Most of the posts that I write for you are pretty high level. I tend to focus on bigger mindset issues and pointing out situations that you should be aware of and can maybe use to your advantage. These blog posts are meant to be more strategic than anything else.
Today though, I’m going to focus on tactical stuff and in particular, automation.
Most of us aren’t doing enough automation in marketing our businesses. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about online or offline businesses, we’re not doing enough to leverage automation.
What brought this to my attention today was that I was thinking about what my “funnel process” looks like for Casual Marketer as I start thinking about adding affiliates. Then I remembered, “Oh right, I don’t really have a funnel for Casual Marketer.”
For the most part, that’s by design. When I started working on this idea actively late in 2015 I didn’t really want anything too extravagant – I wanted to keep things simple, daily emails and links to join the paid newsletter. That’s actually worked out pretty well, but the problem with it is that it doesn’t scale very well and it is a very shallow business model.
By shallow I mean, if you’re not interested in the newsletter or maybe some coaching, then you effectively just get to read my daily emails. That’s great for you, but for my business that’s pretty limited. I need to figure out a way to make that a bit more robust so that I can service people with a wider array of information products.
Which leads me back to automation.
I have all the tools I need to create this stuff and more importantly I know how. I pretty much have no excuse… So I’m going to stop making them.
The plan for me over the next couple months is to build out a series of front-end offers into Casual Marketer, generally around a few topics that I’m comfortable teaching, but also that fit within the ethos of what I’m trying to share with everyone. I want it to be consistent with what I’m already doing and make for a good segue into people becoming newsletter subscribers or a couple other things I’m planning.
This strategy is going to look kind of like this:
– Front-end optin offer that gives away some kind of tactical smaller answer
– The person will enter a sequence that delivers their tactical answer, but then starts promoting them on an information product that goes deeper into the topic
– If they don’t buy the offer, they’ll eventually be moved into a secondary automated webinar sequence where they’ll get something else, but eventually, it will circle them back around to the related information product
– Leads that don’t buy from either of those sequences will be moved along to the next category of information product or just continue to get my daily emails until they pull themselves back into a different product sequence
To automate that properly, there are probably three or four email sequences that we’ll need to write, a couple landing pages to design, get my shopping cart ready for it and then build out the automated webinar.
The idea for me then will be to focus on creating content, constructing offers and doing the marketing to get people in the front end. I’m going to use the automation tools to build the leverage so that I can get the most value out of my assets.
I’m going to document this journey and begin sharing it with you over the coming weeks, so stay tuned for that.