Episode #063: If I Had to Start Over in 2023...
If I Had to Start Over in 2023...
On this episode of Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, we discuss
how to monetize your online presence and build your business from scratch in 2023.
I break down the importance of nurturing initial customers and reinvesting profits into advertising and education to scale up over time.
The episode delves into developing an audience, crafting the right freebie, and creating a variety of offers to build an ecosystem.
The podcast also touches on social media strategies, such as leveraging Facebook groups and using autopilot systems to grow your audience and email list.
Join us as we explore the steps to building a successful online business!TIME STAMP OVERVIEW:
LINKS MENTIONED:
TIME STAMP OVERVIEW:
[00:00:00] Starting Over in 2023: The importance of a starting budget
[00:03:05] Creating an Effective Freebie for Your Audience
[00:07:14] Balancing Content Creation for New Businesses
[00:12:19] Ramp Up Sales with Real-Time Workshop Training
[00:16:35] Repeat, Scale, and Monetize: A Strategic Guide
[00:17:43] Multiple Offers: Why Having Options is Key
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Zach Spuckler [00:00:00]:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, episode number 63. And in this episode, I'm talking all about what I would do if I had to start over from scratch in 2023. So let's get into it.
Hey, hey, Hey, not so average marketer. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. I am really stoked because when I do episodes like this, they're received really well. And I love talking about kind of what I would do to kind of switch things up a little bit if I was starting over in 2023, right? So for those who don't know when I started my online marketing career, I did lots of organic marketing a little bit of advertising and I've kind of stepped into a space where I do lots of advertising and very little organic marketing And that changes my perspective on the way that I would do things and kind of how I operate my business. And so I wanted to do an episode that's kind of like if you're getting started or you're struggling, or you just want some fresh perspective on what you can do to grow your audience and your business, then I think you're really gonna like this episode.
Zach Spuckler [00:01:08]:
So I think the most important thing to start with is that if I was gonna start my business in 2023, I would do something very similar to what I did when I started my business in 2015, which is I would set some money aside. And I know it's easy to kind of think that the barrier to entry is low and we don't have to do a lot of, you know, things to kind of make money online, and we hear things like, you don't need this or that. You know, like I don't need all of these fancy things to generate revenue. And while that's true, I think it's beneficial to start with a small kind of nest egg for your business. And so for the sake of this conversation, I'm going to kind of talk about how I recommend you have about $1, 000 saved up. And I know I'm not gonna sit here and say that that's not impossible or easy or either or. It might take some time. It might take you several months to save up that amount of money.
Zach Spuckler [00:02:07]:
It might take you a few weeks, right? But I wanna challenge you that your business is gonna have expenses. And in the traditional world, the offline world, oftentimes businesses operate in the red for 1 to 2 years before they make money. So I get that it can be scary. I get that it can be hard to generate that front end investment, but I'm gonna challenge you that this is something you're gonna want to do to grow your audience, okay? To grow your business because you're gonna have expenses, you're gonna have hosting expenses and course hosting expenses, and If you don't have some cash available to pay for those, you're gonna struggle to get the results that you want. So I won't spend a ton of time talking about that. I just wanted to throw it out there that I am gonna operate on the assumption that you have a reasonably good starting budget. For this case, I'm gonna say about $1,000. You might want a little more.
Zach Spuckler [00:03:05]:
You might be able to get away with a little less, but this is what I'm gonna recommend. So first thing I would do is I would get super clear on who my audience is, right? Who is my audience that I want to work with? And I've talked about this on the show before, but really get clear on how you want to support your audience, right? Just to give you a high level view, there are really 3 categories. There's health, wealth, and happiness, right? You can either help people make more money, you can help them get healthier, or you can help them be happier. Now, obviously, that's not all encompassing, but I just want you to think, which of these 3 categories do I wanna serve? Am I trying to help people grow their business? Am I trying to help people lose weight or get healthier? Or am I trying to feed into kind of that happiness, that desire for more that people have in life, right? Once you're clear on where and how you wanna serve your audience, you wanna develop a freebie. And I've talked about freebies on this show as well, but a freebie is basically a free PDF, workbook, checklist, audio, video that you give away in exchange for a name and email, okay? What I would do is I would start with a really juicy freebie and we'll link up in the show notes an episode on freebies, but I want you to know that you've gotta have something that people want, okay? You've gotta have something that people desire. So don't do like, you know, let's say you're in the health and wellness space. If you say 5 green juice recipes, but you're talking to people who have never juiced before as your ideal audience, you're not going to get a lot of people opting in. If you're talking to people who are health fanatics that just want more green juice recipes, then that could be a great freebie.
Zach Spuckler [00:04:54]:
So you wanna have some clarity on who your audience is. Okay? What I would then do is I would create a simple Facebook lead generation ad. And I cover this inside my Facebook ads bootcamp, the logistics of how to set these up. You can check it out over at heartsoulhustle.com forward slash bootcamp. But I would set up a really simple Facebook ad. And this Facebook ad would be to get people on my email list so that I have people to talk to when I'm ready to promote a product. But at this point, I'm just growing my email list consistently. Now, 1 thing that I would do if I was starting over today is on the back of that lead ad, I would be inviting people to join a private Facebook community.
Zach Spuckler [00:05:40]:
Now, I have honestly mixed feelings about Facebook groups, but I can tell you that building a community is a great way to grow your business faster. Okay, Facebook groups are still active. We still use them in our business. We've changed it to be a customer only Facebook group. But if I was starting over, I would have a general community for anyone who's interested in working with me, right? So what I've basically set up at this point is I've got my freebie, I've got my Facebook ad, and those are automatically growing my Facebook group and my email list. So what I've done is I've created an autopilot system that grows my audience every single day for me, both in an organic space, Facebook and an owned space email list. Right now, on top of this, if I was starting over, I would leverage social media. Now, when we say leverage social media, it sounds so simple in concept like, oh, post on Instagram, post on Facebook, but oftentimes we're like, what do I post? What should I be saying? So what I would be doing is I would be posting 3 times a week on Instagram, a post or a reel, and I would do 1 post that's purely value, 1 post that's a call to action to either get my freebie or to join my Facebook group, and 1 post that answers a question that I know my audience has, okay? I would cycle through those 3 things over and over and over again, and you could do them as a post or a reel, you know, lean into where your comfort zone is.
Zach Spuckler [00:07:14]:
Don't push yourself so far in the first stages of your business to be like, I'm gonna post an Instagram reel every single day for the next 30 days. That's gonna be a challenge, right? Especially while you're balancing kind of getting this business off the ground. So I would be posting 3 times a week on Facebook, and then I would be posting twice a week on my Facebook profile or page. Okay, the reality is for a lot of us when we're starting our business there's people in our sphere that might be interested in what we have to offer and you've got to start creating content whether it be on a page or a profile, that speaks to those people. So twice a week on Facebook, once a week I would ask a question just to encourage engagement, and once a week I would have a call to action to grab my freebie or join my list. Now remember, with both Facebook and Instagram, you can grow these channels, but remember only a small percentage of your audience sees them. So you might be thinking, wow, promoting my freebie every single week, the same freebie over and over again, it's gonna get boring and people are gonna not pay attention. But the reality is most people aren't seeing your content.
Zach Spuckler [00:08:20]:
A really great post from us gets a 5 to 10% audience reach, and the average post only gets 2 to 4%. And that's been from our personal stats. So you don't have to go crazy trying to, you know, post different content all the time, 24 7, fresh ideas, repurpose, recycle, right? Continue to promote your freebie. The other thing I would say is that in my Facebook group, I would be posting 3 times per week just to engage with my audience, asking them questions, sharing content, linking to my blog if I'm blogging, linking to any resources that I have, right? So I would be consistently posting in my Facebook group as well. So just to be clear, that is a lot of organic, right? You're posting 3 times a week on Instagram, 2 times a week on Facebook, and 3 times a week in your group. It's about 8 posts a week. So every day you're doing a post, but you're doing it in different places. And during this time, I'm also kind of garnering where people are paying attention.
Zach Spuckler [00:09:29]:
Okay. So my goal for this period of time would be over 30 to 60 days to get 500 people on my email list from both advertising and organic. Now typically for a lot of our clients when they run lead ads, we see costs between $1 and $2. So you're looking at about $500 to $750 on list building. And that is if you purely rely on ads, no organic, and there's a good chance you're gonna get some people on your list organically. So probably closer to the $500 mark. Once I've done that, once I've put all these pieces in place, what I'm looking at is an email list of about 500 people. I'm looking at a Facebook group, which will probably have between 100 to 200 people in it.
Zach Spuckler [00:10:17]:
And then I'm looking at, how do I start to monetize, right? What do I put in place to encourage these people to buy from me? Now, I think this is where a lot of people kind of, I don't wanna say go wrong, but a lot of people jump into the deep end, right? We observe what the other people in the online world are doing, and we think, oh, I've got to make that $997 course. I've got to do that massive training. I've got to build my flagship product. And I wouldn't do that if I was getting started. Instead, what I would do is I would figure out what people want by posting a poll inside my Facebook group and maybe even emailing my list and say, what are you working on right now? And I would choose 2 to 3 things that I think they may want and see if people respond. I'll also give them the option to submit their own answers, right? So I'm kind of like feeling out what is it that people want to learn from me. Based on their responses to my email and my polls, I would host a $25 live two-hour workshop. Okay.
Zach Spuckler [00:11:20]:
Now this workshop isn't strictly a webinar. It's high value, high content. I might even develop a workbook to go with it like in a Google doc or a PDF that I can give to people so that they can follow along and start to get results. And I would charge $25 for this, okay? And if you're doing the math on that, that means that the workshop, if we can get 20 people registered, would generate $500, which is essentially what we've put into ads at this point. So the reason I like to do this is because I'm starting to test out the quality of my list, the quality of my leads. Is my freebie aligned with my offer? If I make an offer in my group and on my social media and to my email list, am I gonna be able to garner engagement and sales, right? So what a lot of people do is they jump in and say, I'm gonna do a big launch and a big promotion. And I'm saying, don't put all that pressure on yourself. Start with a $25 workshop and see if it sells.
Zach Spuckler [00:12:19]:
Because if it doesn't sell, you can go back to the drawing board and it's a 2 hour commitment. If it does sell, then you host the workshop and you see results. On the back of the workshop, I would promote a next level offer and the easiest next level offers that I've seen are like implementation months or weeks right so for example If I did a workshop on how to run a Facebook ad, I might do a 30 day incubator on creating profitable Facebook ads, right? I would run a bootcamp style training where I'm teaching in real time. I'm developing content as I go. And what that means is that I can kind of sell the product before it's completely made and the way that I do this is I write the sales page I map out all the content but I don't build the slide decks and the worksheets and the bonuses instead I build the sales page and see do people want this? And my goal would be to convert 10 people at a $300 to $500 offer. Okay, I'm not going to jump to the $1,000 price point. I personally find that once I go past $500, it does get a little harder to sell. And I know that we hear, you know, oh, it's so much easier to sell at a higher price point or it's just as easy to get a thousand as it is to get $500.
Zach Spuckler [00:13:41]:
And I think that's a loaded statement. I think it depends on your audience, your market, what the market can bear, how much money people have available to them based on your ideal client. So I like to be between about $300 and $500. So let's just play the game. Let's say you price it at $300. You convert 2 people into your $300 product. That's $600 plus the $500 from the live workshop means you generated about $1,100 and ideally you've spent about $500 on ads up to this point. So now in the span of 30, 60, 90 days, you've taken this concept of, I'm going to put $500 into my advert, the advertising of my business and I'm gonna double it and I think if you can double your Advertising money that that's a really good place to be that that shows.
Zach Spuckler [00:14:26]:
Hey, I kind of know what I'm doing I'm learning about my audience. I'm seeing sales. I'm seeing success and is it this massive? 100k out the gate no, but it validates my offer And then I can duplicate it and do it again and again and again and continue to scale it up. Now I know that you might be thinking, Zach, that sounds great in theory, but what you're saying is that I might only get 2 people to buy my product. That doesn't seem like a lot, right? And here's the thing. I was talking to a client the other day or a student inside our membership, and they said, what if only 1 or 2 people buy would you still run the training and I said absolutely because we all start with 1 person right you start with that first name and email on your list You start with that first sale of your product. And so I get it. It's easy to look around the online marketing world and be like, well, that person just launched and had a hundred people join their programmer that people had a thousand people join their program.
Zach Spuckler [00:15:27]:
But when you're getting started, every sale counts. And if you have 2 people, nurture and support the heck out of them, get them results, get testimonials, because that's going to amplify your conversions. The next time you do it, the next time you do your promotion, when you have testimonials and feedback and people getting results, right? So once you've done that, once you've got that $1,100, I would take $500 of it and I'd put it right back into Facebook ads over the next 30 to 60 days, right? I put it right back into Facebook ads. And depending on your experience level and what kind of results you're getting, you might even spend it faster. You might spend that $500 in 2 weeks and host another live workshop. But the point is, you can repeat this process and scale it up by growing the list, by growing the audience, by growing the group. And so you're just constantly putting your investment back in. And I'll be honest, in my first year, I put a lot of my money back into my business in the form of advertising and education.
Zach Spuckler [00:16:35]:
And I think that that is a strategic play, right? If you think you're gonna start this business on Friday and quit your job on Saturday, that's really not the right mindset to be in, right? So repeat and scale. Now where it gets cool is you might be saying, Zach, this is great and I love this, but this isn't like a massive growth strategy. This is gonna be slow. Well, here's the thing. As you grow your audience, as you grow your list, as you grow your Facebook group, you can start making offers to work with you one-on-one or in small groups, right? So you've got your kind of $200 to $300 or $300 to $500 offer, but what if you develop a $1,000 offer to work with you one-on-one, Right? What if it's like, I'll work with you for 4 weeks for a thousand dollars one-on-one, and we're going to create this specific outcome. You can start making offers to the audience that you built, and that's going to bring an extra revenue. You can also start making other one-to-many offers. So maybe you really like this workshop idea and you think, oh my gosh, this was great, but half of my audience said they're also struggling with this thing.
Zach Spuckler [00:17:43]:
Maybe you do another workshop with a different offer or even the same offer, right? I'm a believer in having an ecosystem of offers and I really bought into for a long time that you had to have 1 offer and scale it up. But for me, that puts so much pressure on making 1 offer hum perfectly. And so what I did was I said, what if I have multiple offers? What if I do multiple workshops and multiple bootcamps, right? Does it create more creative work? Sure, no bones about it. But it also creates variety and it lets me test, right? I think that when you get stuck on the 1 perfect offer mentality There's nothing bad about that. And if that's working for you, great ignore me, but I find that when you do that You find yourself saying oh, well, I have to do this 1 product and get it right. And sometimes it's just the wrong offer. It's the wrong alignment. And when we're do the 1 offer thing, we get so tied to, I have to make this work, that we cling to an offer that might not be a great fit.
Zach Spuckler [00:18:48]:
Whereas when you create multiple offers and test out multiple different angles and messaging and workshops and courses and boot camps, you might tap into something that does become the 1 offer, right? And that's great too. So what you're gonna do is just continue this process to grow the audience and you scale your launches and promotions. So every day you're running Facebook ads to grow your list, which grows your group. Every day you're posting somewhere on social media to just continue that. And for me personally, as my business grew, I started posting less and less on social media. I became less social media dependent and more advertising and email marketing dependent. And it's up to you, right? Some people love social and some people hate social, but I think it's a great place to start because it taps into that organic and gives you kind of some additional wins that offsets your cost, but you just scale. You repeat and scale.
Zach Spuckler [00:19:42]:
You grow your list all the time. You make offers on a regular basis and you repeat, repeat, repeat. So there you have it. That's what I would do if I had to start from scratch in 2023. Super quick recap just to run you through it. I would start with a budget of about a thousand dollars, post on social media every day, alternating between Facebook and Instagram, run a lead generation ad to my freebie that links to a Facebook group Nurture that group and my email list try to get 500 people on my email list and then host a live workshop with a goal of getting 20 people in at $25 a piece. Convert 2 of those people to a $300 to $500 offer. Host the bootcamp, nurture the heck out of them, get testimonials, feedback, support them, take some of the revenue that I generated, put it back into advertising and repeat and scale.
Zach Spuckler [00:20:36]:
I'd start making one-on-one offers, different one-to-many offers, and I would just continue this process all the time to grow my audience, grow my, and scale my promotions. So I hope you got lots of value from this episode. If you want the show notes or links to some of the things that we mentioned within this episode, you can head over to heartsoulhustle.com/NYAP063. Again, that's heartsoulhustle.com/NYAP063 for Not Your Average Podcast, episode number 63. And don't be afraid to tag me on social media @HeartSoulHustle or DM me directly and let me know, did this resonate with you? Did this make sense? Do you like this? I love hearing from you guys and anytime I get feedback good or bad it always helps us improve the show. So I hope you have an incredible rest of your week and until next time stay not so average.
