137. Picture This: A Steady Flow of Sales of Your Program (I’m Teaching You How!)

Sam Vander Wielen: Hey there. It’s Sam. And welcome back to On Your Terms. I’m so excited that you’re here. So, I’m really excited because for the next couple of weeks, I’m running something that I’m calling Online Marketing Summer School. So, I’m going to be airing a series of episodes that are all geared towards helping you bump up your online marketing game this summer.

So, I’ll be real with you, as always, I am taking a little time to recoup this summer because I just lost my mom. My mom just passed away. Yes, you heard that right, both of my parents. I have lost both of my parents in the past year. So, as you can imagine, it is very tough, very overwhelming, and I need a little bit of space.

And I know that I’ve already given you hundreds and hundreds of episodes of this show and thousands of emails and blog posts and social posts, and I know that there’s so much waiting for you that you might just not have had time to catch up on yet. So, I decided to put it all together for you, call it Online Marketing Summer School. And I am really excited to bring back some of my favorite episodes from my and also from your favorite teachers here that I’ve had on the show to help us bump up our marketing game this summer.

It’s such a good time to revisit your marketing strategy or to create one if you haven’t yet. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anybody. But it’s such a good time for you to do that because you can get some things set up this summer to maybe do some sort of promotion in the fall or just have a better half of the rest of 2023. So, I invite you to kick back, relax, listen to the next couple of weeks of episodes all about online marketing, and I hope that you’ll send me a DM on Instagram, @samvanderwielen, or leave a review of the show wherever you listen to let me know if you’ve liked these episodes.

Hopefully, if you’ve never heard them before, I’m introducing you to something new. And if you’re listening to them again, take a note from my mom, who was a brilliant, brilliant woman and would reread so many books throughout her life. Like, she reread the book Flow and Tipping Point and so many different books throughout her life. She would reread them in different parts of her life, and she would always walk away with something new, and she would always put in the notes what year she read it and what she learned that year versus the other years.

So, there is nothing wrong with re-listening to things. I re-listen all the time, so I hope that if you’ve listened before, you take away something new from this great episode. So, I’ll see you on the other side. Please send me a message, let me know how you liked it. Thank you so much for listening.

So, I still remember the first time I’ve ever created a website or created my first set of products or something like that. I remember putting them out there and then being like, "Okay. So, now, the people will just come, right? They’ll just buy." And I don’t know what exactly I thought was going to happen, but I’m pretty sure I thought there was magic involved where I could just create something and then the universe would just give it to the right people somehow, magically, and they would just see all of my intentions behind it, and buy it and love it and become raving fans. I don’t know. I don’t even know what I thought.

But I feel like I’ve learned a lot over the last several years about how to properly market your products and programs online, on social media, through your email list in so many different ways and in a way that doesn’t burn you out. Like, I am never a proponent and today’s episode is not going to be a proponent of like, "You have to post everyday on social media seven times and use all maximum 30 hashtags, and do a reel everyday, and also be on TikTok, and also be on YouTube, and also have a podcast." That is very much not my opinion, let alone my style.

And so, I hope that you’ll find today’s episode sort of refreshing in that respect because I more want to give you the strategy. I think so many people try to focus on the magical pill of social media of like, Is it that YouTube is going to be my ticket? Is it podcasts that are going to be my ticket? Is Instagram or maybe I have to do TikTok? It’s not the exact platform that’s going to make or break it. A lot of different things are going to make or break it, but, instead, really the strategy behind it. And then, I’m a big fan of you finding platforms and programs and things that you like. So, we’ll get into that. Don’t worry about it.

But really today, the goal of today’s episode, because Episode 12 taught you about how to find the right customers for this evergreen program that you want to create, Episode 13 was all about making the program or product itself so amazing so that people will buy it on autopilot and then become raving fans of it and then tell all of their friends. And so, you’ll start to have this snowball effect.

I really want to share my experiences and some lessons with you today on how then do you get more people to purchase your product. Because after you’ve maybe beta sold it or you’ve sold it to a handful of clients or you’ve sold it to the people who already are on your email list or who already follow you on social media, you might be running into a little bit of a roadblock being like, "Who else is going to buy this product?" So, I’m really hoping that we can break this down today.

Okay. So, part of the problem here is that, I think for one, people don’t necessarily always have the tenacity that it takes or don’t exactly understand just how long and how consistent you have to be. Like, how long you have to talk about something, and how consistent you have to be talking about something, and talking about what you do, and getting comfortable advertising your business, and all this kind of stuff in order to start getting some traction.

So, first things first, I think it’s helpful to just adjust the expectations here that just because you create something or just because you’ve sold it to a handful of people, that it will necessarily start taking off.

I talked about this back in Episode 13, creating a product that you feel like you could see yourself talking about for months and years, you know, that kind of stuff. Because if you really want a product to be successful, it’s possible that it takes that long. Or it’s possible that if it’s successful, you’ll want to still be talking about it months or years from now. So, it has to be something that you don’t get tired of, but that’s also because things take time.

So, when we’re thinking about marketing our product – I’m assuming by now that you’ve listened to Episode 13 and so we’ve gotten past the beta testing stage and we’ve kind of put this thing now out into market. Like, we’ve done all of the work that we’re supposed to do – now you kind of come to this roadmap of marketing of like, Where do I go from here? How do I get this into more hands? How do I get into new people’s hands?

So, essentially there are two ways. The 30,000 foot view here is that there are two ways. There’s organic marketing, which is what most of us are doing every day, which is being on social media, emailing our email list, creating content, all of that kind of stuff. Obviously, if you’re doing in-person stuff, too, like when I had my first business, I was doing in-person workshops and I was giving talks and doing all kinds of stuff like that. So, organic marketing is the first little section that we’re going to talk about.

The second way that you get new eyeballs and new purchasers on your products is through paid marketing. So, we’ll talk about paid marketing at the end. It always gets a bad rap. I feel like I see so many people now bragging, for lack of a better term, like, I did this without any paid marketing or I was able to scale my course without paid marketing. And I’m always like, "No. You do. You’re just talking about Facebook Ads. So, you just didn’t do with Facebook Ads, but you pay for a lot of stuff in your business." So, you pay for marketing, you pay for advertising. And by the way, it’s completely healthy and normal to advertise in your business. Every business advertise.

So, how you choose to advertise is a totally different story, and we’ll get to that at the end. So, let’s start with that first little path that I was talking about with organic marketing, because this one is huge and it needs to come first for a reason. So, one of the things people ask me about so often is how I was able to build the Ultimate Bundle into, not only a program that had so many people in it and that’s pretty successful, but also how I was able to do it essentially on autopilot.

So, what I did for the first several years of the Ultimate Bundle after I did all of the things I taught you in Episodes 12 and 13 of the podcast is that I started talking about it every single day. So, I started talking about it every single day on Instagram. At that time, I’m pretty sure I was pretty active still on Facebook. I’m no longer really active on Facebook at all. But I would take whatever content I was posting on Instagram. I was being very consistent on Facebook. I had a Facebook Group. I would go live once or twice a week. I was being very, very consistent.

Now, the kind of content that I was producing was primarily educational, something that would be helpful. Like, three steps to do this, three secrets you need to know about this, three ways to do this, three things you need to know about your website policy. It was always something like that.

And so, I would teach. I would give something that was truly helpful. It wasn’t just like a tease, but I would teach something. And then, at the end of it, I would say, "And that’s why I created the Ultimate Bundle, which is my program that gives you ten legal templates and video trainings and blah, blah, blah," and I would describe the product.

Everything would kind of make sense, too, that I was teaching about it would be like, "Oh. The person who would find this piece of content helpful, the next logical step would be to get the Ultimate Bundle," or to need that kind of legal help, or to put it into their awareness because they might not even be sure or might not be aware that something like this exists. So, everyday my mission was to share educational and helpful content that was the next logical step into the Bundle.

For the first, I would say, two years, the main goal, the call to action of my actual content itself was the Ultimate Bundle. I was straight up selling it constantly every single day. Yes, I got sales that way. The sales weren’t huge, like more than insane, but they were good and they built over time.

And so, I took it low and slow. That was very helpful because it allowed me to get probably several dozen, maybe up to 100 customers or something that way, and just really learn and hone my skill of talking about it, of really understanding where people were at, it gave me so much more data of dealing with people who were going through the same things and had the same questions, and all those kinds of things.

After that, it was when I decided to create something free. That was the kind of step before the Ultimate Bundle. So, that’s what I want to talk to you a little bit about now. So, I’m a big proponent of doing this organic marketing method first, especially because you get proof of concept. It will give you testimonials. You will strengthen the product, kind of more in line with what I was talking about in Episode 13 about making sure that it’s an amazing product that actually gets people results. You’ll be able to go through all of that.

But it is hard, especially when you have a higher ticket offer like I do with the Ultimate Bundle. It is hard to go from straight, like, an Instagram post that tells somebody three steps to do something to "Hey. Buy this thing for a few thousand dollars." It worked. It actually did, which, in fact, gave me further proof that this product was really good and I was speaking their language. But it is difficult.

And so, in order to actually amplify and scale this product, which is what you’re here to learn about in this episode, I needed to have an intermediary step. So, that’s why I think maybe two-and-a-half, three years ago, I created a free workshop called Five Steps to Legally Protect and Grow Your Online Business.

And so, this workshop, instead of the Ultimate Bundle becoming my call to action every single piece of content, this free workshop became my call to action. And as you can imagine, it’s much, much easier to get people to sign up for something that’s free or that they see additional value coming from than it is to plunk down a chunk of change for a product when maybe this social media post that they find of yours is the first time that they’ve ever met you.

So, I literally became a woman obsessed with this call to action. I mean, I just used to sometimes actually start laughing because I would find all of the ways to connect the dots. I would experience something in my day, something that I could turn into a story. I would go on Instagram Stories, I would share it, and then at the end be like, "And that’s why in my free legal workshop, Five Steps to Legally Protect and Grow Your Online Business, you learn how to do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Click here or tap here or whatever to sign up." And it just became a relentless pursuit to get people to sign up for this free workshop.

In this free workshop, I, of course, introduce my product at the end. People started buying it and that’s really when things started to explode for me, not just because people were opting into my free workshop and buying at the end, which they were, but what happened was more of a snowball effect where people maybe signed up for my free workshop, even if they didn’t buy, they were now on my email list. I was nurturing them and continue to nurture them every single week with a valuable email, whether it’s letting them know about a free podcast episode, a new blog post, something I’m doing, just a little inspirational note or behind the scenes thing, or letting them know about some other free thing that I’m running.

So, what I saw over time and what I have continued to see now for years – and this is, by the way, one of the most beautiful things about taking a long game approach to growing your business if you understand that this is going to take a while – this can pay off huge. I understand that everybody might not be in the right place at the right time when it comes to purchasing my products. That’s okay. I don’t need them to buy from me today. I treat people as people. I am glad that they’re here. I hope that I have a lot to offer in the meantime. And if it becomes right for them one day to purchase my stuff, that’s awesome, but it’s not a requirement. It’s not going to make or break my business.

Having that attitude has just been so helpful in helping to grow these kind of long term relationships, long term consistent sales. Because what I saw happen was that those very people, those several hundred, several thousand people who signed up for my free workshop those first few years, sure, maybe they didn’t buy right away, but they would buy six months later, nine months later, a year later. And once you get enough people signed up, that just becomes a rolling giant snowball.

Now, it doesn’t have to be a webinar in order for this to be the free thing, if webinars aren’t your thing. Webinars can be very powerful tools, especially because you can be on video. You get a bit more of their time and attention. You can really lay things out and then you can kind of present to them, make the next logical step to present to them to purchase your thing at the end. And you can do all of that without being skeezy, by the way. But I hope that I do. I try to.

But there are other ways that you could do this. Some people do this to get people into a free challenge or to get people into a video series or into a freebie that they can download. And then, they go through some nurturing sequence in your email list and then they are prompted to purchase.

Now, there’s a very intentional way to go through all of this. It is important to understand that there is a very, like, methodical, strategic way. It’s not as simple as just popping up a freebie and then talking about your thing at the end. What happens a lot of times that people do that and then they’re kind of shocked when, again, all of the sales – hopefully, you’re seeing a pattern by now that you don’t just pop things up in general and everybody starts buying it. There’s a very specific step-by-step process.

So, we just want to, today, focus on how do we get this content out that is so helpful to my audience. So, I talked a lot about this in Episodes 12 and 13 about making sure that you’re creating content in this organic marketing strategy that is helpful and educational to your ideal customer. So, if you haven’t listened to Episode 12 yet, you definitely have to listen to that before we have this conversation.

But content that is helpful to them and that speaks their language, really, is getting them to that like, "Oh man. She’s in my head. She must know me so well. And I’ve never talked to her, but I feel like she knows me so well." Like, when you start getting those kinds of comments on what you’re doing, that’s when you know you’ve really hit the jackpot in terms of truly reaching this place of understanding your ideal customer.

Now, I know I said in the beginning, people get really fussy about which platform is kind of the magical platform. And you’ve probably heard this before, but I shared the same opinion that you really should focus on not only where your ideal clients are – obviously that’s very important. If no one’s hanging out on LinkedIn, don’t make LinkedIn you’re social media strategy, obviously – so wherever your people are hanging out, and that’s probably where you’re getting the most engagement, where you’re meeting people who seem to fit your ideal client profile.

But you also want to think about a platform that you are able to look at and say, "I know I could consistently show up there for a long period of time." At least six months, I want you to commit to yourself right now. And I want you to DM me and tell me which one you picked and which platform you’re going to do and you’re going to tell me what date. But you’re going to commit to six months of consistent action on that platform.

By the way, notice I said consistent, not daily, not twice daily, not some hard and fast number. Just consistent. Really doubling down. A lot of times people don’t give a platform or some sort of project enough time in order to really sink in. So, we need to commit to something for six months, whether that’s going to be your YouTube channel, your podcast, or your email list, or something like that.

Really, my hope and my goal for you would be that you pick one of the Big Three. So, the Big Three are an optimized blog post, a podcast, or a YouTube video which would also be optimized.

As you move forward or if you’re a bit further along in business, you could also take an approach like what I do, which is picking what’s going to be the core piece of content. Like, maybe your podcast is going to be the core piece of content. So, you record the podcast and then you turn that podcast episode into a blog post that embeds that podcast episode within it, and you also turn it into a YouTube episode, either just audio or with video. The point is that all of these things are optimized for the individual platforms that they’re going on so that they organically attract leads for you.

So, when you put up a blog post on your site, for example, if you focus on SEO, like I have over the last several years, ever since I started my business, it’s been kind of my little – I don’t want to call it secret because it’s not a secret, but I just feel like people don’t focus on it enough. So, you put that blog post on your website, you make sure it’s optimized. Well, that blog post is going to be out there working for you for years to come.

I have blog posts that I wrote in 2017 that are consistently, literally, every day pulling in leads to my evergreen webinar funnel. And that evergreen webinar funnel didn’t even exist when I wrote that blog post. But I’ve since gone back and updated it, included little opt-in things and all of that kind of stuff.

But that is really my point, you guys, if I could pass on anything to you, it would just be to focus on a content strategy, an organic content and marketing strategy that works for you. Because if you want to live your life, live your business on your terms, then you cannot be a content producing machine.

I mean, sometimes I see people online, they’re like, "I have a YouTube channel and a podcast and a this and a that," but they’re all separate and I’m like, "How do you do that?" And then, they’re doing daily reels and daily TikToks, and that is great if that’s what you do and that’s what you strive to do or that’s the season you’re in, in life, I feel like that’s wonderful.

I don’t know about you, that’s not the season that I’m in. I’ve gone through periods of that. It leads to burnout. And what it, to me, ultimately ends up leading to is kind of a blank, like whatever writer’s block is for content, I guess content creator’s block. I would just run out of ideas. I would feel tired. I didn’t want to be on social. And what that leads to is this roller coaster of you’re off the charts for a couple of months and then you’re like, "I’m so exhausted. I don’t want to be seen on Stories."

So, for me, I like to choose this kind of simple system. I would love for you to pick one to two of the Big Three, the YouTube episode, podcast, or blog post, all of which are optimized so that you’re consistently pulling in leads without you having to do additional work. Let the content pieces be part of what works for you. They’re like an unpaid employee, essentially, out there working for you.

But one of the things that we always come back to is our email list, because that really is what you will "own." That really should be a main focus for you. I don’t care how successful your TikTok videos are and how incredible your Instagram following is. That stuff can go away in a heartbeat. It changes. It gets yanked out from under us. It becomes exhausting. Sometimes you might go through a season.

You will always have your email list to fall back on. And I’m telling you, the more that you cultivate a relationship with them now and consistently when you’re not selling something, and just really, really connecting with that audience and focusing on it as an area of growth in your business, that is something that will continue to pay you back many times over down the line.

So, now, if you’ve looked at these Big Three, the YouTube, podcast, or blog post, you now come to your email list to let them know about it. So, the marketing strategy is that you create this super helpful content that’s geared towards your ideal client that has a call to action at the end of it that links to your next logical step and all of that. And every single week, you’re emailing your email list to let them know about that content.

So, let’s say your podcast is your thing, every week, you’re emailing them saying a short intro to this podcast episode, letting them know to go listen to it. You’re promoting the podcast elsewhere. In that podcast episode, you’re then telling people about the freebie that you have, the next logical step, whatever it is. And it’s just this beautiful cycle that will keep going and going and going. Or, you know, someone finds you maybe organically. They Google something, they find your YouTube video, they watch your YouTube video, and then at the end, they have the opt-in.

I think for now, this is a great start for you from there. A lot of people remember how I said in the beginning, there are kind of these two main branches. There’s this organic marketing path, which we’ve now talked about, the other big one being ads so we start to pour money into Facebook Ads. And, to me, that is not a route. This is just my opinion. But that’s not a route that you even explore until you’ve explored the first one.

So, once you have proof not only of the actual product, but proof of the funnel – whatever you want to call it. People get all fussy about the fact that it’s called a funnel. It is what it is – proof of the marketing strategy, proof of the funnel, proof that you can pull in a "random person," for lack of a better term, a cold lead, somebody who finds your YouTube episode, somebody who finds your podcast, your blog post, finds you on social media opts into your free thing and then purchases your product. Once you have that and you have that over and over and over and over again, that is when ads will amplify everything.

To me, Facebook Ads are like pouring gasoline on a fire that’s already burning. So, if we just had a bunch of random logs stacked in the middle of the woods and we poured gasoline on it, nothing would happen. When you light a flame to it, it would shoot up. But if it was just by itself, nothing would happen. If you already had a small fire going and then you poured gasoline on it, it would whoosh up in the air. That’s what ads are. Ads are pouring the gasoline on an already growing fire.

So, if you’re trying to sell something and it’s not working, ads are not the answer. If you sold a handful of them, ads are not the answer. If you don’t have a funnel, ads are not the answer. I knew somebody once a couple of years ago who poured a ton, a multi-five figure investment, into Facebook Ads to get people to sign up for a free call with her, like a discovery call. That’s not a funnel. And that will not work, in my humble opinion. You can ask a Facebook Ads expert about that, but that will not work.

So, with Facebook Ads, we’re really trying to find new leads through something free. We have to tell them about a free workshop, a freebie, a download, a challenge that’s going on, like something that’s free, probably, and/or pieces of content. We nurture in our ads, too. We share podcast episodes. We share blog posts. We share reels that we’ve created on Instagram or popular Instagram posts that have been really helpful. That’s the kind of stuff. So, we’re really nurturing. We’re finding new leads through this nurturing process and then letting them know about something that’s free that we offer.

Once they opt-in to the something that’s free, like a free workshop, yes, then people get retargeted with sales ads for whatever I’ve sold in the workshop or whatever it was in the freebie. So, that is essentially where things are headed. That’s where you build things out towards. But don’t even worry about that path until you’ve really got this first one solid.

So, for any of you who have come to me and asked me, or people say to me all the time like, "Oh. It seems like your business has changed so much in the last year, year-and-a-half, two years." I’m like, "Yeah. About a year ago, I finally started running ads." And like, "Oh. I can’t believe you waited so long." I’m like, "Yeah. Thank God I did. Thank God because I did it this way and I’m so glad that I did."

I had hundreds of people, and I don’t know that you need to wait that long, but I sold it to hundreds and hundreds of people first. I really got to know them. I made the product way better. I made the funnel better. I got my own button order. I got my own operations and systems in order. I got organized. I got on Asana. I did all kinds of things. So, I had to do a ton of work.

If I had gone and done this, I don’t know, a few years ago, not only would it have not worked well, but it would have been a mess once it happened. So, a lot of times these things happen for a reason. It takes a long time for a reason. And if you’ve not heard anybody else in this space share with you who’s gotten to a multi-seven figure business that this shit takes time, it takes time. It takes time. It takes energy, patience, failure, being super frustrated, thinking about doing something else, coming back to it again, and again, and again, and again, and continuing to build.

I’m at this place now in business, I’m still thinking about how I can make things better, how I can improve, what I can do differently, how I want to shake things up. I look at the data, you know, almost everyday. So, it’s a lot. It’s a lot.

And if you’re new to On Your Terms, before you go, it would be so awesome if you could subscribe and follow the show wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you’re on Apple Podcasts, please rate and review the show. Give us however many stars and review the show. It would be so helpful. I love hearing from you guys. As always, my DMs are open. You can DM me, @samvanderwielen on Instagram. Let me know what you thought of this episode. See you soon.

Thanks so much for listening to the On Your Terms Podcast. Make sure to follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. You can also check out all of our podcast episodes, show notes, links, and more at samvanderwielen.com/podcast. You can learn more about legally protecting your business and take my free legal workshop, Five Steps to Legally Protect and Grow Your Online Business, at samvanderwielen.com. And to stay connected and follow along, follow me on Instagram, @samvanderwielen, and send me a DM to say hi.

Just remember that although I am a attorney, I am not your attorney and I am not offering you legal advice in today’s episode. This episode and all of my episodes are informational and educational only. It is not a substitute for seeking out your own advice from your own lawyer. And please keep in mind that I can’t offer you legal advice. I don’t ever offer any legal services. But I think I offer some pretty good information.