Would you love to know how to have multiple successful launches with a small audience? Would you love to know how to monetise a small audience? Whether you are just getting started with an online business or you've been at this for a while, this is …

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Today’s talking point:

Would you love to know how to have multiple successful launches with a small audience? Would you love to know how to monetise a small audience? Whether you are just getting started with an online business or you've been at this for a while, if you:

Have a small audience
Haven't paid attention to your social media in a while
Have been putting loads of effort in and nothing seems to be working

This is for you. We are going to go over exactly how to make money and how to actually sell your products, programs, and services.

back to the basics

I learnt about online marketing and business in an agency setting. I learnt it from people who had been doing this for years.. basically since the internet was a thing. I learned the basics:

Building value
Building relationships
Understanding the psychology behind what actually makes someone want to buy something from you

I am not about this whole new societal pressure to be super popular and super famous. Sometimes I listen to the Instagram experts or the Pinterest experts, and they're talking about how they're spending four or five hours every single day analysing hashtags or commenting on people's posts and that's how they're blowing up their Instagram. That is just not sustainable for the everyday entrepreneur and business owner.

I look at what is actually going to be the most effective strategy for me to grow my business online for the long-term. I don't really care about being popular and about being famous. I want to be doing business, not just today, or in five years, but for life. I am in this for the long haul.

There are way more effective ways of growing and monetising your brand, that don't involve spending 24 hours a day chained to your desk, hyper focusing on trying to get as many likes and comments and followers as you can; because, you just can't take those to the bank. Yes, they're important. And yes, it's great to build a brand and build awareness and build relationships, but it doesn't mean that you have to spend hours upon hours a day working on Instagram.

So how CAN you have consistent successful launches with a small audience? Let’s get into it.

#1 | Have The Right Offer

You need to have an offer that people care about. Whether it's a product or service or program, you have to be providing something that your audience actually is looking for.

From the words of Seth Godin, people do not buy goods and services, they buy relationships. This means that it's so important to understand why people make a purchasing decision. They make a purchasing decision based on emotions, they don't buy based on rationale or logic.

People buy things based on emotion and justify those purchases with logic. So if you build a quality audience, even if it's just 500 followers on Instagram, if you build a relationship with them and give value, they're going to be inclined to say yes when you have something to sell. That's the entire premise of monetising a small audience. It's attracting people that actually care about what you have to offer that will actually pay for your goods and services, instead of just people who are there to entertain themselves, but never really buy into your message.

I know it sounds basic, but basic really isn't basic unless you don't do it. If you get your foundation nailed down, you will understand how to sell in any economy, you'll know how to sell in any platform in any environment. To attract a quality audience you need to get clear on your message (and share what they actually want to hear).

Reverse engineer the sale and ask yourself:

How do I get people to respond to me and buy into me as a service provider?
How do I position my knowledge?
How much do they want to pay?
What are the challenges, what are things that they are struggling with?
How can I prove to them that I can actually get them that result?

Whatever you need to do, getting to know your ideal customer is really going to be the source and the secret sauce to selling with a small audience. When you can prove to a group of people that you understand them and have the solution to their problem, it's going to be so much easier to sell because it's the right offer for them.

So right now, I want you to pull out a pen and a piece of paper and answer three questions:

What is my offer?
Who is actually going to buy this product?
How can I create content around those challenges?

Remember that online marketing and being a brand online is all about sharing value. It's all about sharing your expertise.

#2 | Get To Know Your Audience

You've got to get to know your people. Really set out some time and energy into getting to know your audience:

Jump on a call
Talk to them in real life
Get a lot of conversations going on your social channels so that you can understand their pain points, challenges, and any obstacles they’re facing.

Create solutions around those things.

#3 | Create Strategies

Now that you have clearly laid out what your product is, who is going to be the ideal fit for that product, and what kind of content you can create that attracts those people, we are going to move into the next step. Create two different kinds of strategies.

Long-term Strategy

Most of us know what the long term strategy is: Show up every single week. It’s a non-negotiable. Whether that is having a podcast episode, or a video that goes out every single week on YouTube, or an Instagram Live once or twice a week, I just want you to show up and commit to doing it at least once a week.

Create content straight out of the questions, the challenges, the obstacles that your ideal customer faces. I know it sounds crazy simple, but really, you're just being a good social media manager, a good marketer, a good business owner. You are listening to your people, you are doing more of what works and less of what doesn't. There isn't a magical secret, it’s simple.

You listen to people and you create content around things that they care about. If you do that, you will always be in business.

This principle applies your products, programs and services too. When you have offers that people want to buy, you will be in business forever. If you continue to innovate, if you continue to give people what they actually need, and what they actually want, you are set. It doesn't matter how the climate changes, it doesn't matter what the algorithms do, it doesn't matter how the economy shifts, you will always have the know-how to pivot, to make changes to adjust, to innovate, to continue pushing the needle forward.

Keep changing, keep listening, keep adjusting.

Short-term strategy

How are you going to monetise right now? What does that look like? The first thing you normally hear is: you need to build a funnel. I know when we hear the word funnel, we instantly freeze. But really all a funnel is, is a customer journey. It's a selling system. It's an intentional way of bringing a follower through the process of becoming a lead and then becoming a customer.

This can happen via your email list, straight on social media, on your website, your blog, or even your physical store. It is really important that we look at this whole concept of a funnel as a way to move people to the next step in the relationship - becoming a buyer. There are four stages of a customer's journey:

Discovery: When they get to know who the heck your brand is.
Consumption: They are looking at your content, they are getting to know you, and you're building a relationship with them.
Acquisition: They have said yes to pay for your service, your product or your program.
Ascension: When they purchase from you a second time, or if they become a super-fan and they share your stuff with everyone. They are just so excited about your brand.

You don't necessarily need a fully-fledged funnel right off the bat; you want a funnel because that will allow you to create evergreen sales day in and day out without you having to do a full launch. But when you're just getting started and you want to monetise right now, start by talking about your product or your service. Do it more often than you think you need to.

So often we think that people who follow us immediately know everything about us, that they know you because they follow your brand. It’s just not the case. People are busy. They have lives of their own. They are not paying attention to every single thing that you do until they are super-fans, and most of your audience is in the discovery or the consumption phase. So with that in mind, you just want to talk more about what the heck you do.

#4 | Get More Intentional

Now let's get into a bit more of an intentional strategy, really create a systematic way of bringing people into your world so that they can purchase from you. You could do this in two different ways:

Build a baby funnel, a really small, simple funnel.
1. Whether it's on your website or a standalone service, have a page where you can send people to, and they can actually give you their money online.
2. It's not about the tools that you have, it's just about the strategy.
Take the lead magnet approach.
1. Create an incentive for people to give you their information so that you can follow up.
2. Create a checklist, a toolkit, a webinar, some kind of masterclass, any discount incentive, something of value that people would be willing to get in exchange for further information.

And again, it's still an art, there isn't a science to how you communicate, you have to find your own style. But this is just a basic strategy to get the ball rolling, to inject some cash flow into your business.

In order to monetise a small audience, you don't need to have anything fancy. You've just got to implement basic business principles that will serve you at any size.