If you focus on your mailing list and your product, you’ll progress faster than someone who tries to multitask.
Done right, your mailing list will bring you tons of qualified traffic and your products will put cash in your bank account. First, let’s take a look at your mailing list.
1. Your mailing list
Your Mailing List or simply List or Contacts or Audience or Subscribers is one of your most important assets online. From your list you will get your first customers.
You build your START list by contacting everyone you know, including classmates, coworkers, colleagues, associates, former classmates, ex-colleagues, friends, friends of friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers.
Communicate with them through calls, texts, emails, one-on-one, and social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
The most effective way to communicate with them when you start out will be one-on-one at malls, churches, mosques, conferences, and other events.
Without trying to be too prescriptive, start with small talk. Ask them what life is like with them, what they are doing now, and also share what you are doing yourself.
For complete strangers, you can break the ice by asking them what they do for a living. You can also ask about their other interests and whether they are visitors or live in the area where you met them.
Keep the relationship and conversation ongoing and warm to build rapport. In the process, ask for their phone number and/or email address and start sending them relevant information based on their areas of interest.
You need between 100 and 250 names to start. According to Joe Girard, the author of How to Sell Anything to Anyone, everyone on this planet knows at least 250 other people.
As your list grows, you’ll need a contact management system (CMS) or a CRM (customer relationship management) system.
A CMS will facilitate the management of your list and will be essential in the analysis of the performance of your clients in areas such as opening mail, click through and Lifetime Value, to mention three.
There are many CMS out there, from the very fancy and expensive ones like Keap (formerly Infusion Soft), Click Funnels, Ontraport, Kajabi, and Drip to the relatively affordable ones like Vonza, Constant Contact, ConvertKit, and MailChimp, to name a few. a few.
Each of the CMS has its pros and cons or pros and cons, but as a beginner, I recommend you go for MailChimp.
MailChimp is simple, easy to use and above all, it allows you a FREE PLAN of up to 2000 subscribers.
You need a free plan when you haven’t started earning money.
However, with that being said, you don’t even need a CMS in the beginning. All you need is a Microsoft Excel sheet to store your audience’s contact information, the key of which is the email address.
To manage your list and continue to reach more potential customers to increase your traffic, you also need your smartphone, WhatsApp, and other social media accounts, particularly Facebook.
To establish your credibility and seriousness, build strong relationships and rapport, let your contacts know what you have achieved.
Have you written, for example, a book or books? She shows off and talks about them. That’s where your Products come in.
Let’s take a look at your product below.
2. Your product
Your Product is also one of your most important assets online.
Your Product and Mailing List are the two sides of the same coin: Your Online Business.
Your product can be in the form of a book, ebook, guide, article, checklist, cheat sheet, app, code, or training course.
Courses are popular online because they are easy to sell digitally in PDF, MP4 and MP3 form and with ridiculously high margins.
People are always looking for ways to improve their lives, so the courses are very useful.
As a beginner, all you need is a good Product in the form of a Course.
Although a Course can be Basic, Intermediate or Advanced, as a beginner, you will go to a Basic (Entry Level) Course.
An entry level course is something that is low in price but solves an immediate problem for your target audience.
You don’t need anything complicated, fancy or academic. All you need is a Product (Course) that solves an immediate problem.
For example, if I am thirsty and you have water to sell, I will gladly buy it to quench my thirst (an immediate problem).
If, for example, I itch and you have a balm that can immediately reduce my discomfort, I’ll gladly pay you.
So tie your product to your target audience’s immediate problem, not a future problem, and you’ll not just win, but win big in 2021.
Online marketing experts talk about funnels. Your entry level product will be one of the most precious assets of the upper funnel.
Although the actual mechanics of creating a product as a course are beyond the scope of this article, there are basic things you should know at this point.
To be successful with your Product (Course), ask your Audience what they are struggling with to discover their pain points.
Then ask them more, suppose I develop a product that solves your problem, would you buy it or be willing to pay for it?
If 3 to 10 of your audience members say “Yes,” and better yet are willing to pay you upfront, then you’re home and dry.
In short, if someone in your target audience is willing to pay upfront for your undeveloped Product, it means your Product idea is a good one.
The process of trying to find out if your target audience is willing to pay for your Product up front is called idea validation.
Once your Product idea has been validated, go ahead and create the Product. That’s all you need to do as a beginner.
Let me repeat, you are on solid ground when your audience members are willing to pay upfront for your Product.
Another way to create a Product is to go ahead and create one based on your gut feeling and start selling without involving your target audience at first.
This could be a bad idea if you spend a lot of money to create a product and then find that there is no market for it.
Engaging your audience early on to co-create your product is therefore a good ideal to follow.
Having said that; however, keep in mind that there is no perfect way to do something on and offline.
Just do what works and is working in the market you serve. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel.
For example, I created my first two products, the Book Writing Clinic and the Internet Business Mastery Course, based on gut feelings.
Both Courses have exceeded my expectations, with over one hundred and fifty students enrolled in both.
So go ahead and create your first product, say a course that you can sell for between $19 and $99 per student.
Depending on your target audience, your approach and price will be different, but the principles remain the same.
Once you build a successful entry-level product, you can add more features and benefits and upgrade to a mid-level product as time goes by and your experience and confidence grow.
This article assumes that you have attended some type of training that shows you the basics of how businesses work online or on the Internet.
If you haven’t, you have to because there are a lot of moving and changing parts, so doing it by yourself is not only silly, but also a penny, but a pound.
Good luck my friend as you move to win big as a beginner in 2021.