I hate selling.
I’ll freely admit that which may sound weird from a site that helps you build an online business with digital products. But it’s true.
Selling makes me feel uncomfortable because I know I don’t like being sold to so why would anyone else? And that’s where things get tricky for a lot of people.
Some people have zero problem with selling while others will spend a large amount of time creating amazing offers and then not sell them at all. So what’s the solution?
Sell without selling! I know it sounds silly like breathe without breathing. But it’s possible and in this post I’m going to show you how to sell without selling.
And it’s not as hard as you may think but there are some fundamentals that you must really master.
People Love to Buy, But Why?
Here’s the thing. We know that people have no problem with buying things which is why so many people justify selling. People buy so what’s wrong with selling?
And technically there is nothing wrong with selling, but the secret struggle that many don’t realize is that if you try to sell at the wrong time then you are wasting your time.
Selling is about timing and most of the time your timing is going to be off.
What do you do about it? This is what makes an online business interesting because you can set up systems that allow you to have things available 24/7 that guide people towards a sale.
If you set things up correctly you can have an invisible salesforce always working without anyone noticing.
It Starts With a Simple Framework
There is a framework that we follow here. It’s called The Pocket Business Framework and helps guide everything we do. The framework is quote simple.
- Get them to notice you
- Get them to pay attention to you
- Get them to trust you
- Convert that trust into money
Already you can begin to see the art of selling without selling. If you can guide people through this framework then you can start to make sales 24/7 with your business.
But it’s important to know that you can’t skip steps. You can’t get people to #4 without going through 1, 2, & 3. So what you need in place is a system that consistently applies this framework.
Creating a Content Flywheel
Looking at The Pocket Business Framework above you can see that we need to find a way to get people to notice us and online that means creating content.
Which is great. You should love to create content around the things that you love.
The problem is that you don’t want to fall into the trap in creating content for places that require you to always create content. Think about how social media works today.
You post a piece of content on there and then within hours, if it hasn’t taken off, it essentially disappears. Which means you need to create another piece of content.
It can be extremely exhausting.
But if you don’t post on social media then it’s like you don’t even exist so what can you do?
You create your content flywheel to ensure that you’re consistently getting your content in front of people. How does it work?
Step 1: Start With Longform Content
Every brand that we create starts with a blog not because we believe blogging is necessary, but because it makes things a lot easier down the road.
And that’s the important part to remember. You don’t get to create a successful blog overnight. A blog takes a while to get going and that’s why so many people stay away from them. But in a second you’ll see why they are important to this flywheel.
We can even use this post as an example.
Step 2: Create an Email
So after this post is created, what we’ll do is create an email around it but instead of saying, “We wrote a new post, check it out.” The email will cover this topic from a different angle and then let people know if they want to learn more they can check out our post on the subject.
This email gets sent to our list of people so that they come back to the site. Why do we care about that? Because we want to remind people that there is an amazing resource here which also happens to link to the different offers that we provide.
Step 3: Create Social Media Content
After creating the post, we can check it out and pull out the highlights. These highlights can then be turned into social media posts.
Do we link back to this post? It depends on the platform. Sometimes we will and sometimes we won’t. It’s okay if we don’t because the social media content will still guide people to our bios which contain links back to the site.
People will come to the site and possibly buy one of our offers or sign up for our mailing list (which if you remember means they’ll get other emails sending them back to the site).
Step 4: Improve the SEO
After a post has been up for a couple of months (or weeks depending on the site) we can get a feel for how it’s performing with the search engines and then we can make the necessary improvements to help it climb the rankings.
Search engine traffic is a key source of traffic if you truly want to scale a business plus it’s one of the main contributors to selling without selling.
If you need help with your SEO it doesn’t have to be difficult. Do a couple of things and you’ll find that SEO was a lot easier than you imagined. You can check out our guide on on-page SEO or our book, Mighty Tiny SEO, to get started.
Okay, But Where’s the Selling?
You might be wondering where the selling happens and the truth is that it happens within every piece of content that we put out.
Every time someone comes across one of our pieces of content they have an opportunity to be introduced to our offers. If the timing is right then they’ll buy it.
The key is to ensure that you’re always making people aware without throwing it in their face. For example, I just let you know about our SEO offer but I wasn’t screaming that you need to buy it.
If the timing is right and you want to knock out your SEO then maybe you’ll grab it. If you don’t then at least you know that it exists and if we cross paths again, you just might remember.
There are of course ways to sell that are “harder”. The majority of what we do is referred to as soft selling.
Here there is this solution that could really help you out. I’m just letting you know it exists.
Hard selling involves urgency. If you don’t buy this right now then something will happen (offer expires, price goes up, etc). There is nothing bad with hard selling when done correctly but when it’s done too heavily it can leave a bad taste in people’s mouths.
With what we talk about in this post, we spend more time creating content and helping people than actively trying to get them to buy something. It might seem counter-intuitive and you would think that nobody would buy, but they do.
Consistently.
There are times when we do hard selling but they are very rare. For the most part, we’ve been building amazing businesses by following The Pocket Business Framework and building Content Flywheels.
How to Sell Without Selling
In today’s world whoever everyone and their mom are trying to get your attention, it’s the people that show up consistently to provide you with value and help that you will remember. Over time, these become the people that you trust and because of that they become the people that you buy from.
But there are two key points to remember:
- People have to know that your offers exist. You don’t get to set it and forget it.
- You have to show up consistently for them.
If you skip one or both of these things then it can feel like none of this works and you’ll have to start begging people to buy your stuff.
It’s not necessary.
Just do what you’ve read in this post and you’ll do great.
