← Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
924: Is It Really Possible to Make Money Online Without a Huge Following?
00:33:26
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
Abigail Pumphrey
I would much rather see someone build a following over time, develop those deep connected relationships than have one post blow up and your audience just explodes overnight. Because realistically, they followed you for one moment in time, not who you continue to show up as. Welcome to the Strategy Hour podcast brought to you by Boss Project. I'm your host Abigail Pumphrey and I'm dedicated to supporting online businesses. I don't believe in one right way to build a business. I'm here to help you build business your way, one that supports not only the life you have, but the life you want. I'm on a personal mission to help you become financially free. I'm taking all the lessons learned as I turned a layoff into a seven figure online business. I'm here to help you prioritize your life every step of the way. Whether you're creating your first digital product, growing an email list, or scaling an already profitable business. Settle in. It's time to talk strategy. Ever wish you could get the full behind the scenes of what goes into your favorite educators launches? Well, now you can. I was tired of watching people scrambling over what to say, how to present their offers or ask for the sale. So I did one better and decided to hand over my full two week launch plan. The entire marketing strategy, email copy, social posts, literally all of it. Head to bossproject.com box for more details. I don't want you to miss out this. It's bossproject.com box. You don't need thousands of followers to make thousands of dollars. Today I'm breaking down exactly how to build a profitable online business without a massive audience. I think we can all agree that a big following might look glamorous, but but it's not a guarantee of income. The real magic happens when you connect with the right people, build a real community, and make a genuine impact in your audience's life. Throughout the course of my business, I have prioritized building my actual business over building vanity metrics, which absolutely has meant that I have made sales. But it also means that some of my platforms, the ones that tend to be the most visible, don't always look as successful as others. But that has nothing to do with the amount of profit, new students, or the pace at which I am growing my email list. So today I'm going to break it down and walk you through exactly how you're going to make sales, even with that little teeny tiny audience. I don't know about you, but when I start thinking about large audiences, I start thinking about cult followings the kind that are going to buy absolutely anything you put in front of them. Like how many times have you looked at an influencer that had potentially what, millions of followers and they go to sell something and they are selling something out in minutes. And I think it's really easy to assume that it's like that with absolutely everyone. And it's absolutely not. There are plenty of influencers and content creators and other people building a following, potentially even large following, that have low sales. And so much of it has to do with a lack of trust or genuine connection. I would much rather see someone build a following over time, develop those deep connected relationships than have one post blow up and your audience just explodes overnight because realistically they followed you for one moment in time, not who you continue to show up. As I have watched again and again, small engaged audiences performing so much better than larger and disconnected ones. It honestly reminds me of this particular person in my industry. She has a stellar reputation, she has worked with some of the top people doing what I do, and interestingly enough her audience is quite a bit smaller. But that audience is not only deeply loyal, but they're also at a different point in their journey. So she has a bunch of people in her world that are further along in their area of expertise, which generally means they have more free flowing cash and more reasons to potentially invest not only in something small, but also to invest in more signature offers down the road. I think people often are confusing the actual purpose of social media and when you're a business owner versus someone who is strictly a content creator, the purpose of that audience is different. So let me break that down. When you are an online business, the purpose of social media is to provide you traffic and leads to your own offers to the things that you are actively selling. When you're strictly a content creator, you're not necessarily you could, but you're not necessarily selling your own products. Often you're being paid for the amount of views and engagement that you're getting on the content that you're producing and sharing online. Now there could be situations where you have brand deals and you potentially have metrics that the brand wants you to hit in terms of sales, but it's selling their product, not your own. If your income is based on the number of people that view your content, your goal of that content is different than someone who wants to drive warm traffic to a paid offer. It just is. Typically those content creators that are strictly relying on views, or primarily on views are focused on creating engaging, entertaining pieces of content versus a small Business owner needs to focus more on inviting someone into their world, making them aware of the kinds of problems they solve and positioning their offers as the solution. You could have just 100 followers and still make money. If 10 of them buy your offer, that would be what's called a 10% conversion rate. And when your audience is smaller, you're way more likely to have a really high conversion rate. I've seen people with niche, highly engaged, small audiences convert as much as 50 to 75%, which is literally unheard of. When you start having large following numbers, the average social media engagement rate is less than than 2%. So even big accounts can struggle to convert at this point. You have choices. There's no right or wrong answer to how you decide to run your business or where your primary sources of income come from. You get to dictate what that looks like. I personally like to be in control of the products that I offer. I control the delivery of those products, the client experience for those products, and ultimately am responsible for the kind of results that I get my clients. But that doesn't mean I'm not also selling other people's products and services. I make up to 20% of my income every year from just affiliate dollars. Affiliate income comes when you sell someone else's offer and and make a percentage of that sale. So for an example, I work with Teachable and I have for a couple of years now. I have been using their platform to host my digital products and other courses online for almost nine years and I get to share and talk about their platform. When someone else goes to bossproject.comteachable, they're going to go to Teachable's website and have the opportunity to engage with their software. If and when someone decides to make a purchase, the traffic I'm sending to them gets paid out to me. Just sitting here, I had a little bit of an epiphany and I was thinking about if I was brand new today and I had no audience in the particular topic that I wanted to share about, how would I go about it? How niche would I go? And sitting here, I'm realizing potentially the best way to take advantage of the growth opportunities, but also to drive the most income would be to start out niche and get more broad. The bigger your audience, I think it's easy to assume that the more niche your audience that the smaller that group of people is that you could potentially sell to. And there's some truth to that. Yes, the nicher the topic, the smaller the potential group of buyers is. That is true however, there is likely less people serving that very specific group of people. So I had a client last year that was her background was in website design and she had a variety of templates, website design templates, and some courses. And it would have been really easy to say that she's just a website designer and that she sells website templates. But she went niche and she was selling website templates for psychologists. Like how oddly specific is that? She honestly probably had one of the fastest growing businesses I have seen in a very, very long time. And I think it had so much to do with her ability to bring her unique expertise to a group of people that are seriously underserved. So to figure that out, I think you have to ask yourself a couple of questions. First of all, I think you need to be aware, self aware of your skills. What are you excellent at? What can you just do without even thinking about it? What could you talk about again and again and again and never get bored? What could you like put a whole 60 minute lecture together about without looking a single thing up? Those are the kinds of topics that you are just naturally good at. But I want you to dig into that a little bit. What are the specific problems around that topic? What are the kinds of places that people get stuck? What are the things that people tend to struggle with? What is something about it that you thrive at, but you see other people struggle? That might help you identify a potential product. But I want you to take it a step further. If you were to teach that content or share that content, who do you love working with most? My hyper specific students that work with a very specific group of people. Like for another example, if you want another random one is an accountant that only works with photographers. I imagine you're going to have to spend some time brainstorming on what that could potentially look like. But I promise it is going to get you so much further faster than you attempting to have this massively broad appeal from the beginning. But how do we make money from that small following, that small niche following? There's really two main strategies that I would personally put time and energy into at the very beginning. Since you have a smaller following at the beginning, you likely aren't going to be getting paid to produce that content from the actual media platforms that you're posting on, like Facebook and Instagram and YouTube. Probably not going to pay you if you are just getting started and maybe only have a couple hundred views on the kinds of things you're putting out. Creating content and growing an audience takes time and so you need to be able to get paid for the time you're investing in marketing and growing your business. And I think one of the best ways to do that is using a low ticket offer. It's an attraction tool that you can bring the right people into your world, but you can actually get paid and essentially reimburse yourself for the time and effort you spend creating content. Hiring with Indeed, your search is over. When it comes to hiring, don't go searching for the 1. Just meet your match with Indeed. Get unparalleled access to job secrets with over 350 million unique monthly visitors globally, according to Indeed data, and an extended reach through Glassdoor. I love that Indeed makes it easy to hire. When we've hired in the past, the process was full of unqualified applicants. With Indeed, we can target the right candidates for the right position, leveraging over 140 million qualifications and preferences every day. Indeed's matching engine is constantly learning from your preferences, so the more you use Indeed, the better it gets and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit. To get your jobs more visibility at indeed.comstrategy hour, just go to indeed.comstrategy hour right now and support our by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com strategy hour terms and conditions apply. Need to hire you need Indeed. I walk you through exactly how to build out this digital offer and position it so someone will not just buy from you once, but buy from you again and again inside digital product Jumpstart. So if you want more details, you can go to bossproject.com jumpstart and find out more there. But I really think this is such an incredible tool to attract people. Now with that low ticket offer, I want you to be thinking a little bit about how you position it within that niche. And in comparison to your other more signature or premium offers, the low ticket offer needs to have the most broad appeal. And so I think it's really easy to think, well then I need a broad audience. And it's like, no, I don't necessarily want you to broaden who you're speaking to. Just that the low ticket offer makes sense for the majority of that audience. It has broad appeal within that niche. But in the beginning, at least initially, most people can't live on just the income they make from low ticket. They're going to need some sort of additional offer to drive the majority of their income. And there's no right or wrong way to how you go about doing this. High ticket can look like a lot of different things. It could be a signature program or course, it could be a group coaching offer, it could be some sort of one on one service. But ultimately that higher end offer needs to be on the more premium end of the spectrum with the right high ticket. Regardless of if it is in that course or program or service realm that is going to drive the majority of your income. Initially, your low ticket offer is going to drive the majority of your leads. But in theory, you could potentially book yourself out and thrive on just referrals if you have a urgent enough need that you're filling with that premium offer. I think everything makes more sense when you have examples. So just to give you some perspective on what that's looked like for me over the years, I started as a graphic designer with a specialty in website design. And initially when I was taking premium clients, I was working on a pretty wide spectrum of one on one services. We're talking branding and business cards and brochures and things for trade shows and packaging and like everything, billboards, literally all the things. Honestly, way too broad. I let the client determine what they needed and I simply made the thing. But I started honing in what that looked like and I eventually landed on essentially just a signature website design package. When I started out 10 years ago, the premium in for that was 10 grand. The same type of service two or three years ago, I was charging closer to 30, $35,000. And that's for one project. So in theory, if you were working by yourself, you could have three, four, five clients a year on the more premium end of the spectrum and then focus on growing your audience and getting paid to grow that audience with low ticket if you wanted to. That's simply just one strategy. Regardless of what you're ultimately trying to sell. You just want to make money, right? You want to make money with a small following and that only happens when you have relationships. Numbers on a screen mean literally nothing. You need to be engaging with your audience and definitely more so than you would potentially with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers. Now, in my opinion, even with a larger following, the people that take the time to do this are going to have more trust within their community, more natural trust. It's not necessarily required. You could still absolutely make money without doing this with a larger following. But when you're just getting started, having those one on one conversations is essential. Now it can happen in a whole variety of ways on social media. It could be if someone comments, you comment back every single time. And not just like a thumbs up kind of thing. I want you to genuinely connect with that person. So if they go through the process of leaving a comment, can you ask them something back? Now, don't be obnoxious with this, where you always take any statement and then ask a question that's, that's goofy. I don't want it to be fake. I want it to be something that's genuine. What do you genuinely want to know about this person? What's relevant to the conversation you're already having? That can happen in comments, but can also happen in DMs. You can have conversations if someone responds to a story you post. Ask them about their day, ask them how they're doing, what's going on in their world. Create genuine and real connections. These people will very well also become your friends. Your early clients are going to be the kind of people that stick around for a very, very long time. I have a friend, Jordan. She was one of my very first clients when I started selling courses and she was my first program. There was only like 12 people in it and she was in it. She went on to purchase many courses from me over the years, and now she works at Adobe. And she has been such a fun person to stay connected with. I have watched her build her own business, travel the country, going to comic cons and selling her products. And now she works her dream job and she gets to be an evangelist for Adobe. And I promise you, despite not talking to her every single day, if I just need to vent or I had a question, or if I wanted a referral or honestly, anything, there's nothing off the table with her. I could message her absolutely anything and she would respond because I spent the time very early on to genuinely care about every single person. Now, it's not to say that you care less, the bigger your following. That's not true at all. It does become harder to know who every single person is. It just does. You can't keep track of 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 people. You're not going to have that many genuine connections. You're not. Sometimes I miss it. Sometimes I miss how close I felt to the people who were in my world because I knew all of their names, I knew all of their businesses. I knew anytime they had a bad day, I knew anytime they had a good or bad client, I knew when they won proposals, I knew when they made sales of their products, I was in it with them. Now, as much as I love having those conversations on social media or in some sort of messaging app, I do want to make sure I have an opportunity to stay connected with that person. So very, very early on, like day one, potentially even day zero, before you announce that your business exists at all, start building an email list. Email subscribers are going to convert more heavily to sales than any other audience you have. You don't need a massive list to get started. The first five people on my email list consisted of myself from another email address to just make sure my emails were sending my mom a fake email address I made for my dog. I honestly don't remember why I did that. Looking back, I probably just wanted to test it twice because I was so paranoid. My husband and my sister. I will never forget the first five people who supported me. Two of them being myself. When you're in those beginning stages and you're looking for growth, I think one of the things that is great to do early on is smaller collaborations. So a lot of people, when they think about collaborations, they think about putting on a big event or hosting. Hosting a summit or putting together a bundle or speaking on stage at someone else's audience or striking a brand deal or something. They're thinking about this big hoopla. But early on, a lot of my exposure came from very candid interactions. I had someone on my podcast and recorded an episode with them, and instead of just recording an episode and sharing it, when it came out, the day I recorded the episode, I would like take a snapshot of the two of us over video and then I would share on social and tag them and thank them. And then often they would reshare that content. I would often get followers immediately just because I bothered to thank them for spending the time with me. I've also been generous with my mentioning of other people. So one of the things I did very early on was I did like, I think I called it like Follow Friday. And I would feature other creators and I would just share people that I thought were doing cool things and I would talk about them, what they're good at, the kinds of things you might expect from them. And this honestly, can work for any niche. Now, it's not to say you have to introduce your, like, direct competitors, but think about people who are complimentary to what you do. Again, they will potentially reshare that content, but also it often opens the door to a conversation. If you don't have an existing relationship with them, you going through. If you walk away with nothing else, I want it to be that you need to stop waiting to have the followers to make the moves. You kind of want to make make the moves now. Don't chase numbers, don't miss an opportunity to serve people because you don't feel like you have enough people already here. Show up in the kind of ways that you want to make an impact and people will notice. Focus on connection, Focus on real conversations. Sales come from trust, not from likes. I can't tell you the amount of times I have been alone with my own thoughts and doubted my ability to succeed because I saw someone else who looked like they were growing faster than I was. But you don't know what's going on in their world. You don't know what's going on in their life, the kind of support they have. You don't know if they're even making sales on the back end. They might have all this front end things that are looking amazing, but no products for sale. Or maybe they do have products but they're not converting. Maybe they have a team of people creating things in the background for them. Maybe they're spending money on ads like you don't know. You also don't know the mental health of that person, how happy they are. I've seen plenty of people who have it all. They have what it looks like to be successful, but they're not. Not that they're not successful. They're unhappy. They have this feeling of loathing, like it's not worth it to them. Worry less about how many people there are and think more about how you can serve the audience you do have this week. What do you want to say? What inspires you? What are you excited to share? What did you learn recently that you could pass along? Show up for people, make a real difference, make a real impact? Lately I've been loving experimenting with carousel posts over on Instagram and creating real value. The kind of value that I would put inside of a paid program or even turn into a long form blog post or do a whole podcast on distilling that down into just a handful of slides and making it so valuable that someone wants to save or share that content. That's what's working. I want to know what's holding you back from launching to a smaller audience. I want to hear the things that make you anxious or the things you're not willing to admit out loud. I'm here to chat it out, so go send me a dm. You can find my profile by going to Boss Project on Instagram. My personal profile at Abigail says is linked there. I would love to help you take that next step and really get started. Now, if you're curious on what I do to make a profit on social media, because I don't have a massive following right now on any social platform. The majority of my income comes from the traffic to my website, my podcast listeners and my email list. If you want to know how I am monetizing the audience I have on social and turning that into profit, how I'm getting paid to bring in warm leads, you can go to bossproject.complaybook for more details. That's bossproject.complaybook. hey, a few quick favors before you leave. I'd love if you'd share today's episode, send it to a friend who needs to hear it and post on social. You can show us where you're listening from, your favorite takeaway, or why someone else should listen. Be sure to tag me, Abigail says and ossproject so we can share it. Okay. Second favor, to get podcast updates and all the behind the scenes news from Boss Project, I'd love if you'd join my VIP list. Just head to bossproject.com signup to make sure I have all your contact details. Really love this show. It would mean so much to me if you'd leave a rating and review. It not only helps more listeners find the show, but allows us to bring on quality sponsors so we can keep bringing you this valuable content for free. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time.