You can get anyone to give you money if you trick them or scare them enough.
That doesn’t sound like something to be proud of, but that’s the foundation of most online marketing today.
Think about a traditional funnel:
- “Hey you, I have something amazing that you want and it’s FREE“
- You give up your email for the free thing
- The free thing is meh and it just leads to a sales promotion that ends tomorrow when the price increases by 866%
- You buy the thing because you don’t want to miss out on the deal
- You forget that you buy the thing so it never gets used OR you buy the thing and it’s still not what you wanted
- You’re annoyed until you see, “Hey you…”
As a Creator, you can see this is a numbers game.
Follow this process with enough people and you’ll make money. That’s why you want to get 100,000 Twitter Followers. That’s why you want 10,000 subscribers to your newsletters.
So you chase.
Some people are great at the chase. They do it with no problems.
Others burn out because chasing the algorithm sucks.
But if we go back to the formula that we talked about we can see that this way isn’t the best way for everyone.
Don’t remember the formula? Here is again:
Audience x Offer = $$$$$Remember, the Audience variable is the people that are willing to buy from you at some point.
Those 100,000 Twitter Followers?
The majority of them won’t ever buy from you because they will never want to.
The problem is that you don’t know which of those 100,000 will buy from you.
And that’s why people continue to play the numbers game.
But let’s take a step back.
If we can get better followers then we have more control over the formula.
But how do we get better followers?
“Better content!!!”, you scream.
Better is hard to quantify.
How about this:
Content meant for that one person who is ready to buy now.
That sounds better.
But now we’ve introduced a new problem.
What if the person is the right person but they aren’t the right person right now?
Meaning, they fit the profile of your other buyers, but for some reason, they aren’t going to buy right now.
Don’t have the money to invest or they’re reading on their phone in traffic (don’t do that) or they don’t fully understand the problem yet.
The content you create will still be for them, but they have to understand the content is for them.
While these numbers look great there is nothing magical about the process required to achieve them.
The right message hits the right person with the right offer at the right time.
- No paid ads
- The mailing list was at most 10,000 subscribers
- Pageviews to the site were never more than 20,000 a month
Does this mean you should do paid ads or get a ton of subscribers or build a massive site with SEO? Of course not!
You want those things, but you want them with the right people.
I’d love an email list with 100,000 subscribers if I knew most of them would buy. I wouldn’t love an email list with 100,000 subscribers if they simply joined because of a giveaway.
That sounds like disappointment and regret.
You Want Them to Feel Good
One of the worst things that you can do is buy out of fear.
When you do that you don’t feel too great after the purchase. Instead of focusing on the ways the offer is going to help, you think about whether it really was a good idea to buy it.
That’s not the way to build Superfans.
Notice I said “build” there.
Because that’s what you have to do if you want Superfans. You have to create them.
That means every interaction they have with you is a positive one. It means that every time they think about you, they think of how you’ve made their life better and will continue to do so.
The algorithm can’t beat that.
A giant following of people who don’t pay attention can’t beat that.
When you can build a business while remaining true to yourself and align with the vision of your audience, you’re unstoppable.
It’s impossible NOT to make money at that point.
If all of this makes sense to you and you agree with it then let’s talk about the implementation.