and speaks to a very specific, desirable outcome. 

One problem that I often see with offers is they’re very bland and generic. Using the example of learning to play the guitar. Nobody wants to be “better” at playing the guitar, they want to be able to play 10 songs back-to-back in front of an audience in three weeks, practicing only 10 minutes per day. Again, think about how different those two offers are.

In marketing we always have to overcome one major human trait; people are inherently lazy. This isn’t a slight on anyone, in particular,  it is how we have evolved. 

Remember, it wasn’t that long ago that humans were living as hunter-gatherers and the conservation of energy was essential for survival. If it wasn’t hunting, humping, or contributing to the tribe, it wasn’t deemed important. 

We may have fancy iPhones, cars, and all the technology in the world, but we haven’t out-evolved our primal instincts. You need to smack people over the head with why what you’re saying matters and how it will make their life better in specific terms. 

They have to know why they should expel calories to take the action that you are asking them to take. So it has to answer the question, what is in this for me? 

Future Pace Their Experience And Make It Real

Paint a picture of how their life is going to be made better by whatever it is that you’re offering. Never assume that people will connect the dots, spell it out. 

One framework that I find especially beneficial for this is the FDE benefits framework.

F: Functional Benefits

The F stands for functional benefits, or how it improves their lives. If you were to buy a car for example, how it will improve your life? Your car will get you from A to B, it will keep you dry while doing so and you won’t have to clean up horse poo. These are the functional benefits. 

D: Dimensionalized Benefits

The D stands for dimensionalized benefits. This is where you paint a picture for people of how the functional benefits look in their lives. So if I was selling a car, I’d paint a picture of them driving through the countryside with the top-down on their convertible with the wind blowing in their hair, and enjoying the car. 

E: Emotional Benefits

The third element of this framework is the emotional benefits. This is how your Perfect-Fit Clients will feel after they experienced the dimensionalized benefits. Having driven through the countryside with the wind in their hair and enjoying the drive, how will they feel after that? 

You are future pacing them, bringing them on a journey to show them what life will be like for them once they have experienced whatever it is that you’re offering.

Package Your Offer So It Feels Like A No-Brainer

The prominent marketer Todd Brown talks about a SIN Offer. This stands for:

  • S: Superior
  • I: Irresistible
  • N: No-brainer

When you think about how your offer is superior, think about how your offer is better than all the other offers out there. 

If you struggle with this intellectually and you honestly don’t see how your offer is superior, then I advise you to go back to your avatar research and see what pain points or desires you have not included in your offer. 

If we’re looking at an offer from a lead magnet perspective, and you don’t feel that it is in some way superior to other content that’s out there, maybe you should spend some time working on it until you have found an angle that makes it superior.

Irresistible; your offer has to create an emotion that draws people in. Here comes again the importance of your avatar research, because you wouldn’t be able to reach your Perfect-Fit Clients on an emotional level unless you truly understand their language. 

And last but not least, your offer has to be a no-brainer. So somebody has to see it and go, “Yes of course, why would I not accept this?” 

Imagine someone offered you a brand new Ferrari in the morning, no strings attached, no hidden gotchas, would you accept it? Of course, you’d accept it, why wouldn’t you accept it? Even if you have no interest in cars, you’re still going to accept it As you could still sell it, and make a lot of money. 

Every Action Has A Cost: Price v’s Value

Before pricing an offer, let’s look at the different components of an offer, like deliverables, features, and advantages. If your Facebook Ad is driving people to a lead magnet Think about deliverables for the lead magnet, what is a Perfect-Fit Prospect going to get? A checklist? A video? A guide? A fill-in-the-blanks template? 

Then think about the features of your lead magnet. What would that deliverable enable someone to do? If somebody had this guide, checklist, or video, what would that enable them to do better in their life? If they were able to do that “thing” better in their life what would that mean to them? Would they be able to earn more money, would they be able to save more money? Would it save them time or give them more free time. If they had more time what would they do with that time? 

Would they be less stressed and more relaxed, would they be fitter, healthier or stronger? 

And if any of the above is true, what would that be worth to them? 

It’s important to realize that everything that you ask somebody to do has a cost or a price. 

If you ask somebody to think about something, there is a cost to them, there’s a cost of energy, there’s a cost of time. So that is still a price even though you’re not getting paid.. 

If you ask somebody to go from a Facebook ad to a landing page, there is a price that they’re paying, they’re paying with their time, they’re paying with their energy, they are paying with their attention. 

Again, a lead magnet, even though it’s free, there is still a cost. The price that someone pays is their email address. The cost that they are paying is letting you into their email inbox. So there is a real price. 

3 80/20 Levers For Effective Offers

Risk reversal is something that makes a huge difference in the decision-making process. And again, you might say risk reversal does not apply to free products. But that’s not necessarily true. 

For example, if you scroll down to the bottom of this post you will see I have an offer to apply for a Focus Strategy Session and I give a risk reversal. If you come to that Focus Strategy Session and you do not find it useful, I will personally send you a $100 Amazon gift card. 

Risk reversals work because they are guarantees, providing psychological ease. And here’s the funny thing about them, they’re rarely called upon, so normally, they don’t cost a huge amount to offer. 

But you need to be careful, the bigger your risk reversal, the clearer your guidelines are as to what people’s responsibilities are in achieving the desired outcome. 

Bonuses are the second thing that gets people to take the action you want within the timeframe you want. 

If there is a reward for taking an action within a certain timeframe people will be more likely to take action. This can be used for commenting, sharing, lead magnets, webinars, course registration, membership subscription, or any other action you like.

There are two approaches to bonuses. The first one is that the bonus answers specific objections that people may have in taking the action that you’re asking them to take. The second one is that the bonuses help you get the same transformation as the offer only faster. 

And then finally, scarcity, which is one of the strongest triggers of all. Here you need to give people a reason to respond and take action now and this is normally in the form of a deadline even though it can be combined with additional elements 

How Does This Practically Apply to Your Facebook Ad Campaigns? 

Profitable Facebook ad strategy is not just about the ad campaign, it’s about the entire funnel, and that’s the way you need to think of it. 

Your ability to craft a compelling offer doesn’t just kick in when it comes to them pulling out their credit card.

You are creating offers all the way through your funnel:

So let’s look at where that manifests itself. 

  • The offer of your image is to get people to stop scrolling.
  • The offer of your headline is to get people to read the first two lines of the Facebook ad copy.
  • The offer of the first two lines of text is to get people to read the body of the Facebook ad.
  • The offer in the Facebook ad is to get people to click the “learn more” button and visit the opt-in page.
  • The offer in the opt-in page is to get people to submit their email addresses.
  • And then if you have a mini front-end offer in place, now is when you’re asking people to put their hand in their pocket, pull out their credit card, and make a purchase.

The first thing that you need to do from a Facebook ads perspective is to stop people scrolling. How you do that is with the Ad image or video. These two elements are what’s going to capture your Perfect-Fit Client’s attention. 

Most people will not pay attention to the text or the headline until after the image or the video has triggered something for them. Native images tend to work better than graphically designed images, but I would always test this.. 

Facebook used to have a 20% text upper limit on their images, this has now been removed, but I still believe that less text is better when it comes to images. 

So if you are using text to push your offer, work on evoking curiosity. With videos, you have a bit more latitude where you verbalize your offer further throughout the video. 

The second element is your headline. Your headline has to answer the question, what’s in it for me? It has to be something concrete because the headline is what’s going to get them to pay attention to the first two lines of text of the ad. These first two lines are the most important part of the ad copy. Try to work your most powerful triggers into this portion of the ad.

If you’ve done your job with your image, video, your headline, and first two lines of text, chances are somebody could have already gone, clicked the learn more button, and visited your opt-in page. 

Then comes the Ad body copy. A well-drafted long-form copy will convert better than short-form but when you are getting started it is easier to get the short form to convert. Remember poorly drafted Ad copy will repel people and the longer the copy is the more chance you have to turn someone off. 

Your target audience is going to dictate in part the success of your campaign but if you give Facebook a large enough audience to work with they will do an amazing job for you. 

Then we get to our opt-in page. For a lead magnet, I like to keep it simple. I believe that you should have a very clear headline, subhead, a small number of bullet points, maybe four to five bullet points, and an image and that’s it. And these elements should convey your offer without relying on too much bloat. 

Hopefully, it is now clear how essential the role of a strong offer is throughout your entire funnel and why it’s a skill = that you as an online entrepreneur have to continuously work on developing. If you need help bullet-proofing your offer so that you can convert more traffic from Facebook ads, and have the lifestyle that you desire, book your FREE Mini-Strategy Session today.

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Value Ascension Roadmap: Step By Step Process For Long-Term Success

Micheal O'Neill 3 Comments

Value Ascension Roadmap: Step By Step Process For Long-Term Success

Table of Contents

If you haven’t deliberately mapped out your Perfect-Fit Client’s Value Ascension Roadmap, then best-case scenario, you’re leaving money on the table. Money that your clients would love to have spent with you. Worst case scenario, you’re not supporting your community in the way that you should. And you risk losing the hearts and minds of loyal followers, who may look elsewhere to have their needs met. Your Value Ascension Roadmap is the plan that you have for a Perfect-Fit Client to achieve the ultimate transformation that you can provide, and the milestones that they will hit along the way. 

Your Value Ascension Roadmap is a graphical representation of the levels of service and interaction between you and your clients.  From your Perfect-Fit Client’s perspective the further along with the roadmap they travel, the greater the value they receive. This is normally delivered by means of increased touchpoints, live interaction, deeper levels of content, group coaching, and all the way to masterminds.  And from your internal perspective, it illustrates the increase in value to your business as the amount paid by your clients increases further down the roadmap that they travel.

 

A Common Mistake Most Knowledge-Business Owners Make and How to Avoid it

With the ever-increasing cost of front-end client acquisition, it is essential that we have a reliable and scalable methodology for acquiring new clients. A mistake that many online business owners fall into is that they do not have a systematic model to convert leads to paying clients as quickly and efficiently as possible.

And not only is this risky from a business continuity perspective but it can also be extremely costly. an expensive mistake to recover from. Without a system to recoup your investment in ads, you end up at the mercy of fluctuations in new client acquisition costs which can result in mass erosion of profits. In addition, if you don’t have a Value Ascension Roadmap you are limiting the lifetime value of a new client and you risk losing clients after their first interaction since they don’t have a logical next level to ascend to. 

This can be an expensive mistake to recover from, especially when you take into account that it costs 5 times more to acquire a new client than it does to sell something to an existing client. That is why having a logical, sequential, and useful Value Ascension Roadmap that genuinely maps out a Perfect-Fit Client’s journey to the ultimate transformation that you provide, will both save you and make you money giving your business financial security.

The Dangers Of Not Having A Value Ascension Roadmap For Your Online Business

A good friend of mine had a profitable online course. Things were going great, their clients were getting massive results, they had an offer that converted and they had built great systems in their business.. They had great cash flow from their course sales, which enabled them to expand their team and grow their business. 

The business was booming and they were on top of the world …until….a big launch flopped. Now the reasons why the launch flopped were numerous and worse of all, many were outside their control. But bottom line, they didn’t get anywhere near the sales that they were expecting. With so few sales, all of a sudden finances began to get tight. So they did what anybody would do in that case, they scrambled hard and they brought forward one of their mini launches. Unfortunately, coming so close the first flop stuttered too. Now, they were in real trouble. They were running out of cash fast.

With their backs to the wall, they decided they needed to diversify their revenue streams. They released a mini-product for people they felt weren’t ready to jump to their signature product. Bingo, it worked. They enrolled lots of new clients which injected fresh energy and enthusiasm into their community. The revenue wasn’t enough to cover the losses from the failed launch but it stabilized their cash flow, and things started to look up. 

But the story doesn’t end here. They realized that if people on the front end needed this little mini-step, maybe people who had gone through their course needed additional support on the back-end. They realized that despite people having all the knowledge they needed many were struggling to implement what they had learned. They decided to launch a membership and invited everyone who had been through their course to join. This turned out to be one of their biggest launches ever.

Their clients were appreciative of the opportunity to further their journey and to learn more, plus they had stabilized their cash flow. Everyone was happy. And by the time my friend got around to their next big launch, they had an entire army of clients from the mini-product who were now ready and waiting for the opportunity to step up to the next level.

Hopefully, this example illustrates why the Value Ascension Roadmap is not just about revenue generation, but also about serving your clients in a deeper, more meaningful way, meeting them where they are giving them little steps they can follow, and always having a new level for them to ascend to as they seek the ultimate transformation you can help them achieve.

Instead of an uphill battle for you and your client, you’ve got a step-by-step process that makes your ascension process easy. And once somebody gets onto the Roadmap, they won’t want to get off.  Because your Perfect-Fit Clients need you. They need direction they need support, and they will thank you for mapping their journey out in advance.  And you will see their gratitude expressed with even higher levels of profitability and revenue for your business.

Value Ascension Roadmap: Step By Step Process For Long-Term Success

Your Value Ascension Roadmap Simplified

Whether you have a product or a membership, start by identifying the five to seven core topics that you help your Perfect-Fit Client address to achieve the transformation you know is possible for them.  Let’s say for example you are an online fitness and health coach. The core topics that you address in your course or membership could be as follows:

  1. Cardio Training
  2. Weight Training
  3. Nutrition & Food
  4. Technology & Fitness
  5. Mindset & Goal Setting

Level one, of your Value Ascension Roadmap, is your free content. For each core topic, you produce front-end content in the form of blog posts, videos, and social posts. In this case, all you need is 10/11 titles under each topic and you have a full 52 weeks of content. Level two of your Value Ascension Roadmap are your Lead Magnets.

Each one of your core topics could have a Lead Magnet associated with it. The Lead Magnet is something of real value that either delivers a small % of the overall transformation you offer or helps a Perfect-Fit Client take their next first step on your Value Ascension Roadmap. 

The Lead Magnet has to be valuable enough that someone will be willing to exchange their email address but simple enough that they will be able to gain the promised value within 15 minutes of downloading.    

This doesn’t mean that you need to have 6 lead magnets. If you are strategic with your Lead Magnet production you should be able to create Lead Magnets that cover more than one core area. A huge benefit of this is that you will now be able to promote a lead magnet with every piece of content you publish. Remember a Perfect-Fit Client should have an easily identifiable path to follow all the way from your front-end content to their ultimate destination on your Value Ascension Roadmap.

At level 3 of your Value Ascension Roadmap, you will have your initial front-end offers. If you are following my model this is the level on which your Mini-Front End Liquidator and your Mini-Priming products will live. These products are the logical next steps for your Perfect-Fit Clients to take once they have opted-in for your Lead Magnets. Again, multiple Lead Magnets can lead to a single product and your Value Ascension Roadmap continues to narrow.

The subsequent levels on your Value Ascension Roadmap are completely dependent on your business, your goals, and your personal and business strategy. With this model in place you have a fully automated organic lead generation system on autopilot and also strategic, fully aligned, revenue optimized funnels for paid channels.  Having met people in their world, connecting with the challenges and opportunities they face, with your front-end content you can then provide them with the next steps they need to take on their journey to the ultimate transformation you can help them achieve.

Continuing the example from above, picking the core topic of Nutrition & Food. You record a video and publish a blog post on the 4 Foods That Are Sabotaging Your Health and Fitness Goals. From both of these, you link to a free 7-day Meal Plan. When people opt-in for the 7 Day Meal Plan they enter an engagement sequence that concludes in an offer to sign up for a $47 mini-course on Fueling Your Body & Mind For Ultimate Sport Performance. This mini-product should then position a Perfect-Fit client for your signature program or membership which will deliver the content that they need to achieve the ultimate transformation that you can help them achieve. The levels above this are designed so that they can get the same transformation only quicker.

After identifying the levels of your Value Ascension Roadmap, the offers for each level, the core topics associated with the overall transformation, and the Lead Magnets that will move a Perfect-Fit Prospect over the line from casual observer to committed follower it’s time to put your master plan into action and create a content creation plan. 

And the best part about the Value Ascension Roadmap is that once a person steps to a new level you already have a plan in place and a process to ascend them not just to the next level but for multiple levels after that.  Your goal is to keep your Perfect-Fit Client moving up your Value Ascension Roadmap. The further they travel the greater the transformation they experience and the greater the return to you, the person helping them achieve a future that they may not even have imagined was possible for them. 

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4 Ways to Attract Perfect-Fit Clients at Scale

Micheal O'Neill 5 Comments
4 Ways to Attract Profitable Perfect-Fit Clients Today

4 Ways To Attract Profitable Perfect-Fit Clients Today

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I firmly believe that everyone can build a profitable and massively enjoyable online business. Every single week I see success with courses and memberships in the most unusual and unconventional niches.

I see course creators and membership owners who start just a couple of steps ahead of their Perfect-Fit Clients who go on to build massive communities and achieve the time, lifestyle, and financial freedom that they desire, without being the go-to industry expert.

Here are four tips to help you build your online business faster by attracting Profitable Perfect-Fit Clients at Scale.

 

Know And Have 100% Confidence In The Transformation You Can Provide

You have to be confident that your program or membership can achieve the transformation that you offer in a step-by-step, efficient, and effective manner?

If you have any doubts about your ability to achieve this transformation it isn’t the end of the world, there are a couple of options. You can:
i. Change your Offer
ii. Change the program or membership
iii. Refine your process or framework through 1-to-1 work until you achieve the result you want

Map Their Journey From Start To Finish

You don’t have to be an industry-leading expert to achieve the transformation that you offer. But you have to break your subject into manageable bite-size actionable chunks.

Map out the steps that your Perfect-Fit Clients will need to get them from where they are to where they want to be.

If you have followed my other posts you will have come across my Value Ascension Roadmap which is the transformation plan on which your business is built and which your Perfect-Fit Client will use to chart their journey to the ultimate transformation you provide. 

Your job is to always have them primed to get to their next milestone and then graduate to the next level of your Value Ascension Roadmap. Remember small steps are better than big ones and clarity of outcome is the most critical factor in creating a Roadmap that excites your Perfect-Fit Client. 

4 Ways to Attract Perfect-fit Clients at Scale

Make It A “No-Brainer” Offer

Can you verbalize the transformation that you offer? Can you make it sound and feel real? Believable. Concrete. Unique. Is your OFFER truly compelling for your Perfect-Fit Client?

Without a doubt, this is the number one problem I see when analyzing launches that flop. Online business owners invest massive amounts of time, effort, energy, and cash in their copy and their funnel and they throw together their offer last minute.

Your Offer is the core promise of your program or membership. It’s the very essence of why your Perfect-Fit Client needs to join. Aspirational, vague, high-level, ambiguous promises that their lives will be better just won’t work. You need to be super specific about how exactly their lives will improve and then you need to convince them how you can help them achieve this.

Whether you are a membership site owner, an online coach, a course creator (and you might not like this, but) you are a direct response marketer. In order to get someone to pull out their Credit Card and spend their hard-earned money, you have to get them excited and show them a better future that they can believe in. 

If you do this job properly your Perfect-Fit Client doesn’t have to read a long-form sales page or be battered over the head by a 27-part email sequence. Often, they don’t even need to see the price. With a knock-out, no-brainer offer, your Perfect-Fit Client will be falling over themselves to give you their money. 

Be The Solution to a Massive Problem 

Our job as Course Creators and Membership Site Owners is to provide solutions to problems people already have rather than coming up with ingenious solutions to problems people don’t yet know they have.

Selling a solution is hard enough but selling a problem that people don’t know they have is even more difficult. That isn’t to say you can’t introduce highly innovative solutions it is just that those solutions have to be rooted in some pain that your Perfect-Fit Client feels regularly.

One of my mentors Perry Marshall coined the phrase Find Bleeding Neck when describing this. Your job is to find your Perfect-Fit Client’s bleeding neck. One of our overriding instincts developed over millennia is to conserve energy. If something is a slight annoyance in our lives, we will put up until we have “time” to deal with it. 

And guess what…. we never have time to deal with the little things.

When you have a bleeding neck it isn’t a mild inconvenience, it is a treat to your future survival and guess what…. you take massive action, and the cost of the solution is inconsequential.

And remember, you sell your Perfect-Fit Clients what they want and then give them what they need. The best solution is not always the best offer. The key to this is developing a deep level of intimate knowledge of your Perfect-Fit Client. 

Nail these four elements and I can guarantee you that you will see a dramatic improvement in the results of your next launch or promotion. If you would like to discover how you can implement your very own Profitable Perfect-Fit Client Attraction Strategy click the link below and apply for a FREE Focus-Strategy session.

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3 Quick Ways to Identify Your Perfect-Fit Client

Micheal O'Neill 5 Comments

3 Ways To Identify Your Perfect-Fit Client

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Having a long-term view of the transformation you want for your Perfect-Fit Client is crucial to the success of your online business. As Course Creators and Membership Site Owners, our sole business focus should be on helping our Perfect-Fit Clients achieve the transformation they seek.

Not everyone will want to move at the same pace or invest at the same level to achieve their desired transformation and that is perfect. Our job is to meet them where they are and help them move forward at the most suitable pace for them.

Therefore, a Value Ascension Roadmap is essential for your online business. It makes sure that your Perfect-Fit Client always has a destination to aim for and always has a next step to take.

Your Value Ascension Roadmap will begin with your free content. This may be your blog, social, podcast, or YouTube. From your free content, you want to entice them to opt-in to your email list through a Lead Magnet and then offer them entry to a front-end membership or course. 

From here they will step into your signature program/membership and if they are suitable, all the way to your coaching program and high-end masterminds.

Your job is to know what your Perfect-Fit Clients’ most important next step is at each level and how you can best support them to take that step. 

Often online business owners run into difficulty when their Value Ascension Roadmap isn’t fully aligned from one level to another, or the groundwork hasn’t been laid well in advance of the next milestone on the Roadmap.

In order to attract and hold your Perfect-Fit Clients’ attention there has to be a number of things in place:

  • The first one is your Value Ascension Roadmap, with clear descriptors of the transformation on offer at each level, any pre-requisites, or qualification factors. In addition, you much have a clear and compelling offer for each level.
  • Your Perfect-Fit Client needs to see evidence of the transformation that you have helped others achieve at the next level of the Value Ascension Roadmap so that they are compelled to do what it is that you’re asking them to do. You may be able to transform someone’s life but if that person doesn’t believe in you they will never take the necessary steps.
  • And finally, you have to enroll them in a better future for themselves. This is where you enroll them not on you and your product or membership, but you enroll them in themselves. Very often you are showing them a future that they may not have even imagined was possible for them.

So now that you have created an environment to attract your Perfect-Fit Client how do you distinguish between Perfect-Fit and ok client. Here are 3 quick questions to ask yourself:

Am I Excited by The Prospect Of Speaking To This Client?

When you have an opportunity to engage 1-on-1 or in a group do you get excited when you are about to speak to that client? Do you feel energized, on top of the world, having a sense that you’re making a difference in their life? 

Because if there is an ounce of reluctance the chance is that the person is not your Perfect-Fit Client. There are two reasons why I am so passionate about people attracting their Perfect-Fit Client 

  1. If you’re not excited about helping your clients achieve their ultimate transformation, showing up day after day and playing full out is going to be hard.
  2. If you are not showing up 100% every day and feeling even a tiny bit of reluctance, your Perfect-Fit Clients are going to pick up on that.

If you are genuinely excited about the thought of every single interaction with your clients, this is when your business will take off.

Can This Client Achieve The Ultimate Transformation I Know Is Possible For Them?

As described above, your Value Ascension Roadmap should have different levels of transformation that your Perfect-Fit Client can attain. Some people are going to move at a different pace to others and that is fine, but, do you think the Client can achieve the transformation that is possible for them on that level.

Your goal shouldn’t be that everyone makes it to your top-level mastermind. That is only for a select few people who want to get the maximum results, in the fastest manner possible and are willing to invest accordingly.

Often when I am working with my Perfect-Fit Clients on their Value Ascension Roadmap we discover that the most appropriate level for their Perfect-Fit Client is in their Group Coaching Program.

Are They Ready For The Next Step? 

Depending on their Value Ascension Roadmap, you’re going to have different stops. Each stop will come with a different price level that people will pay.

Price resistance is often a sign that either people don’t believe in themselves, or they don’t believe in you. More often than not, however, it comes down to self-belief.

You are going to start with free content and lead magnets. From here you’ll have front-end, self-liquidating offers, then mini-courses and programs all the way to your signature program or course. And at the end of their journey, you’re going to offer them high-end masterminds.

If they are not ready to move to the next level on your Value Ascension Roadmap that is fine. It may be that they need more time on the level that they are on to build their confidence.

The worst thing you can do is step someone up to a higher level before they are ready. Your Perfect-Fit Client may not always have the skills or experience required for the next level but as long as they have the attitude and appetite that is all they need.

If you answer yes to the three questions above it is a good sign that you are working with a Perfect-Fit Client. When you identify a Perfect-Fit Client the job isn’t complete as you now have to analyze their personality, traits, attitudes, and behaviors to build a profile so you can attract more and more of the same.

If you would like to schedule a free Perfect-Fit Client Mini-Strategy Session, simply click the link and we will build a customized client attraction framework for your online business

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Should I Build an Audience or a Community?

Micheal O'Neill
Should I Build an Audience or a Community

Should I Build an Audience or a Community?​

Table of Contents

If you want to attract profitable Perfect-Fit Clients at scale, then you should look at everything that you do in your business as an opportunity to build and grow a community. 

For the long-term success of your business, this is where the real value lies. 

If you examine the really successful course creators and membership site owners the one thing that they all have in common is that not alone do they have a large audience but they have taken the time and effort to build a highly active and engaged community.

What’s the Difference Between an Audience and a Community?

In simple terms, an audience is a group of people with which you have a one-way stream of communication. Think about when you are watching a TV show or movie, a single, pre-recorded, one-way, mass message is delivered to your device. In this model, you have no way to interact with the creators and if you want to interact with others who are interested in the same show you must do the leg work and find them online yourself. As an Online Business Owner, if you have an exceptional message and you are a charismatic presenter, things can work out ok, but you are missing out on a huge opportunity if you choose to go the broadcast route.

Community on the other hand is a gathering of like-minded people, built around a core topic or a person. This is where you give a platform to like-minded people to interact not just with you but with each other. In doing so they will not only identify you as a leader, but they also self-identify themselves with other community members and feel part of something bigger than themselves.

The Power of Community

Building a strong community, even if small to begin with, is one of the keys to attracting Perfect-Fit Clients at scale. In a community, people see other members engaging with each other, they can see the shared values of the group which is a reflection of your values. This will not only attract other Perfect-Fit Prospects but will also repel those who are not.

Building community is something you should focus on every day in your business. In many ways, your job is to hold a safe space for your community and to facilitate a conversation between community members.

Just take some of the viral companies that have emerged in recent years like Airbnb, Uber, and Peloton. These companies have leveraged intercommunity relationships to fuel their growth by creating a platform for their community to share values and preferences which provides a far better experience for the community members.

So it is not a surprise when you analyze the people who are delivering the big launches in the online knowledge space. They’re the people who are most intentional and proactive in this area and as a result, have the most active and interactive community. Yes, they had really good marketing. Yes, they had a good product. Yes, they had lots of JVs. But, What they also had, and what added that extra dimension to their launch success was the fact that they leveraged the communities they built.

In the online knowledge business world which is filled with immediate gratification and quick wins investing in a community can be frustrating as it takes time. But the long-term ROI makes it more than worth it. When an active and engaged community gets behind your launch the excitement and momentum it builds is a joy to behold. And, when you have momentum and excitement behind your launch you are already halfway towards a really successful launch.

So What Are the 3 Things You Can Do to Start Building Your Community Today?

Should I build an Audience or a Community?

Build Conversation Starters Into Everything You Publish

Yes, some mediums make it easier to build community than others. But when it comes to publishing content, don’t just post for the sake of posting. Make sure you have a very specific message you want to portray and ensure every interaction is a two-way stream.

Think about different ways to start a conversation with your community. Try asking people for feedback and once you get feedback use it not just to get to know your community better but incorporate it into your messaging and the products you create to serve your clients.

Ensure That All Your Content Is Focused On The Pain Points & Desires of Your Perfect-Fit Clients

Do you understand the pain points that are holding your community back? What challenges do they face, what are their values? You need to understand what they hold most precious in their lives.

Learn to speak their language, live a day in their life. You need to be able to read them a page from their diary with such accuracy that they feel you’re looking over their shoulders. And, when you make everything about them, they are going to respond favorably when you deliver your offers.

Share The Success Stories of Your Community With Your Community

Your job as an online knowledge business owner is to get results for your clients. Your sole purpose is to bring about the transformation you promise in those that you serve. Once you start getting these results for your clients, share them with the rest of your community. Make your clients the heroes of your stories.

By doing this, not only will other members of your community better understand what it is you do and see the results you can help people achieve they will also recognize themselves in and identify with the success story. As a result, they will interact more and it strengthens your community.

And remember, it’s not only the big success stories that you should share. In some ways, the little wins and the small steps are even more powerful as they are easier for your community to believe it is possible for them.

Three Tips for Growing Your Community 

Your goal is to start conversations and get the community members talking. Number two is to make everything you talk about your Perfect-Fit Client. And third, you want to share success stories from your community. 

Building a community around your product or membership is one of the most important things that you can do to grow your online business and it is a key part of the work that I do with my Impact Inner Circle Coaching Clients.

Every month I make a small number of slots available for FREE Focus Strategy Sessions where we roll up our sleeves and assess the biggest challenges and opportunities facing you and your business. If you would like to apply for a session you can do so here. 

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3 Essential Building Blocks of a Successful Online Business

Micheal O'Neill 1 Comment

3 Essential Building Blocks of a Successful Online Business

Table of Contents

If you are an online knowledge business owner, course creator, or membership site owner, and you want to attract more, Perfect-Fit Clients at scale then this post is essential to the success of your business. Having built many 6 and 7 figure businesses and helped countless others launch and scale online courses and memberships these three factors above all else will dictate the long-term success of your business. Even successful online business owners can overlook these fundamental building blocks, and they do so at their peril.

Every time I have been drafted in to debrief an underperforming launch the underlying cause can be traced back to one of the three elements that I share in this blog. No matter what promotional strategies, methods, or tactics you use if you hit a home run on a launch, you can be guaranteed that you have dialed in these three areas perfectly, and based on the evidence you can rinse and repeat again and again.

Applying this way of thinking in your business will vastly simplify your decision-making process and will focus your attention on the key elements that will bring about the greatest returns on the time and thought that you put into creating and refining promotions.

The 3 Key Components of A Successful Online Knowledge Business

Unfortunately, what I am about to share is not a bright new shiny trick, it isn’t a silver bullet, it isn’t sexy, it isn’t a new platform or a magic sequence of words.

But it is a tried and tested marketing principle which has withstood the test of time from way back in the days of direct mail (postal) which is as relevant (if not even more so) today as it was back then.

So what are these three essential building blocks?

  1. Your Offer
  2. Your Copy
  3. Your List

If your promotion exceeds your wildest expectation and “knocks it out of the park” the one thing that you can be sure of is that you have optimized all three areas. If your launch gets ok results, you have probably hit 2 of the 3 areas satisfactorily but you have missed the mark on one. If your launch flops you have probably missed the mark on all three or maybe scraped a C- in one of the three.

Across all my coaching and done for you agency clients the element that makes the biggest difference is the Offer but it is normally the area that is given the least amount of time, effort, and energy. A knockout Offer can overcome bad copy and even a bad list. Unfortunately, the best copy in the world cannot overcome a bad offer, however, a strong engaged and loyal List can sometimes make up for a weak offer. There are always some people who will just buy whatever you put out, but trust me this is no way to build a business and trust me if you rely on this your business will have a short shelf life.

The Most Important Component Of Your Online Business – Your Offer!

This is the one element that most online business owners do not spend enough time and effort on. They spend a huge amount of time focusing on tweaking their copy. Many obsess overgrowing their audience and their list. But so often they don’t spend time thinking about their core Offer.

I think often this can be explained because we have spent so long thinking about the content of our course or our membership and we are so familiar with the transformation that people can achieve that we never sit to think about how we can verbalize it in a concrete way that gets people reaching for their credit cards before we have even given them the full picture.  

Your offer is the most important element of your business. You must have a compelling offer. One that makes people want to jump into action. And that action is to sign up for your course, your membership, your virtual event.

Your offer also has to have a unique mechanism. Your unique mechanism is what gets your clients the solution or the outcome that they are looking for. First, you figure out what they want. Then you tie their wants, desires, and their pain to the solution that you have. And this is the whole concept of becoming the bridge from pain island to pleasure island.

So, if you imagine your Perfect-Fit Client, they’re in pain because they don’t have something that they need. Or their current reality is not what they want they want. In other words, they want a different outcome for their life. Your job with your offer is to first show them what pleasure feels like for them. Paint a picture of a future life where they are happy and living their life in the way that they feel fulfilled.

Your Offer is the unique mechanism “the bridge” that will take them from pain island where they are living at the moment to pleasure island where they want to live. You can see why if you do a really good job with your Offer you can overcome bad copy and even a poor list.

Imagining A Better Future For Your Perfect-Fit Clients Than They Can Imagine For Themselves

The job of your copy is to connect with the challenges that people face, what they are going through on a day-to-day basis. It’s to get inside their head, to understand the language they use, and to enter the conversation that is already going on inside their head.

When you have a level of understanding of your Perfect-Fit Client that enables you to verbalize their innermost dreams, ambitions, and fears (often which they haven’t even verbalized for themselves yet) then and only then can you draft truly compelling copy

And not alone will you then be able to draft compelling copy but you will also build a bond and a connection with your Perfect-Fit Client. When you demonstrate that you understand the challenges they face, their dreams, goals, and ambitions. They will feel heard and they will feel understood.

In many ways, your job is to see a better future for your Perfect-Fit Clients. A better future they might not even have imagined for themselves. And if you can demonstrate that in your copy, you will build an engaged, loyal army of Perfect-Fit Clients.

So the first thing that you need is a knock-out offer. Then you need to back up your Offer with emotionally compelling copy that connects with your audience and lets them know that you understand them.

Strategically Aligned Community Building – Growing A Raving Group of Perfect-Fit Prospects

If you are going to invest time, effort, and money in building your list, you have to be strategic about it. Some things to consider as part of your strategy are:

  • Who am I building the list for?
  • What are their next steps? Where are they going?
  • What do I want them to do once they are on my list?

It’s important to have this throughline from your very front-end content. Through you lead magnets, front-end offers, signature program, membership, and coaching program. And one of these components is the ultimate destination that you want your Perfect-Fit Client to arrive at. Some may go onto higher levels, some may be happy at lower levels.

The first thing you need to decide is where on your Value Ascension Roadmap would your very most Perfect-Fit Clients want to live? Once you have decided this you can set about creating the content that will attract your soon-to-be Perfect-Fit Clients. One strategy is to create pillar posts with associated lead magnets around the 4-7 key topics that your ultimate destination deals with.

A personal favourite of mine is to have a lead magnet, leading to a self-liquidating front-end offer as it prequalifies people for the launch of a signature program or back-end offer. Being strategic about the development of your content is how you get your list, launch-ready. This is how you optimize your list and get them ready to buy the offers you present.

How Do The 3 Essential Elements Overlap?

Now, the funny thing is that if you have a strong offer, you can get away with a weak copy or a weak list. A strong offer will overcome everything and it makes finding your Perfect-Fit Clients easy.

If you have a good copy, but a weak offer, things get harder. You are still in the game. But you’re not going to have an amazing promotion. If you have a really hot list with people who enthusiastically engage with you regularly, an audience who knows you understand them, you will probably get away with an okay offer and copy but your promotion will not achieve its full potential. But when you combine a hot list that is engaged and responsive with strong copy and a strong offer that’s when you crack the online business code. That’s when your business is going to take off.

So, to recap. Think about your business, think about where you are. Think about which of the three areas your business is strongest in and which needs the most work? How can you optimize each area, and which one are you going to start with? My personal preference is to always start with the Offer as it is the one where you will get the greatest return on investment.

If you were to ask the big names in the info world what they obsess about most they will all tell you “My Offer”. This is also the area I spend the most time refining and tweaking with my Impact Inner Circle Coaching Clients. So if you would like to set up a Free Focus Strategy Session to review your Offer I would love to hear from you. Simply complete the application form here and we will be in touch.

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3 Ways to Overcome the “But…I’m not an Expert” Feeling

Micheal O'Neill

3 Ways To Overcome the "But...I'm not an expert" Feeling

Table of Contents

But I'm not an expert. I’m never going to be able to start or scale my online business to the next level.

This is a comment I hear so regularly in the online world. And I hear it not only from people who are just starting out but also from experienced online business owners who feel they need to be a true expert in their field to succeed.

Not alone do I disagree with this sentiment but what I have found is that very often being “the” category authority in a field often works against people when it comes to launching and scaling an online business.

Because What You Do As An Expert Matters

Having worked with thousands of entrepreneurs across the world I believe that not only can you start or scale your online business, but you also have the responsibility to do so. I’ve witnessed first-hand the impact that online entrepreneurs and knowledge business owners can have in the world and more specifically the impact they can have on their community.

But it all starts with that first step, committing to the transformation that you know, only you can bring about for your Perfect Fit Client.

Far too often people sit back and complain about governments or big corporations, that they are not doing enough to improve society or to give back to the community. For me this is the easy way out, shifting responsibility away from ourselves. Away from the very people who can have the biggest impact in the world.

The World is Looking for Leaders Now More Than Ever

Imagine the feeling of having built a profitable and successful online business. You’ve scaled your business, you have met your own income and saving needs, you are looking after your team and your business has the capital to grow and expand, now you can start giving back to your community and to other communities in the world who needs it the most. 

And this is my call to you, to step up and to be counted. To take responsibility, not for making the world a better place, but for making your corner of the world a better place.

Never before has there been so much uncertainty in the world. And, wherever there’s uncertainty, there’s an opportunity for leaders to step forward. 

I have seen this happening in so many niches from parenting, sales, coaching, historical dressmaking, currency trading, art, knitting, business, marketing. Online business owners stepping into their power as leaders, providing comfort, inspiration or just a safe place to hang out and connect with others in an ever more divided world.

So whether you are beginning your journey in the online knowledge world, or you are an established online entrepreneur, a real opportunity exists to create a safe space to help like-minded people connect and feel a sense of belonging around a specific topic.

Three Things To Keep You Moving Forward When You Feel Stuck

You Don’t Need To Be “THE” Subject Matter Expert

You don’t need to be “THE” subject matter expert. You only need to be “A” subject matter expert. This is a subtle to important distinction. Whereas “THE” subject matter expert is the go-to authority in a niche who has written the No.1 best-selling book or who’s processes are widely adopted.

“A” subject matter expert is someone who can get a result for their Perfect-Fit Client. The truth is, you might only be a couple of steps further down the road from your audience. I do believe that everybody can start an online business. It is a matter of picking the area of in which your expertise can best helps others.

Commit to Lifelong Learning

The second thing is committing to lifelong learning. Nothing stands still. What got you here will not get you there. And if you’re coming on this journey, you have to be committed to a life of curiosity. Willing to grow as a person and as an online business owner.

This is hugely liberating because if you are committed to constant growth you don’t need to know everything today. As you are learning every day you know that you will be a little bit better tomorrow than you are today. And, by better, I mean that you will be able to help your Perfect-Fit Client get the transformation they desire, quicker, easier, and with less stress.

Become an Expert In Delivering Results

The third one is that technical expertise is only a fraction of what will make you a successful online business owner. Understanding the psychology of your Perfect-Fit Prospects is far more important. What do they want, what is holding them back, what are their fears, what motivates them, why do they not have what they want right now?

You need to become an expert in delivering results. Helping people move past their barriers and take their next steps towards their goals. Results are all that matter. It’s about taking your expertise and your knowledge, figuring out what your Perfect-Fit Client‘s next steps are, and giving them what they need to move forward.

It Isn’t a Matter of “IF”, It’s a Matter of “WHEN”!

No matter where you are, right now. Whether you’re looking to start your online business or take it to the next level. Remember that it isn’t a matter of “IF”, it’s a matter of “WHEN”.

I can show you people with less knowledge, less skill, less ambition, who had fewer opportunities in life who started after you…And they’ve made it in the online world because they moved to pass the “But I’m not an expert” feeling.

It’s about getting out of your own head and thinking about those that you can help today. Those who need you right now. Those who will continue to struggle unless you get your message into their world. And provide them with the support they need to move to their next level, whatever that is for them.

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