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Welcome to a BBO super blog, where two experienced marketers have an open dialogue on a particular topic, so please read along as if you are sitting at a marketers table and listening in. Want to join the table for free? Come and say hi and ask any questions you have on this guide within the free slack group here :https://bit.ly/34n2EH5 – Enjoy learning from the blog.
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One important asset you will create by the end of this super blog is a resource list for your community.
Here is an example of one we created for you, to keep in mind what a raw basic version looks like >>
And here is one that is a finished product to serve a wider community >>
Harms: Let’s dive into the start of this guide and the focus we want to keep it topical and try not to avoid the conversations happening right now, which is coronavirus. The easiest thing to do is bury your head in the sand and what I would say is no business owner typically does that.
But a business owner would have got to a point or whether you’re a start-up or whatever it is, you already have something within you, which is going to win this battle.
But with that comes a different kind of feeling, for example, I’m a certain type of industry or company, how do we even get out of this?
We’ve got some really smart people internally. I’m smart as a business owner, but I just don’t know a way out of this without just completely being suspended in time. That’s almost how I feel sometimes just suspended in time, which is why Kyle and I had a conversation to do this. Let’s do something proactive, which is helpful for the community.
What we are going to do is focus on a primary niche which we feel is massively affected right now.
Kyle: It is going to be a niche but this is going to be generally applicable.
It doesn’t really matter what your business is because we are all being hit right now, but what we’re going to be focusing on in particular are people, businesses, individuals who offer classes and events, where they’re getting people into a physical space and providing a service.
Easy examples are people like yoga teachers or a personal trainer.
Harms: Also physical events, I’m involved in sales orientated events, physical live events where you’re teaching people live. They came to our live workshop and it stopped immediately.
Kyle: Behind the scenes there we’ve just launched our own workshops so we’re getting people into a room and teaching them how to do online business, digital marketing. We did one, and then coronavirus hit.
Harms: We’ve taken it online and that’s one of the first steps I guess you can do.
But this guide’s focus is going to be on live events and the initial conversation today rather than getting right into the idea of how do I market to people?
It’s really going to be around the business economic model.
Kyle: Yes, so we’re going to be following a framework that we use with our clients and with our own businesses, we’ve set up lots of businesses online.
Over the years we’ve built this framework called the BATON framework, which we will be referring to. In particular, we want to just focus on the first part of the framework which is business.
It’s working out what is my core business.
What parts of this business and what units of value can I take and start to deliver now that the environment, the business environment has changed?
It’s really drilling down to the core basics so yeah, sure, we could just run off and start talking about Instagram and tiktok and all the different tools.
That’s not what this guide is going to be about, we are always going to start with the fundamentals of business first before waving shiny new toys like TikTok in your face.
It’s always going to come back to the fundamentals and that’s something we can promise you and something that we think is going to be useful.
Harms: I hope that’s a relief for some people because often you find online and it’s not saying it’s a bad thing, but the focus is exactly on that.
How do you hack tiktok?
How do you get 1,000 people watching your TikTok video?
It almost feels like a smash and grab like, that’s great I got a short-term win on one particular platform, but the dangers are also very real, with focusing the entire business on one platform, which a lot of people are experiencing now on Facebook as an example.
Those who had fantastic organic reach on Facebook are suddenly seeing nobody see their post and all of a sudden they’ve got to find a marketing budget.
I recently saw somebody that is a personal brand and they do artwork, poetry and things online and they said that their revenue via Facebook went from about £15,000 a month to about £3,000 a month the moment Facebook switches its algorithm.
They were saying to the audience, do I have your permission to advertise because if I don’t, you’re not going to see my posts and they were really uncomfortable with the idea. I think there’s a danger there with just focusing on one particular idea.
Kyle: It’s relinquishing control and right now, especially during this time, when the business environment is being so affected by the pandemic control is what we need.
We need to start resting back into our business and personal lives and taking control of the things we can control, and realising there are some things, whether it’s a virus, or whether it’s Facebook’s algorithms that are outside of our control.
We should not be focusing our energy there; we need to be focusing on what we can do something about.
Harms: Just to give some context, although Kyle and I did start our first workshop, we are not experts when it comes to the events industry and organising events. We’re not personal trainers.
Although we have live consultancy clients and we do physically see them it’s very easy for us to say, hey guys we’re going to Skype today instead.
Whereas people who are personal trainers who have yoga classes, maybe they teach industry specific things whether it’s communication or public speaking or whatever it is, in a live environment where the student gets the maximum impact.
That’s not our field of expertise.
Although we have clients like that, Kyle and I don’t physically do that.
I guess Kyle this is how we would do it if we were in somebody’s shoes, looking from the outside at an events industry, how would we approach things now?
How would we change our business model?
Kyle: This is us coming at the problem wearing our digital marketing, online business spectacles. We work with clients in this respect, but obviously we would want to talk to people who are boots on the ground.
Actually, in this situation right now, so that we can come up with ideas together.
We are here as a resource to help with that.
Harms: Kyle, how long have you been doing digital marketing and not being in a conventional job?
Kyle: I only ever had a commercial job when I was 18, I worked in a bar and I was a cycle courier, but after that, that’s about it. I guess the first big online business was about 10 years ago.
Harms: Kyle’s been doing this for about a decade and that is a long time when you consider the industry is still quite a new industry.
Kyle: The industry changes so quickly as well as just being in the industry for that time you learn a lot and we’re going to bring in what’s working now to your businesses.
That’s the idea here.
Harms: So events, what are the obvious things that people can do immediately and we’re seeing people do it.
Kyle: We are seeing this and it wouldn’t be a very exciting podcast if we just said this, but people are starting to do classes online.
They are setting up Zoom, Skype, Google hangouts, whatever it is, and delivering their yoga class or whatever it is to their existing students, that’s fine.
Some of them are doing it for free to keep the regularity and make sure that their previous customers come back to them after the crisis and some people are charging.
Two different ways to do that.
Harms: I think both are okay because they really depend on where you are currently in your situation.
If you are a start-up look you need the revenue. If the way your business is structured is that it pays you a salary and without that salary, you’ll financially be in a difficult space, then charge. I mean, at the end of the day you are providing a service.
If you are able to do it for free or reduce your rates that’s a bonus and I think your audience will appreciate that, but everybody right now and it is not easy to say because we are going through financial difficulties in some of the businesses that we have, but not everybody.
There are as a whole bunch of people who are working from home and getting paid full-time salaries, there are a whole bunch of people who are continuing to work as they have essential work to do and they can’t physically work from home.
I think it’s okay to charge and it’s okay to do it free.
The reason I say this Kyle is because I’m seeing a lot of people abusing people online who are having to sell maybe a bit harder than normal, because they are financially strained.
They’ve got an events business and what they didn’t do was focus online prior to this, so now they’re going from a hard events business not being online to suddenly like, I need to get online ASAP.
Kyle: That’s what I’ve been seeing over the last couple of days, I’ve been having a look at what people have been doing trying to come up with a solution.
The obvious is just do that, get a Webcam go or just use one on your laptop and do zoom classes, Skype classes whatever tool you’re using to get your existing student or to go out there and try and find new students and charge a class fee.
I was looking at Fuse fitness, they’re a small, independent studio in Brixton, London. What they’ve done is they’re saying normally you would pay £8 a class to come physically. Instead, you can come to any of our classes via online and it’s £20 a month. I think they’re doing three or four classes a day so you get a lot of value if you were to actually do these classes, fantastic. At £20 a month that’s fair, that’s okay and that was one good example.
But we want to talk today about going a bit further than that.
Harms: I tell you who I feel has nailed it and I don’t think they did it intentionally. Peloton allows you to cycle in your bedroom however they advertise it and your class is live streamed to you and this was way before this happened.
Kyle: Yeah they’re in a good position right now, so right now I’m in Canary Wharf and Peloton has an actual shop next to the Tesla showroom, but they sell these very expensive bikes on financing plans and then deliver these online courses. They are doing fine, I’m sure they’re doing really well right.
That’s an example of a business in the niche who set up from the get go for online.
They were there entirely online.
Maybe you can go to a physical studio I don’t know, but it’s really for people who are at home, give you high-end bikes and iPad or you use your iPad. Then you connect into their online lessons, they’re setup for the get go for online whereas a lot of the individuals a lot of the smaller studios right now are in this weird position like crap, I’ve been doing three yoga classes a day for the last five years at the local yoga studio, but now I have nothing.
So what do I need to give up?
It’s that transition which is really tricky for a lot of people.
Harms: Hopefully we can help with that but also I think look at other case studies like them and say what can I do in advance of something happening like this again.
I think we are having this discussion at an opportune time because if we can help a lot of people do that, as it doesn’t happen overnight.
To get a whole bunch of people to pay for your online yoga class does not happen overnight.
But what we’re hoping is from this, yes, we’re talking about emergency measures right now, we’re talking about what you can do right now to make sure you keep paying your bills and keep eating, but a lot of this stuff you can continue to do in addition to your physical classes.
Harms: Getting back to the focus of what we are saying it’s the easiest thing to do right now is just to switch online, and there’s plenty of tools out there.
Zoom, Skype, a live stream like this, you can live stream into a private group on Facebook. You can have a slack channel it depends on if you’re video orientated or you’re advice or consultancy based you can have slack channel. There are other things like slack as well.
What’s the next step for this conversation?
Kyle: I think part of that transition is working out who exactly you’re going to be talking to.
So yes, obviously it’s going to be your current students.
It’s just the existing students are now doing it online and paying a smaller rate. That’s fine, that’s the easiest thing you do, you go to your existing clients to say this is what I’m doing, these are the times, these are the prices are you interested?
Nice and simple.
The great thing about online, though, is that once you set up a zoom class or a Skype class there’s no reason why you need to stay delivering content to just five people, or just the 10 people.
As opposed to being in the physical world where there is a certain number of people you can fit into a room.
Once you move online, once you’re in the world of bits instead of atoms we can take that same content and we can deliver it to a much larger number of people.
If I am a yoga teacher and I do kundalini yoga 30-day challenge instead of me doing it with the same five people I can now talk to 50, 100 people and that’s not going to negatively affect the quality of my teaching for the other people in the room.
That’s the key thing here and it also means that we move from okay, I might have been charging £15 an hour before and I had 10 people in the room so that’s £150.
Now I’m charging £1.50 instead and I have a hundred people in the room, I’m making the same amount of money, but it becomes a volume game rather than a cost game.
It’s not about charging high prices but lowering the price that I’m charging but giving that service to more people and this is the first thing that we can do when we open up to online, and to do that we need to can we need to work out who our potential audience is when we are off-line, it’s who will come to our studio?
Harms: It is not normally geographically located, you may have a room in the gym you may be an instructor who operates out of a large branding gym. You may have your own. If you’re in the events industry you will be advertising to your audience.
So what’s the best way and I guess what we are really identifying here is there a market size?
Who is our market audience and taking a data approach, a data-driven approach rather than a gut feel approach.
Kyle: And importantly not going too big because a lot of people will be like, oh yeah, everyone can do yoga. We need to narrow it down as unless you have a budget the size of Nike or Amazon to be able to talk to everybody you need to restrict who it is you’re talking to so you can better deliver your message to those people.
Harms: There is a famous article that a lot of marketers do anchor to which is one thousand true fans.
Imagine just having a thousand loyal customers that are going to continue to pay you X amount based on whatever you do, it could be yoga could be PT, it could be you have an online support group, whatever that is.
Think of it like that, get the thousand first and then think about scaling beyond that. Because the temptation I guess is you look at the celebrities, you look at these amazing marketers online, businesses online and I’m talking about actors and all the people who could have a massive following. Kardashians launched a make-up brand and got a billion dollars in sales overnight.
Some people have that leverage so we often feel like, unless I’m doing that then I’m not going to make any money, but scale that down to one hundred people, two hundred people and then aim for a thousand people and you might find that financially you have well achieved your financial goals.
Kyle:
The article Harminder is referring to is called thousand true fans by Kevin Kelly quite an old article but he talks about how you don’t need 25 million followers on Facebook because most of those people aren’t going to be purchasing anything from you.
If you get a thousand people who will buy anything you put out because they love you, they love what you do.
They love the value that you create and what you do for the world. Let’s say you have a thousand people and they’ve signed up to a £30 a month membership.
Harms: We spoke about a yoga class and assuming somebody pays £15 to go to a physical yoga class, what if they paid £5 for this premium online yoga class. You shoot it in a room in your house and you charge people £5 for that a month, that’s £5,000 per month.
That is probably more than what the majority of yoga teachers or PTs or anybody doing physical events are earning.
If you look at the Amazon or Netflix model look they have probably done a lot of data research to work out what people are comfortable paying. They just don’t feel it I guess that’s what I’m saying, the 7.99, 4.99, 9.99.
Looking at big companies as an example here can help you as well.
Kyle: There are financial models behind this and you can say okay, at what rate can you charge and people will still buy and then when does it start to drop off?
If you’re charging £50 a month for yoga probably too much, but if you are charging £5 a month that is at the point where people are it’s almost too low to bother cancelling.
Harms: If I went to Starbucks or Costa or any other company that would cost me £4 something, a cup of that.
So people don’t feel it.
Kyle: This is the kind of level we are talking about.
You don’t need 25 million Instagram followers to generate an income for yourself. If you are the sole operator an individual running these classes if you get 500 people 1,000 people which online is a small amount.
If you can get that kind of number paying you on a regular basis a few pounds a month, £5, £30 a month if you have enough value to give them, then that is enough to support you extremely comfortably.
Harms: This is how WE would do it.
Let’s look at the data
You can get 500 people who are interested in yoga. But what’s the process behind it just to check that we have a good sound business model before we go and start to attract this audience.
Kyle: What I want to talk about is the fact that you can say I’m just going to market to everybody who does yoga.
I’m just going to talk to everyone who does cross fit, it is too expensive to do that.
Instead, we want to find a particular niche of people we only need that thousand people that we were talking about. We need to find these people and talk to them repeatedly.
So instead of talking to a million people and spreading out really thinly, the amount of value we give to them, we instead want to talk to a much smaller group and deliver a huge amount of concentrated value for them.
This means we need to go online and look at some of the information that is available about the size of markets and we can also at the same time learn if we are talking to male, female or no particular gender markets.
What age groups we’re talking to?
What kind of education levels?
What kind of interests?
What magazines do they read?
What TV shows do they watch?
We can get all of this information directly from Facebook using this tool.
I’m going to jump into Facebook audience insights.
We are going to be looking at yoga with Adriene.
We’re going to use that information to narrow it down who we could be talking about.
It’s one of the tools that Facebook provides their advertisers with. It is free to use and this is how Facebook makes money. They make money when we create adverts. You can see there’s a create ad up here.
Let’s go straight to yoga with Adriene, if you’re a yoga teacher great if you are in another niche you’d put in a company name or a famous YouTuber, Instagram celebrity in that particular area. If you were doing cross fit for example you can put in cross fit and it will give you what you need. If you’re doing pilates you can also just put in pilates.
You could do yoga and the reason I’m doing yoga with Adriene is because I want to focus on the audiences who can see yoga content online. If I just put in yoga by itself that would be off-line same with cross-fit obviously, that’s going to be people who are going to crossfit studios. Ideally, I would find the name of a famous YouTube who does cross fit and put them in here to get the same kind of information.
I want this to be all ages, so 18 to 65. I’m leaving gender as all, at the moment I’m putting in no location because I just want the widest amount of information possible, then I’m going to click on demographics here.
This has already given me a massive amount of information on Facebook about half a million people who have liked, or in some way interacted with the yoga with Adriene. So this tells me that the size of the market around yoga with Adriene is about half a million. This is half a million people worldwide who are interested in learning yoga online.
These are people who could be if you teach yoga online, they could be your customers.
Then we can look at the information that Facebook has about them, and this is really useful when we are starting to decide who our online audience could be because we can start to adjust our messages.
If I was looking at this, I would say 93% female and 7% male. If I was marketing to this particular audience I’m going to be going with a very heavy female marketing plan. Married is a much higher percentage this is the percentage difference compared to the average Facebook user.
Compared to the average Facebook user the people who follow yoga with Adriene are 228% more likely, 2.3 times more likely to be postgraduates, university postgraduates. And they are -61% less likely to be just high school graduates. That’s what these numbers mean. I can also see what kind of jobs they work in.
I can now jump into location.
Top countries are America, so 40% of her audience is in the US and 11% in the UK. That’s not unsurprising, and then everyone else’s is going to be different countries.
If you were focusing on a national celebrity or national hobby, then we could use top towns and cities. London is massively disproportionately into yoga with Adriene compared to everywhere else in the world. London is 500% more engaged, so we can get a huge amount of information here.
Not all of this is going to be useful, but it allows us to start to build up a profile of the audience that we could be talking to when we go online.
We’re not asking you to become the next yoga with Adriene, instead what we’re going to do with this information is we are going to start to niche it down and use it to learn more about the people in either your local area or nationally to you.
The reason we’re doing this is we don’t want to necessarily, well we do want to become a global brand eventually if that’s what you want to do, but it’s not very easy to do straight off the bat.
Instead we want to start locally and nationally and then expand out like that.
What I’m going to do is I still have yoga with Adriene selected here, but I’m going to click on location and put it in the United Kingdom. I would do this if I am a yoga instructor and I want to do something similar to what yoga with Adriene is doing, but do it in the UK only.
Already I can see that my audience has fallen by a factor of 10, so it’s 10% of the size of yoga with Adriene, that’s fine. I’m still seeing a high female skew and still seeing mainly married people, mainly highly educated, probably similar types of jobs, education means that there’s going to be a lot of teachers who are into this.
There is slightly different information here because I’m now focusing just on the UK. Top countries are no longer going to tell me anything because it’s 100% in the UK but now I can look at the top towns and cities and get more information. Edinburgh, Aberdeen, seem to be highly skewed. Imagine London is quite a big one here somewhere, 11% of the audience is in London.
We can get a lot of information from here which tells us these are the people that we can be focusing on moving forward.
The best thing about this is it actually gives us numbers, it gives us data and this makes me more excited than maybe it does for you.
But if you come in here and you cannot find your particular niche that means it’s probably going to be too small and it’s not worth focusing on online and at that point, you need to decide okay what can I do to expand it?
What else can I add in in order to find the tribe of people and my audience that I want to talk to online?
The other issue is if I put in something like yoga it’s going to be too big.
Generally we want to find an audience of about one million people. If I put in yoga by itself in the UK alone there are 10 to 15 million people who are interested in yoga, that’s going to be too wide.
The information I get from here is it’s not going to be that useful because I cannot focus on the market this large. Which is why I’d use something like yoga with Adriene from a finer and far more refined view of people who are specifically interested in consuming yoga content online. Rather than just yoga as a whole, which is too large to pick.
With all of this stuff, you can then go ahead and start to contact these people directly using Facebook ads, that’s not what we’re talking about right now.
We are talking about using this tool purely to get this information to learn about who it is we need to be talking to online. To get information like okay 90% female if I’m doing yoga online I should go with a female focus.
Of course you might decide now I’m going to go the other way, I am going to do male that’s going to be my line in the sand. That’s going to be my defining business message absolutely fine, but at least using Facebook audience insight we have the data and we can make decisions based on the numbers that we’re actually seeing.
That is audience insights, again it’s free you can jump in and grab that.
Harms: Hopefully, you’ve got a benchmark now because Kyle has said if your audience is about a million, then let’s say from that million all we need is a thousand paying customers, and even less than that.
Just look at your numbers and your pricing and say how many do I actually need for that?
Often you’ll find it’s crumbs,
What we’ve done so far is we’ve spoken about the conventional or the most obvious way that we can get our off-line business online immediately. Then we have to say who do we talk to and actually, is there an audience online big enough for our business to actually talk to anybody.
If there’s not, then what’s the point?
Kyle: Something like yoga is too big and we need to work out what our place within that niche is. There are certain niches like health, wealth and relationships.
Most businesses really fit into these, especially online, health, wealth and relationships. If you’re niche and your focus is health, too big, too wide.
Unless you are a company like Nike and you have an advertising budget of hundreds of millions or billions even, instead we need to go from something large like health down to something smaller like yoga.
We are still seeing 10 to 15 million people in the UK interested in that, that’s still a lot of people to try to talk to at the same time.
So we need to niche down again and it might be people who consume yoga content online and we saw that drop just about 50,000 UK. If we use yoga with Adriene so that’s a lot smaller.
Harms: 50,000 is that worth pursuing?
Kyle: If I was doing this myself, I would be adding in other yoga channels of course yoga with Adriene is American-based, so if I was in America I would go for it, using the information I’ve learnt about her viewers.
In the UK I’ll probably want to look into other influences other brands that offer online yoga and I would also be putting them into Facebook audience insight to see what else I can learn. That will allow me to go up from 50,000 to I’m guessing half a million or one million, but you can play with the numbers basically.
Harms: That’s the summary of what we’ve done so far and now being us, we always like to go for the extra ambitious method, but also this is probably the method that we would recommend.
Because online I think people often miss this technique and it’s often hidden, but it does require a bit of extra work.
Kyle: This is a question of how do we reach those half million people, one million people, we can just run adverts to them and probably reach all of them for a couple of hundred pounds quite easily on Facebook. That’s a basic way to do it.
It’s not what we’re going to be suggesting right now.
Take control of the conversation
Right now, because of what’s going on there are a lot of resource lists being sent around.
I received this PDF which was I think eight pages of all the different shows all of the different times, the links to go there and how much they cost, fantastic resource.
I’ve also received one like that again from another WhatsApp group, which was different ways to stay fit at home. It had lists of YouTube channels so people like yoga with Adriene who we’ve been talking about as well as fuse fitness, which is one I mentioned before.
There were two lists one which was specifically for south-west London businesses and all of the online offers that they were doing.
It was saying support your local businesses in this time fuse fitness are doing this and this restaurant is doing food etcetera. Again it’s a resource list, a master list of all of the different businesses you could support in the area.
What we want to suggest is that you take control of that conversation for your particular niche.
There are already these lists going around and they’re being spread like wildfire because people want to help each other and if there is a list of the top yoga classes in the UK or globally, that has been sent around if you take control of the conversation.
If you take control and you help compile that list if you put it together, if you format it nicely, if you make it easy for people to access. If you verify what stuff is good and what stuff isn’t good and you do all that work and you spread that list out, you are in control of that resource list.
You become the spokesperson, you become a leader within that particular community.
Harms: The host of the party and imagine a networking event and you become the host of the networking event. So that kind of mentality and approach.
Kyle: I know some people are sitting there saying, why would I want to advertise my competitor’s yoga classes, what are you talking about?
Harms: The resource list that you created I’ve started to distribute doesn’t have any of our stuff on.
We’ve got lots of resources ourselves but the question then is and you raise a good question. It’s often something our clients always kick back at which is, I’m sorry we’ve got a database why are you advertising other people’s?
If I’m a yoga instructor, why am I going to send out a document with all of these other competitors yoga YouTube channels?
Which already has a large following, why would I do that?
That is a solid question.
Kyle: The first answer is that when you control a list you control the order of the list. People are lazy so you put your stuff at the top of the list.
Harms: Kyle and I are teachers by nature.
We did a personality test before we actually became business partners. We did a really detailed personality test and ultimately both of us are very similar personalities, we are both teachers, creators, we both want to share what we have and we get our fulfilment through that mechanism.
Kyle: The first thing you can do is obviously put yours at the top of the list. If you made a nicely formatted PDF you can bold your offering. You can put a big star next to it, that’s one way of doing it, not subtle but it works.
You can also brand the list again if it’s a PDF if you stuck your website on it people are going to be coming there. The main thing here is yes, we want people coming our way, but the main point of having this resource list is to get it into as many hands as possible.
By creating a resource list which is not just about you if it’s just you sending your class schedule out to people, who is going to spread that?
Nobody.
This way, it actually gets spread, it gets spread naturally and if you’re in any WhatsApp groups you’ve probably been sent lots of these lists already for opera or for local businesses or food delivery.
By making it a list which includes everything which is a genuinely helpful ultimate resource list, you can actually co-opt your competitors into spreading it for you.
You can send it to your competitors and say, hey, I’m putting together this list of resources you’re on it, send it to all of your people who are looking for yoga or for services in your niche. I think this would be helpful, you’re on the list as well.
You could send it to someone like yoga with Adriene and say, hey, I’ve put together this great looking list of yoga resources. You’re on it as you’re a great resource and I love your work. Could you tweet it out to your followers, or could you send it to your followers via email list and then suddenly the resource list that you put together is now in the hands of millions of people.
Rather than you putting together a price list or a timing list, a schedule of your classes and sending it people.
Instead, it becomes a community resource that you created, yes, but it’s for everybody, not just for your business it’s a different way to think about it.
Harms: Yeah and what I’d say is it also gets directly to them, so it’s not like they have to go to a website. They’re going to be directly downloading it on their computer or mobile phone, so they’ve got this resource list right in front of them.
There’s no better marketing method than WhatsApping somebody via a friend or a friend sending somebody a recommendation, or list that’s come from an original source which we want you to be the original source.
Think of it as the most direct, powerful method of marketing.
One of the things at the moment text message marketing has suddenly become very popular again because people actually open WhatsApp.
You’re going to see a bit of a trend where you’re going to get lots of sales text messages over time, until it depletes itself, it just becomes another averagely converting marketing method.
Kyle: People don’t open emails anymore
Harms: Also the emails go into the promotions tab or spam tab so, Gmail as an example, has a specific promotions tab.
Kyle: We are aiming to create this resource list which, yes, has your brand on it, yes it highlights your classes as one of the resources there. Depending on how you want it to be you can put it at the top, you can put it in stars, glitter, etcetera.
But the main thing is this is a really useful resource which can be spread by the community, whether it’s the people who do yoga in the UK, whether it’s worldwide doesn’t matter.
It’s something that is so valuable that people will actually spread it around and you’re going to be the curator, the leader of this list, which is a very cool place to be.
As we said at the beginning, the most basic thing you can do is just start talking to existing customers and doing online courses with them.
Harms: But what we’re saying here to get beyond those people, let’s use this and I would call it is like growth hack marketing or guerrilla marketing.
Think of this as that we are in a guerrilla marketing period where we have to do stuff which is out of the norm that maybe we wouldn’t, and learn some marketing tactics as a business owner that actually we would have just thought no, I don’t need to do that as I’ve got a good steady stream of customers.
Whereas now we don’t because you’ve taken your off-line customer base which is maybe 15 students, a guide, to online which could be a thousand students a month or whatever it is.
So how do we get to those people?
This is a very direct and potential viral way of doing that.
Kyle: Think of how many of these resource lists, think of how many of these links you’ve been sent during this current crisis.
They are not necessarily going to be about your niche, that’s fine, but these are spreading by themselves from group to group to group in WhatsApp, so if you are in control of one of those lists you’re in a very, very powerful position.
Harms: Think of it from a heart place as well, and a place of giving, where you’re just doing something useful.
For example, the work from home list that we created and Kyle compiled actually for us is very few of those links are ours.
I think one of my podcasts was on there, but apart from that, there’s a whole bunch of people who are going to be going into a changed environment that they’re not used to, how can we help them?
I think that’s just to keep it simple as that, if you pulled from that mechanism and we are all pulled from different ways.
If you’re pulled from the need to help people, then this is a great way to do that and benefit off the backend.
Kyle: That’s the reason why we put together that list.
We are used to working at home.
I’ve got lots of friends suddenly working from home and aren’t used to the office environment and suddenly they’re going crazy.
They don’t know what they want to do, they don’t know how to structure their day. They don’t know about some tools I’ve been using for years, so for me to download information is nothing, it took an hour to put together this list and we made it look nice and that could be very valuable to people.
It’s the same with you and your particular niche, you have the expertise to see what’s online, you’ve probably received a few of these lists already. All you need to start doing is putting everything together, curating it using your expertise, reformatting it, making it nice and then spreading it out into the world.
Putting the value out, expertise out into the world and then saying I did this so if you do want to check out stuff we do great.
Harms: It’s going to be a lot more work than you may have expected, because this could take you half a day to put together a really quality list and then send it out and say this might be useful.
What happens after that?
I just wanted to get the idea of what we’re going to be doing.
The next steps will be let’s say you’ve got this 20 page PDF of all of the online fitness resources. All of the ways to stay fit while you are at home. Fantastic list, people are sending it around. We want to have a mechanism for getting the people who receive this PDF.
We want to get them into our orbit somehow, we want to get them into our tribe, we call it.
One way is people signing up directly for our classes, but we ideally want to have something that’s even lower friction and we’ll talk about that in two days.
One thing that we want you to take away, we are going to create some mass value, which to you right now you’re probably thinking no, I just need to get people signed up for my online classes. I just need to generate revenue.
Instead, we’re going to spend a bit of time creating something of mass value and get it out to the world to help as many people as possible, and then we will be talking about how this will directly benefit you as well.
Harms: It depends on what pulls you and there is no judgement there, it’s really very much where you are and how Coronavirus affected you because we are all connected.
Some people don’t, some people win, but the majority seem to be struggling in this transition stage, so hopefully this guide has helped so far.
Harms: In this guide, we are focusing on events specifically independent people such as yoga, yoga teachers, who would have to physically meet their students or their cohort. Personal trainers, consultants in the health field, osteopaths, physios who operate on a one-to-one basis.
For them it’s slightly trickier, but for the relief side of things certainly this will work.
Kyle: I think any class’s physical health is the easiest one to think of because we tend to go to a lot of health classes, but it can be foreign languages if you’re learning Japanese, for example and you can no longer go to your classroom. Any kind of class and event.
Harms: If you remember we said there is a very simple shift. We focus on a model which is called BATON and we will reveal that throughout the guide.
The first thing we focus on which is the business part of things and you can think about the business model in two ways.
When faced with the current situation, which is coronavirus lockdown, having to shift our business.
We spoke to a gentleman, an amazing person that has been in business for 27 years and asked the question, what was different between the 2008 recession versus now?
What he said was 2008 you sort of realise that people are tightening down their spending, there were rumours and whispers, we knew for a couple years or a year before.
You could see patterns in the financial market which were not right as a business owner, you would have found lending was getting more difficult.
Whereas this is you just run into a hard brick wall without any preparation whatsoever so that was his response after 27 years in business.
Kyle: 2007, 2008 that was easy mode.
Harms: Hopefully this is going to make it easier on what we can do and you can pull apart what we’re doing and take the bits that you like.
We’ve spoken about two different ways we can implement this within this niche that we’re talking about.
One is just to go online and we spoke about the really simple thing, just go online, shift online, but that requires a whole bunch of things.
Advertising the transition time etcetera but we said, what if we took a different approach where we were the host of the party?
Where we were adding value to a community, but in the sense of getting directly to them.
Kyle: As many of you probably already encountered there’s a lot of especially in WhatsApp groups, but also on Facebook and other online communities.
There are a lot of lists being compiled, these ultimate source lists.
Harms and I put together a list like this about how to work from home because we’ve been doing it for years and we know that there are certain tools that are useful.
There are certain apps, software you should be using if you work from home.
For us to put together a list, a resource list was very easy and quick.
We are talking about competitors’ products, we’re talking about things unrelated to us, we’re just talking about creating something of value that we can put out into the world.
We did it for work from home, but you in your niche whether it’s yoga, whether it’s physiotherapy, whether it’s crossfit, whatever your particular niche is whatever you provide classes in, you’ve probably noticed that within your WhatsApp group, or any other groups that there are these kind of resource lists being thrown around and sent around
You’ve probably already received these lists and they’re really useful, they are just giving you a list of either free classes or low-cost classes you might do in yoga, cross fit or whatever it is. It could be anything.
It doesn’t matter what your niche is, what we are suggesting is that you as an expert in your business niche put together your own list and start to distribute it.
Harms: That answers the question, what are we marketing?
So what we’re marketing is essentially an ultimate resource list.
Harms: I think the next question is how we create that because I made the error when we created this list, but what we didn’t do was brand ourselves, i.e. this is our list guys, but we are more than happy to share it for free.
What I did was just give the list away and there was no inkling that has come from us, our company, our brand. My other podcast featured on it but nothing that we do together featured on it.
We put this value list out and I think it’s okay to do that, but we’re talking about business here, revenue, survival, guerrilla marketing.
We have to include ourselves on that list, so don’t make the mistake I did.
The question then is how do we create it?
Kyle: The first big question here comes back to your audience and who it is you’re trying to get to, how wide do we want this list to be?
If I’m running a yoga studio in south-west London, for example, do I want this to be a useful resource for just people who do yoga in south-west London, or do I want it to be for everybody in London, do I want it to be national?
Do I want it to be the whole of Europe, or do I want it to be global?
There’s no right or wrong answer here.
The more people you help, so if you go global more likely that there is a high likelihood you’re going to turn that into a revenue stream later.
That said, if you’re mainly focusing on being able to bounce back from Corona once lockdown ends and you want to provide a huge amount of value specifically to your local area, then maybe you want to keep it closer.
Harms: There are pros and cons to both.
Global will have potentially arguably a greater viral reach because the list is the ultimate global resource list, but locally it will probably benefit you more for your physical business.
Kyle: It depends on your business.
Like the other day I received a list which was from a local coffee shop who is really big in the community and they had put together a list of all of the local businesses who are still serving customers.
They were still doing deliveries so this included fitness, but it also included food delivery and coffee.
They’d done a hyper-local one that made it easier for them to spread it in the local area. If they try to spread that list in India it is irrelevant. That doesn’t make any sense there so obviously it has no global ramifications.
It depends on who you want to be spreading this list for and who it’s for.
We do need to keep this in mind early on, it’s who do we want to be reading this?
Is it local, is it regional, national, global?
Harms: What else do we need to consider when creating this list?
Kyle: We need to decide what it is we’re collecting?
If you’ve already received any of these resource lists go and have a look at them and you’ll know exactly what we’re talking about here.
Generally what you’re going to see is a chart if it’s a Google sheet or an Excel document, you’re going to have the name of the company, website or their social media platform if they’re providing the service through social media.
You’ll have what the offer is so 10 yoga classes for £30 or whatever it is. You’ll have a column that has the price, whether it’s free or if it’s paid, then you might have one again, depending on whether the resource list is a schedule.
For the one I received the other day with cultural events, theatre, opera and ballet, etcetera. Obviously the schedule is important because the show is on Thursday at 7 PM so you need to have that on the list.
One additional thing you might want to add into your resource list and this is how we start to brand it is have an additional column which is your thoughts so as the curator of this list what you think about this.
Maybe it’s a few notes. Maybe it’s giving some extra details. Maybe it’s your current review of whatever the service is.
It’s up to you how in-depth you want to get on this particular column, but that’s a way of adding some personality and adding yourself into the resource list, one way.
Harms: We haven’t done a tabulated format because like you said the purpose of this was a bit different.
Especially when Kyle was talking about your personal thoughts that final column your brand, your personal thoughts, your personality which comes through. Kyle has done that with these resources but at the top.
This is a work from home resource list which is trending at the moment.
Kyle: This is slightly different.
I’d ideally have this in a Google sheet format like Excel, that would be a bit easier to see and to work through the list, but this is fine as well.
We have general resources, including a few long-form guides. We have some podcasts, we suggest some books and as you can see each one just has a couple of suggestions.
Through each one, I’ve actually given my thoughts as it’s very easy just to go Google and look up project management for example, but I’ve given my experience and my thoughts based on having used many of these tools.
Most of these tools over the years and we’ve changed them.
We used to use base camp. It’s great, but it didn’t do what we needed to do so we moved to teamwork.
Trello is a stripped-down tool for example, which is free and something I recommend people use. This list just goes on in the same vein, giving very specific suggestions like a decent headset is a Logitech H340.
Harms: The cheat way and probably the way we would not recommend doing this is copying and pasting our list or going on to another website or, where Kyle will show you how he researched this.
Copy and pasting it and just completely plagiarising that’s not what we’re recommending here what we’re saying is, spend some time to research this yourself and share your own personal experience for whatever this list is for you.
Kyle: As you should be an expert in your particular niche.
That’s what people are looking for, let’s say they’re looking for online yoga classes.
They can go on Google and type online yoga classes that are not difficult but what they’re looking for from somebody like you is your curation.
They’re looking for advice because they’ll find a hundred different websites offering online yoga classes.
They need somebody who knows what they’re talking about to say, actually ignore this these are the guys you need to be looking at.
Harms: Someone like you, someone who is in the same mindset as you, the same social circles, community, somebody you may even go to a yoga class with.
That’s the person you want to be positioning yourself here, almost like a community leader.
Somebody who is the host of the party who’s saying I put this list together because I think it will be useful for everybody and then actually have put that list together.
Or is your industry or business if you have a sharp clean image, does that present you in a better way and does that mean your message is stronger?
That’s how you want to feel like you’re giving your opinion about every piece of item on this list and that will set your list apart.
Kyle: Again if somebody wants advice on which Webcam to buy, they can just google best web cams 2020, or go on Amazon and see which one has the best reviews.
Even then, though it’s hard to tell what to trust because you don’t know if the sites are legit. They want somebody to make it easy for them and say this is a good Webcam, that’s all people are looking for.
Harms: How did you curate this list?
Kyle: It took me about an hour to make that
Harms: document. But expect an hour to two or three especially if this is the first time you’re doing it.
Kyle: So make a sheet with name, website, what the offer is, any price, any schedule and then any notes you want to add to it.
There are a few ways that you can find the resources to put into your list.
The first thing you can do is look at any lists you’ve been sent. Some people have already started to compile these lists. I’m not saying steal their list, I’m saying start with it and pick out the things you actually genuinely think are useful within that list.
A lot of these lists have been sent out including everything so again, that’s not very helpful for somebody who is an amateur and doesn’t know this niche as well as you.
If they’re given a list of 20 different options for Webcam, for example, or 20 different options for yoga lessons that’s too much. Whenever human beings are given that many choices their brains shut down.
We do not make a decision.
We need to have max two or three, and that’s it.
Look at the lists that have already been sent around and pull out whatever is useful, put them into your Google sheet. That’s one thing we are going to be using so we’re not stealing we are curating.
Harms: If you’re confused between somebody who steals versus somebody who curates there is a great book called ‘Steal like an artist’, that will give you a strong definition if you’re ever confused am I stealing or not?
Kyle: Because all of this information is out there.
The problem with the internet nowadays is not that there is hidden information or that the information cannot be found, there’s just too much. So what we’re doing is curating it.
We are making it easier to access quality information and getting rid of the crap.
Harms: It is no different to say somebody curating their own blog post and having this information on there as a blog post, it’s very similar. But what we’re saying is we want to get this directly into the hands of people just remember that as a comparison, if you’re thinking can I use it as a blog post?
Yes you can.
Can I use it on my social media?
100%, but make sure you’ve curated it but how we distribute it, that would be the final point.
Kyle: A really useful resource is Reddit, all we are going to do is put in a search term on Google like free yoga resources, Reddit, or you can even put in things like yoga quarantine Reddit or yoga covid Reddit, or yoga Corona Reddit.
That’s going to come up with specific lists and resources that people put together to combat the quarantine.
Harms: The key there is to include Reddit in the search term.
Kyle: That’s going to show us what Reddit has shown us.
This person is asking what are some good sources for online and we have 59 people that have given suggestions. We have yoga with Adriene of course.
Reddit is it’s own beast, but it’s basically a messaging board where you can go on ask questions or post links and then other people jump in and give answers, or discuss whatever you’ve posted.
The main difference with Reddit is that it has a very active community and they do things like curate this list.
I want to highlight this at the top. Basically the yoga part of Reddit has been going for so long that over time, people on the yoga messaging board have put together this guide.
For example if you want to give a suggestion on a yoga mat.
These are all of the discussions people have had on Reddit about mats and these are going to be very in-depth, so there’s a mega thread here, which I imagine is going to a huge amount of depth about what is the best mat. You can jump in here and find suggestions.
Again, you need to curate it so you need to base it on what you know about the subject.
You should not just be copying stuff from Reddit but this is a great place to start and get inspiration for what you should be talking about.
Reddit has a lot of different sub-niches so you will be able to find whatever your niche is. You will be able to find a community around your interest inside Reddit, so this is a great place to find resources.
So again, we are just putting in something like Reddit yoga list or Reddit yoga free list and then we just go through until we find useful resources we want to borrow from.
Harms: I think a nice way to start is to think about the categories that you may want to find resources in that might be able to speed up the process as well.
For example, in our list, we said what is work from home?
What are all the things we have to consider from hardware, office set up, streaming, online learning, podcast, YouTube people. All of those things are different categories then we can very quickly find resources within that.
I like Reddit as well, because it’s an actual human being, giving their opinion, whereas a blog post is a human being, given their opinion via an incentive.
It’s a bit different one is in the top 10 reviews but we don’t know if they’ve been incentivised behind the scenes again, it is up to them.
That’s their business model and if you click through the link do they get an affiliate payment again, totally fine, but it’s why have they put that on there?
Have they generally tested it?
Kyle: On that point, if I type into Google top 10 yoga mats if you click any of the links here it will go to Amazon and when you purchase that yoga mat the website will make a small amount of money for each of those sales. Everything there is only available on Amazon.
So whether or not the best yoga mat can be bought on Amazon is irrelevant because they’re trying to send you to Amazon to make money, and obviously they are incentivised to suggest certain items on Amazon.
They get paid a percentage, so if they recommend a higher cost item they’re going to make a bit more.
Harms: That is called affiliate marketing.
And that’s okay if that’s your business model
Kyle: But it is not what we are going to use for researching right now.
We want to find unbiased sources. People actually giving each other real human suggestions because that’s what we want to be doing and see it.
The third suggestion I just gave you can just google best yoga mat or best yoga block or best free yoga classes and you will be able to find lists.
You just need to be careful to really curate these and again, if you just fill your list with these eight best yoga mats of 2020 it’s not very trustworthy or helpful if you’re just spamming people with all the yoga mats.
Again tell people about the yoga mat that you use and why you use it, it’s going to be a much more valuable resource because of that.
Harms: If you’re thinking what do you mean by that, well, let’s say, for example, you do yoga at home, but when you started doing yoga you used the cheapest mat which you bought on Amazon as an example.
When you’re starting out, you don’t know how long you’re going to be doing yoga for. Is this a short-term thing?
What’s something that ticks the box but also cheap as possible before you step up to a higher level yoga mat, whatever that is.
That’s you giving your personal opinion.
When I started I used this it was £15 but now I use this one but I’ve been doing yoga for five years and I would certainly recommend starting with that. That’s you giving your personal opinion on the yoga mat as an example, in case you’re wondering how do I explain that.
Kyle: it is little sprinklings of your actual personal opinion and your expertise.
Harms: Where else can we look?
You said Google for our competitors.
Kyle: The final one is ask, because you are in this niche you’re probably part of various groups, whether that is WhatsApp or Facebook groups, wherever your groups happen to be. Maybe you have specific apps and specific communities around your niche.
Ask people to set up a question thread where you are asking what are the best free yoga resources for people who are quarantined right now?
Just go ahead and say this is what you’re looking for.
If I were you I would also say I am putting together a list, an ultimate resource list of all the best things and I am looking for suggestions. I would say just be open and honest about this that you want to build this list and you’re looking for people to throw as many suggestions at you as possible.
The reason for this is one it’s honest, that is what you are doing so tell people about it, why not, but it also means when you have completed the list these are the places where you’re going to go back to first.
Anywhere you’ve asked a community of let’s say a thousand people in a Facebook group you’ve said to them, I’m putting together an ultimate resource list. I’m looking for suggestions, please throw any suggestions and I’ll include them.
Then after you’ve put together the list, you can go back to the group and say it’s done. Thank you guys, you’ve been so helpful you’ve helped me to create this here is the list.
They’re going to become the first people as they’re part of the creation, so they’re going to be the first people you want to send to.
Harms: A nice question to ask them to initiate this is give me your recommendations for X, yoga mats, could be applications you use at home.
That way you can even include if you haven’t used it you could include their recommendation, my dear friend says this about that. I asked my community and they said this about this yoga mat, so it also helps make the curation a bit more personal.
If you think psychologically it includes their input onto this report so when you give it back to them they have a greater natural incentive to share this. It’s making them a part of this whole process.
Kyle: For example, let’s say I need a recommendation for a mat for a very tall person, so there are specific mats made for extremely tall people but let’s say you’re not tall.
You need to go to a group and say I’m looking specifically for recommendations for taller people, and then you can include that and say Dave says this is a great mat. And then at the end of the process you send the list back to Dave and say thanks for your recommendation.
Three different things, there are existing lists that you have been sent whether it is through WhatsApp, whether it’s in these kinds of groups, so look for existing lists.
We are going to pull together as many as we can and then curate them.
Second is going to Reddit, it is really good for this kind of collective discussion.
Then third go into communities that you’re part of around this niche and ask. Say this is what I’m doing and I am looking for suggestions.
Nice and simple these are three ways.
Initially we are going to do it in a Google sheet because it’s easy to get lots of information in there, this is going to be a working document.
People are going to keep giving you suggestions.
Initially you’re going to want to share it as a google sheet. Later though we can take all the information, let’s say we are almost at the final draft.
Later we can take this information and turn it into a nice PDF and then we can add our branding, we can add our website, we can add our social media, etcetera. So later format -wise, we might go to PDF.
We don’t want to do that too quickly because this should be a living document that is going to change, at least for the first month or so.
Harms: Once it’s done, once you’ve seen the changes slowing down or the frequency of the change reducing, then we can turn into something a bit nicer.
Because now people have seen this and they’ve added the changes, or I’ve tweaked it based on feedback.
Now we have a great document that’s going to be very useful. Let me brand it up and make it look nice.
Kyle: Now let’s take the time or maybe even pay a designer to make this look really great and that will be the final draft.
Harms: Because what we never recommend, and this is the trap most people fall into is they would spend maybe a guide creating this list getting it designed, making it look awesome then distributing it to find out nobody cares.
It looks fancy but it is not really that useful to me.
Whereas doing it the other way is getting a useful list first which is more of a raw list, then going out with a finished polished product.
Another example is the BBO show.
We don’t have a website yet, we don’t have a logo yet although it is being created and it’s freaking awesome, but we could have delayed the launch of this until all of the logo, the domain name, email collection tool, everything was all set up whatever, but we didn’t.
We said let’s go live because this is providing instant value and you can speak to us directly and say this.
Harms: Going back to formats, initially we said we’ve got a sheet and then think about a fancy PDF once it is done. Once you’ve compiled that list and you’ve seen the frequency of changes reduce.
What are some tips there, what do you recommend without going over the top.
Kyle: The first thing if you are adding your voice, if there is an authorial voice with your comments and your suggestions.
That is already personalising it so that you’re already putting yourself in a position of an expert.
We just need to make sure people know who you are so it could be as simple as making sure the header in the Google doc has your website.
You could change the title of the list so it is the name of your company or your name’s ultimate guide to yoga at home.
We make sure that when you are listing out the top online yoga classes or the top spinning classes, we make sure that yours is one of those obviously.
You don’t hide that so you’re very open about that.
This is a slightly technical one but when you do export it and we’re going to be talking about this in distribution when it is exported, make sure that your company name or your name is in the file name.
Because that’s what people are sending to each other on WhatsApp and that’s a good way to make sure your name is going to appear every time it is shared.
Don’t be shy to include your social media because although they may not transact with you now they will follow you and see you’re the person behind the list, which is always nice.
Have your URLs, so have your links embedded so one way you could do it is if it’s a live document is in the title, say Harms and Kyle’s ultimate guide to working at home, Harms and Kyle could be a URL which takes them to the BBO show as an example.
Have strategic links placed in there as well, which are obvious it’s not to hide it, you created this list so don’t be shy to link it up as much as possible.
Kyle: The main thing is it’s not 100% just your products because you’re going to begin with so many suggestions, it’s fine that you sprinkle in yours.
It’s fine if you even highlight yours above other people’s. If you’ve got 100 different suggestions and two of them are yours in pride of place, that’s fine.
People know the value of the rest of the document.
It’s just if you give people a one pager which just has your prices and your times on it that is valuable for you as a business owner but not for them.
Think about what’s useful for them and then add in your branding, your voice, your service offerings just don’t take the piss basically. answered that.
We are going to be getting it into so many hands the fact that you are one of hundred different suggestions on there won’t really matter, because we’re going to be getting it to thousands of people.
Harms: Final part then how do we distribute this list?
Let’s assume that we’ve researched it, we’ve curated it into this working document, not a final piece of artwork but a working document.
Now how do we get it out to people’s hands?
I guess the first thing we need to focus on is what channels do we need to get it out from?
I mentioned a blog post, but there are more direct channels that we can use.
Kyle: Right now what is working really well is WhatsApp because everybody is stuck in the same situation, we are all stuck at home. Nobody has any way to socialise, so WhatsApp works in particular, people are chatting on WhatsApp.
People are using WhatsApp groups whether it’s family, whether it’s a peer group, their friends, it’s how we socialise right now.
People were using WhatsApp a lot before, but now it’s become even more important.
This is where the current resource lists the ultimate resource lists are being shared.
Ultimately, that’s where we want ours to gain some traction and to start being shared around by people within our niche or people interested in our niche.
We want to share it into these groups of people who will find it useful.
If you are in a big yoga group or yoga instructor group, or maybe you have a group with your current students make sure you share it there.
That’s the first place we want but we need to go a bit wider than that, we want to get other people sharing it so it’s not just us sharing it to our groups.
We need other people to find it useful and share it into their groups and that’s where it is really going to start to grow.
I don’t want to use the term going viral, one, because of coronavirus I don’t think we can use going viral anymore.
Harms: Going viral now will become a PC term I think.
Kyle: Things go viral when they’re valuable and people want to share them so we are trying to manufacture virality, but we cannot rely on it.
Harms: Because there are companies out there which have people working to create viral content, there are groups of individuals who create video content with the sole purpose for this video to go viral and that is their day job.
Kyle: Plus there is a lot of money behind it as well, the idea of organic virality doesn’t work anymore.
Harms: So don’t allow that to be your focus or your goal.
That’s the intention that we would like to happen but we can’t rely on it.
Kyle: We are going to spread it to WhatsApp to our current groups absolutely fine, if it takes off and people start sending it to other people fantastic that’s virality. You’ve got what you needed.
We are going to look at a few other different routes.
First up is going to be your current clients and your current customers, so this is a really useful thing you can immediately provide them.
You know they come to you for spinning, you know, they come to you for yoga. They are now stuck at home as everyone else’s, so these are immediately people you should be sharing this value with.
Sharing these resources with and it’s a good way for you to keep in touch with them and a good way for you to maintain a relationship.
Let’s focus on value and giving value and getting as much value out into the world instead of virality.
We want something to be valuable enough that people share it with each other and that’s all we are aiming for. If they start to share it with people on WhatsApp, great.
Harms: And do ask them, just say share this with anybody you think will find this useful and specifically send it to them via WhatsApp.
If you email it to them you’re adding an additional step there, where they need to get it out of their email into WhatsApp and then forward it to people.
Harms: We call it friction.
We want to reduce the friction for them to act and do something.
Kyle: We want it to be one button away to share it with their other friends who are into yoga.
That’s why we want to try and use WhatsApp as much as possible to get the initial file to people or the initial link to people and beyond that, they’ll be able to share it more easily.
One other additional useful suggestion and this depends on whether you go local or regional, if you are focusing locally there are the physical noticeboards, Sainsbury’s and Tesco etc have them.
They are less useful nowadays because of the lockdown, but there are also apps and social media networks like next door. The people who use it are really into it. Next door is invite only.
Harms: You can request it but you have to be invited by a neighbour who knows you. So only people in the local world will be on this app. It’s amazing.
Kyle: If you are doing local marketing it’s great you can download the app, I think you can request someone to send you a postcard and each member of next door can send either 10 or 20 postcards to their other neighbours.
That will have a little code on it and that’s how they spread and it means that only people within your postcode and the surrounding postcodes have access to your particular part of next door.
It is hyper-local right now during corona it’s just kicking off, everybody is helping each other and everybody is setting up corona support groups within next door.
A lot of them, then go to WhatsApp but next door is where they first congregate.
If you were to go there and say, I’ve put together a list of resources to help you keep fit during these times, please share with anyone you know who needs a bit of support physically and mental health, next door is going to be a really good place to start spreading that out to people.
Because you’re coming from a place of value giving not because you are trying to sell.
If you just went on next door saying I’m doing yoga lessons at £20 an hour online, you’ll just get shot down.
Harms: The good thing about WhatsApp and apps like next door is that the hardest thing for a market to do is to gain trust with your audience.
Here the trust is built up, you’re already on WhatsApp with somebody and next door is very similar. Because of this whole postcard and recommendation process there’s a layer of security for you to be in the local group.
Kyle: You need to maintain that trust, so do not go in there and just try to sell people your classes.
Harms: Do ask the question.
This is the part that most people do miss, which is what you would like them to do with this list.
Hopefully, it’s a useful resource for yourself, but also, please share it with anybody outside of our community which you think may benefit or maybe in a similar situation.
That’s the ask otherwise sometimes people see the list and they’re like that’s an amazing list. Just that extra bit of direction will mean, I know people who may really find this useful I’m going to share it with them.
Sometimes we need that prompt.
Kyle: That’s something you cannot do if you’re just selling to people.
If you say, buy my stuff and share this with three of your friends people will say no. But if it’s something that’s generally valuable that ask is going to be well received.
So the local community, using next door great, maybe print out some flyers and stick them in Sainsbury’s and Tescos. Right now fewer people are going out so that’s going to be less useful but there are community boards depending on where you live, which might be useful.
Competitors are an interesting one.
Not going to call them competitors but other people who are probably struggling because they do something similar to what you’re doing.
You’re just going to contact them and say, I do yoga classes, I do spin classes in the area, times are rough. I’m putting together this ultimate list of resources to help people in the area I’ve put my classes in here, do you want to add your classes?
Harms: That’s the key, ask them to say, what would you like me to include in this list and give them a template so that initial template from the name, website, testimonial.
Ask them for that information specifically and say I’d love to put you in this list because during this time we’ve got to stick together and it’d be great to feature you on this list.
Kyle: You’re going to them not as a competitor, but you’re going to them as an information publisher at this point.
You’re saying I want to include you on my list and we can get this out to lots of people so that they can continue to stay fit at home, and I want you to be on this list.
You’re coming at it from a very different angle and they’re never competitors, they’re colleagues.
Harms: They share the market space with you.
The next step from there once it is created you send it back to them and say you’re on this list, share with your customer base, share with your community
Kyle: Share on WhatsApp, go on next door and show people.
That’s how you spread it, you get other people invested in getting it out to the wider world.
Harms: Give them that list and give them that direction from a place of just helping them out in terms of let’s assume that nobody knows about WhatsApp, next door, another competitor and say these are three or four different places you can share this just to help you or your team.
Allow them as little thinking as needed because at the end of the day we’re all going to be thinking about lots of other things right now, never mind sharing a list.
Kyle: I had a couple more options; these are smaller ones as we’ve covered the main ones.
But if there are any big blocks in your niche or podcasts or podcasts that have blogs or it could be YouTubers.
Any big influencers within your niche share the list with them. Make sure they’re on the lift first even if they aren’t a competitor in your area, it could be someone larger like yoga with Adriene.
If you do yoga share the list with them, either via Twitter or email or however they normally talk with their fans and say, I’ve put you on this list.
I think this ultimate resource list would be really useful for people around the world or in the country who are trying to find free resources but they don’t really know where to turn.
If you can get someone big, some big influencer to share your list, then you’re good.
Harms: That’s one way to do it.
Find somebody who’s got a very large, powerful, influential position with their audience and then go like that.
Kyle: I’ve separated them from competitors because you probably don’t think of them as competitors as they’re so much bigger.
So we can go to them and say this is the list you’re on and I think it’d be really useful for everybody in the community if you could help share it that will be great.
Harms: These are lots of free methods, say somebody wanted to put their money behind this, what would they do?
Kyle: You could use a paid Facebook and Instagram posting.
There are a few more steps involved but the way I’d do it is I would get on video like this and I would say, hey, I’ve put together a list of the top resources in yoga, if you’re stuck at home right now and you want to keep healthy and you want to keep your mind sane. This is a free list.
You don’t need an email or anything to access it, if you follow the link down below you’ll be able to access a Google document and I hope it’s useful for you.
Something like that just fast quick, making sure people don’t think there’s a sale because they’re going to assume there is.
Harms: So let them know it is free.
Kyle: The more you plan it the more it’s going to seem like a sales script, so it really does need to be off the cuff like that yet.
That could work and you’d be able to reach thousands of people for five, £10 a day.
I think for now, if you focus on creating something that is genuinely valuable to the community we shouldn’t have to focus on paid too much.
Harms: We’ve covered what we’re making the ultimate resource list, number two is how to make it and we discussed how to distribute it.
Number one is deciding the scope of your list, what is your focus going to be, e.g. an ultimate list of free yoga resources something like that which is specific and will be opened by somebody who has got an interest in the area.
Number two is pull together everything you can into a Google sheet,
It’s very easy to use and share that link and for people to access it very quickly and easily.
Curate the list and go for the research process that we discussed today and remove the things you think are not relevant.
Things that you’ve used yourself are a bonus as you can give a personal opinion on that as well.
Then publish to the people you asked, get it into all those places, WhatsApp’s, Facebook groups, all the places that we discussed and ask them to please share this with other people.
Keep pushing it, keep getting it out there and then later, the next step in the future could be to brand it up, turn it into a PDF and send it to a designer.
But right now a Google sheet is 100% okay, that’s it.
What can a business do in shifting their model going online, what’s a way they can do that?
An ultimate resource list is a technique that we wanted to share with you.
Harms: We are focusing on a section of the BATON system.
We have done business, how to attract an audience’s attention and now in this section of the guide we’re focusing on how to harness a tribe.
The third letter in the BATON system is tribe and essentially the key question is how we get people to care how and start to form around our idea, our business, our product.
What we’re focusing on in terms of product is events businesses and mainly individuals like yoga teachers, gym instructors, educators, coaches and mentors who have to physically meet people online.
So even some kind of coaching and mentoring cannot happen remotely it has to happen physically.
Kyle: We’re moving into tribe and it’s worth talking about what this is because when we’re going out wide, to as many people as possible in the audience we can use the Internet to get to millions of people.
That’s not really a problem, however, we’re not expecting everybody in that group, in that one million or 10 million to actually care about what we do. We also don’t need them all to care, which is a good thing.
If you use social media you know that you can just swipe through and there is so much information.
There are so many people putting out content that because our time and our attention are limited, we will only spend that attention spend that time with people we care about.
A lot of online businesses jump straight to the offer, they jump straight to the sale.
It is just an advert saying this is what we sell come and buy it now, it doesn’t really work online nowadays because people are fed up of being sold to.
That’s why instead we grow an audience, we build something of value to put out into the world.
We get people to opt into our tribe to actually say hey, I care about what it is you’re doing, and I want to hear more from you. And then and only then are we going to move to offer that’s when we are going to start selling to people.
Harms: What Kyle is saying when we have our business idea, product, service, most people will skip immediately to offer and they don’t worry too much. Sometimes they worry about the audience, but they certainly skipped what we’re talking about today which is the tribe.
We want you to work through this process.
Kyle: Because of the coronavirus, what a lot of businesses are doing is they’ve lost their off-line business.
They’re no longer able to do classes or lessons at the local gym for example, so they have jumped straight to trying to sell online classes without bothering to build an audience or tribe.
Harms: Because I empathise with them, I do appreciate that they have to transition quickly. I understand why they would want to do that, theoretically, but how long would this take?
Kyle: It’s a very difficult question and it depends on what results you need.
If you are just looking for a handful of people to start paying online classes we don’t need to reach millions and millions and millions of people or get thousands of people into our tribe.
We need a handful.
That’s why we talked about how we start to distribute our ultimate list, how we distribute that resource guide, we started locally.
We started with our existing clients.
We started with people in the local neighbourhood because that might be enough to build up the online client base you need.
If you try to build up a massive online mechanism to generate online sales in the thousands selling courses online every day, hundreds of courses, then yes it will take time, six to 12 months, but that’s a totally different business.
What we’re talking about right now is instead of rushing off and just running some Facebook ads, which I know a lot of you will be thinking this is the thing I need to do.
You can do that and it does work, and you will get a few online sales and you will be able to start doing classes, but it’s very expensive.
We are talking about doing some value building at the same time, we’re doing this in parallel to just running adverts.
This system of building an audience and building a tribe will start to generate business for you for a very low cost.
Harms: Now we’ve got our ultimate resource list, how do we get people to care about that and how do we move people from just looking at it and saying this is fantastic, into a position where they can transact with us, whether it’s attention transaction.
What I mean by that is just exchanging for example, you’re reading this guide you’re transacting your attention rather than money.
Kyle: We’re moving towards that but first we need to get their attention and show them that we’re worthwhile investing in, so we’re not going to jump too quickly.
Harms: We all would love to get the cash instantly, but the online world is super busy, so working through this process helps you niche a little bit of space and allow attention to come to you in that space that you created in this mass online
Kyle: We want to have a place for people to get in touch with you, for people to learn about what it is you’re doing.
You might be thinking I’ve already got a website that’s not what we’re talking about, websites are quite old-fashioned.
They still have a use but nowadays it’s really about social media and groups that we’re going to be talking about.
Because as a business, as a brand of yourself, there needs to be interactivity.
Harms: What we’re saying is to get people around us we basically need a mechanism to take people from the wider space into a group where we interact with them.
We are saying our recommendation number one is we need to work out a way to get people within a group,
Kyle: Specifically for this particular niche, for this particular funnel that we’re taking people through it’s going to be a Facebook group.
There are many ways to do this, we can get people onto a newsletter.
We can get people to a physical meet up and I run a few of them obviously that is not working at the moment because people aren’t meeting. You can get people onto a membership site, we can get people into a LinkedIn group instead of a Facebook group.
Kyle: What you’re reading right now is the audience.
This is us putting value out into the world and building an audience.
This is just us putting our flag in the grounds saying this is the value we’re going to be offering, and we are starting to see an audience build up already.
The slack group is our tribe, that’s where we are communicating with people and bringing the community around us. But we are doing what we are teaching as well.
However, in your case, if you run classes, if you run events, if you’re doing yoga classes for example, we are recommending a Facebook group instead of slack. It
Harms: It could be Zumba, could be your PT, it could be you are an interventional coach.
It could be that you are a mentor to a group of people, you could be a networking meeting host and we know that’s very common across the UK.
Just consider yoga as shorthand for all of these interactions and there’s a lot where people have to physically meet others in this space where you are almost educating and providing a service of something similar to yoga.
When we say that don’t feel like I’m not a yoga instructor it doesn’t apply to me. It may apply to you so look for the opportunity in the message that we’re describing.
Kyle: I’m going to pull up an example of a really good Facebook group, again this is just a yoga example because it’s a nice easy way for us to talk about it.
Yoga with Sandra is a private group, you do need to apply to enter it. However, it’s free and anyone can apply.
In this group she has nearly 21,000 members. You can see, there are 96 new posts today and in the last 30 days she’s added nearly 10,000, it has doubled in the last 30 days.
YouTube is her main platform and she does free YouTube videos.
The call to action from those videos is to come and join her Facebook group. She also has this free seven-day beginner yoga journey, which is an email newsletter where you get seven days’ worth of videos basically.
The point of this group is you join up for this seven-day yoga journey and you come into the group to get support with that and beyond in her community. It’s a fantastic example of what you can do with a group, you are just creating a space for people to gather and to talk about and to discuss and share information around your particular niche.
This is again, us being the host of the party.
Harms: What that should give you is a big woah hang on a minute, if I had done this beforehand I would also see some sort of doubling in the numbers.
Some people are going to win during this time some won’t, some will be in between and it all depends on your special circumstance.
But that should be an encouragement to us all to put something like this in place because we never know what kind of luck in a certain scenario whether it is good or bad may occur to us. She has seen a doubling in numbers within 30 days.
Kyle: She’s had the group for about three years but 9,500 of them arrived in the last 30 days, so that’s telling you something.
Harms: That should be encouragement enough about your opportunity right now.
Circumstances can operate in different ways for different people. And because she’s online because she’s been putting videos out, putting value out into the world and saying, hey, I’ve got a private group where you can come and chat about yoga.
She put herself in a position where suddenly because of the lockdown she’s doing extremely well as a result of
What we are saying is create a Facebook group essentially for where your tribe can come and interact.
Harms: But here is a question Kyle, why a group and not a page?
Kyle: Previously we were talking about yoga with Adriene, who is probably one of the largest if not the largest yoga YouTuber. She has a Facebook page. She does not have a group, she’s gone down a different route, and this is a really good question.
Why should I have a group instead of the page?
Because a group is harder to get into anyone can go on like a Facebook page.
Anyone can access content on a Facebook page, so why would I make it harder for people who want to access me and access my content?
Why would I make them have to join a group and it’s a valid question.
The main reason is because of the way the Facebook algorithm works.
If I post content to a Facebook page it’s like 10 to 16, 17%will see that content. Let’s say I have 10,000 people who follow one of my Facebook pages, maybe a thousand of them maybe 1,600 of them are going to see when I post a new video that’s it.
The rest of them will not see it because Facebook is such a busy place and there’s just so much information all the time that Facebook will not show everything I post to everybody who follows me.
They used to, and a lot of people still think they do.
A lot of business owners think if every time I post something on my Facebook page obviously all my fans are going to see it, that doesn’t happen.
A Facebook group is different.
There is much higher visibility because somebody who has joined a Facebook group has raised their hand to Facebook and said, look, I’m really interested in what this person has to say.
I’m interested enough to actually opt into the group that they have set up.
As a result of this when you do post something into a group far more people will see it.
Harms: There are some really cool features within a Facebook group in terms of all of your posts as an example, you can select an option to have it featured as an announcement.
Which means it’s the first thing somebody sees every time they come into that group and then once they’ve seen it, they’ll see another announcement.
There is a potential there for either the host to create ads or to experience a percentage of the ad revenue that Facebook makes.
Or they may be using groups in a way to get hyper-targeted adverts because they know certain groups will be interested in certain advertisements.
I wonder how long groups will stay safe from advertising?
Kyle: At the moment you cannot advertise to a group that’s not something that can be done within the Facebook advertising interface.
Which means if you own a group it’s very powerful because you can pin an announcement or you can pin a post to the group saying, hey, I’m starting a new workshop series, I’m going to be teaching yoga every Friday at 6 PM. There are 30 spots available.
You control the group so you control the messages to the group.
You have basically created a space on Facebook you control, whereas if somebody was on your page, or in their stream they’re getting bombarded with messages from all over the place.
It’s a very different environment to the safety of being in a group where it’s just going to be your content, your value.
Harms: In short, it’s an opportunity for you to advertise for free and that’s another way to think about this, although that’s not the intention that is another way to think about this in terms of an advantage for having a Facebook group.
It is externally powerful.
So why don’t we like it?
Let’s talk about that before we move on to how to get people in there.
Why don’t you like it Kyle, what’s your beef, with Facebook groups?
Kyle: I don’t personally use Facebook and social media platforms, so for me personally, it’s not a convenient place to consume content.
I prefer other platforms, which is why we’re using slack for our group because I’m much more likely to be there and to commit to actually adding value into a group.
But for something where you are teaching using video Facebook is amazing because video is very native to Facebook, whereas if we were to use WhatsApp for groups for example, video doesn’t really fit in there very well.
You can post videos but the videos have to be relatively short or they have to be embedded YouTube links, it is not built from the ground up for video, whereas Facebook is.
Harms: For example we’ve got a private course that we ran into a paid Facebook group.
What we did was we used the Facebook group as you can convert it into a social learning group.
You have social learning units which you can upload your videos to. And then a whole bunch of people wanted to learn about something specifically with online business, join the group and then they can actually work through that and then comment within the social learning group. And Kyle and I can jump in and answer questions and so forth to make sure they’ve got somebody to interact with.
It is very powerful and I used to love it.
I don’t love it anymore because it’s just extremely distracting just to look.
In terms of a focused place to work I like slack because it’s already adopted by big companies because it’s so focused.
You’re not getting bombarded with notifications, advertisements, your friends, these videos that are just there to get you to click. It’s hilarious and great, but I’ve just lost another seven minutes of my life.
There’s too much of that on Facebook versus Slack where it’s like, okay, I’ve got a specific question, Kyle and Harms on what you discussed on episode number three, around the Facebook group.
How do I do this within my Facebook group?
Amazing, now we can answer that without me getting distracted by a silly video that’s going to make me laugh.
Kyle: I think it’s useful when we’re talking about these platforms, whether it’s Facebook or LinkedIn on YouTube or whatever it is, we’re talking to you, we are business owners and you’re a business owner.
When you use social media when you use something like Facebook as a business owner it’s different to using it as a user.
Personally as Kyle, I do not use Facebook as a user I do use Facebook as a business owner, very different thing and unless you’ve used Facebook for your business, unless you’ve used advertising to build communities etcetera, it’s quite hard to wrap your head around the fact that Facebook is a platform.
Facebook sits between the users and businesses who are like us, business owners who want to get in touch with Facebook’s users.
Harms: That’s quite an interesting one because if you just think about who the actual customer is there it’s not the user, although they would like you to think that, or maybe they are partly, but the real customer is ultimately the person who pays them the cash and the cash comes from businesses that advertise on the platform.
That’s it in a nutshell.
Harms: Let’s move on to how do we get people to join the tribe now?
Kyle: The simplest way is we control the list, so at the top of the list are we going to say if you like this, if you find this useful we have communities set up here is the link, and you give the Facebook link.
You make sure your Facebook group has pride of place in your list, maybe in the introduction, you just say if you like this it was compiled by me and my company. I run a Facebook community here where we do x,y and z.
The basic idea is you’re going to be providing a lot of value, you’ll be giving more and more and more value to the people who have chosen to come to you because you’re an expert.
Harms: They already know you’re very useful in the fact that you can compile all of this information, whether your stuff is in there it was also quite unbiased in the fact that you featured your competitors, you featured all this cool stuff that you’ve done and experienced.
Which when you actually catalogue like that, you’ll probably be surprised at yourself that you’ve used a lot of these tools or the services, and I have an opinion on them. I enjoyed these, I didn’t like these so much because of this, and that’s great.
People will start to flock around you because you have that kind of experience to share.
Kyle: That’s why we have the group as if someone has a question they’ll ask you in the Facebook group.
That’s going to be the easiest way to get people from the ultimate list to the Facebook group.
Harms: That will potentially get a handful of people and it depends how well your resource list is.
Kyle: Again we can’t rely on that but if it does start to get spread around fantastic, that’s great, but we want to have a method where we control how many people come in.
For that we might want to look at running some Facebook boosted posts.
Harms: This is a second way.
We discussed just telling people and they will see it when they get it on their WhatsApp and next door and all the other cool places we told you about your competitors, etcetera.
Now we’re talking about number two, which is a Facebook boosted post.
Kyle: Again, because we are at the moment coming at this from the perspective of pure value delivery, just giving away information and giving away classes, etcetera. It’s quite easy to make a sale because we’re not charging people anything.
I would recommend shooting a quick video where it is basically you saying what you’re offering, who you are and what they need to do to access what it is you’re offering in this group.
If it’s yoga again, I might say my name is Kyle. I’ve put together a group for people interested in learning yoga. I’m going to be going live every day at 1 PM doing a free yoga class, you’ll be able to hook straight into a group by Facebook to live. Totally free. All you need to do is hit the link below or join the group I will add you into it and you’ll be able to access that content every single day.
Again adapt it to your niche, but what you’re saying is this is what I’m offering, you start with that you don’t start with who you are because people will turn off very quickly.
You start with this is what I can do for you in the first few seconds.
Then you can talk about who you are because then at that point they might be like who is this person, why should I listen to them, why should I care?
But first, you need to start with what’s in it for them because most people will scroll pass very quickly.
Three seconds on Facebook is considered a watch.
That’s like a long time.
If you manage to hold somebody’s attention for three seconds Facebook considers that a big win for you, so that gives you an idea of how little attention is spent on each piece of content.
Harms: The post is awesome and that’s essentially in short, you know, just spending a bit of money to get the post seen by lots of people off the back of that message you just said.
Kyle: From a technical point of view, you record that video and you upload it to Facebook onto your Facebook page. And then below that post will be a little blue button that says boost post and that allows you to send it out to your market on Facebook.
I’d recommend again if you’re doing something like yoga I might target yoga with Adriene and then the UK.
I’d basically put five or £10 behind that post and see what happens.
Also, it’s going to be extremely specific to your niche, so this is the kind of thing you can ask us in your slack group. Because Facebook advertising or any online advertising is very difficult.
Like should you go global, should you keep it local?
What interest targeting should you do?
Should you be using video, images, etcetera.
Lots of questions and the answer is always it depends on and your audiences and product market fit. For me to give a sweeping answer is very difficult.
Harms: The most common question we get is should I advertise?
The answer is always yes.
If you have a marketing budget to advertise, of course you should.
How you do it is so specific to you. There are so many factors to consider.
Kyle: Facebook groups generally are going to be the best for you and Facebook is generally the widest and most all-inclusive social network.
It has got about two billion users, but it is not always going to be the answer in this case, in classes and in health and fitness in particular it will be.
Number one is through your audience gathering mechanism.
Harms: lt’s through the ultimate list, the resource list that you put together, front and centre your group and the additional way people can contact you and benefit from your experience and expertise.
Number two is a direct call to action saying I’ve set up a group this is what we’re doing in the group, this is why it’s good for you, this is who I am, join below.
They’re the two ways.
What do we do once they are engaged?
The next question is what to do with the people in the group.
It’s not about the numbers to start with, it is the first time you’re doing.
It doesn’t matter, it could be one person, five people, 10 people, could be 10,000 people as we’ve seen that some groups experience as well. It all depends.
But the point is now just to get the first person in, the first five people, first 10 people.
But when they are in there what do you do?
Kyle: On that issue of how do I get my first people in there, you already do lessons you already do classes, so talk to your clients, your existing customers that helps you get over that slightly odd phase when there’s only five people in your group including your mum.
If you can bring in your existing students and say I’m going to be delivering content here if you want to keep in touch during this time, this is the place to be.
You’re already going to be a few steps ahead of somebody who is starting from scratch.
Harms: It is arguable that somebody’s got a great off-line reputation and a great off-line network they could never have existed online before, but their initial foot up is bringing all of their off-line clients into this group, so that’s a good win.
If you’re thinking I have a great off-line presence, a community, etcetera now it’s a case of just educating them and transitioning them online, and that’s the key so well done there that’s extremely hard to do.
That’s a bigger win than just starting completely online, it gives you a better footing you have a trust with those people already, and most of them were probably using Facebook or something similar.
Kyle: Which is one of the other reasons why we have suggested Facebook for today because there is always going to be an additional friction if you say to them you need to download this app and then join here.
If you can say it’s a Facebook group most people you know or your customers and clients will already have Facebook, so it’s a bit easier.
Harms: When they are in the group the big category is let’s deliver them some fantastic content, that’s the first thing to consider.
But what does that mean?
Kyle: This is a big question that I’ve been going over in my head.
I think it means delivering free lessons, but this is something we can discuss and this is going to depend on the people who are doing this. I think that is the best way to give away real value as long as we have these steps in place to make an offer.
I think that’s just such a massive hook.
If you can say okay once a day or once every two days or however often you can come, I’m going to come onto Facebook live and I’m going to stream free lessons for the people in my group.
I just think that’s such a powerful hook and a way to get people in.
The question a lot of people are thinking right now is like well no, my plan was to charge. If I give away stuff for free how am I going to do that?
What I’m talking about now is providing the most basic live experience you can.
Let’s say you normally do hour-long yoga sessions.
What if you did a 25-minute live session every couple of days, so you’re giving away a stripped-down version, which is still complete.
It’s still a good yoga workout, but it’s more aimed at beginners; you are not necessarily giving the same amount of feedback you would in a paid lesson.
It’s less structured than if you were taking people through 30 days of yoga, for example, which is something you could sell as a product.
You are providing value without necessarily devaluing your paid products. In fact, you’re using these free lessons to show people you know what you’re doing that you have expertise, that you are worth them investing their time and money.
Harms: If we look at the current situation it also shows that you’re standing strong, standing tall, you’re providing a service, even at a cost of being free at a certain level of service and it’s free to your community, whilst this is all going on.
The appreciation that will bring from your tribe towards you as the value adder or the content producer during this time, they’re going to love you for it.
It is just human nature.
It could be a maths lesson and they’re going to love you for that.
Think about reputation during this time as well and how you can reinforce that with your off-line audience and a new online audience as well.
Kyle: The other thing is you’re stuck at home and if you are bulking at the idea of giving away an hour’s worth of free content we have a lot of extra time at the moment, especially if you had booked in classes previously and now you don’t.
For you to set up a camera and deliver this content for an hour is relatively small.
I think that stuff you just said is absolutely on the money. It’s about you being like a lighthouse in the storm, you are there, you’re standing strong.
You’re providing this kind of service to the community.
From a moral point of view, that’s a great thing to do.
You can even think of this in a more cynical way which is, if you were to start to actively offer these services to like NHS workers who need to stress relief, etcetera.
That’s the kind of thing that would get picked up by newspapers, it would get picked up by bloggers, it would get spread around a lot more.
By helping other people you are creating something that’s newsworthy.
Something that people want to support so I think cynical is the wrong word for it, I think by helping people in this time where people do need help, there’s going to be a lot of appreciation and that’s going to help you grow and tell more people and build your business off the back of it.
Harms: And that’s okay.
You’ve just decided to choose as a business owner a different path.
There are going to be a handful of people who might be cynical, we’re not interested in them, we’re interested in the people who we can serve during this time.
The next thing I’m thinking of in my mind is something that we commonly get is, I don’t have any video camera. I haven’t got a hard drive, I heard about this editing tool but it’s £400.
All this sort of stuff people throw at us and we very quickly demystify for them but what’s a good starting point?
We’re assuming that they’re going to provide this value and we are focusing on the fact that somebody has to physically see you do something providing that particular service like yoga like PT.
It could be that you’re an author and you do book readings, you do writing or drawing classes, or painting classes.
Typically they need to see you and feel as if it’s a live experience. The closest thing that we get to live experience is a video so we always encourage video because it’s the next thing from live experience.
Kyle: It used to be five, 10 years ago.
Yes, you would need to go and get a video conferencing suite, you’d need a good camera, you’d need a superfast Internet, you’d need microphones, etcetera. Not really the case anymore.
I can use this supercomputer with a very good camera, decent microphone, it’s fine and I can use it to go live to potentially two billion people on Facebook at any time.
I can live stream to somebody in India right now or somebody in Indonesia and they can watch me using the Facebook live platform.
The barriers to entry for video production have been removed, so when people come to us and ask what microphone to buy, what camera etcetera.
Generally it’s a psychological block.
They’re just not willing to get started and whenever we say you’ve got this high definition camera in your hand.
Harms: They’ve filmed films with or parts of scenes in movies with the latest iPhone or Samsung.
Kyle: The excuses are technical excuses removed.
You’ll have little technical glitches like at the beginning of this, we weren’t sure if you could hear us because our streaming software has been a bit weird at the moment, it’s fine.
The thing about live video is it makes it more authentic.
We are not highly polished.
It’s not like a corporate video where everything is edited and everything is clean and tidy.
It’s more authentic, true and honest and as long as you as an expert are able to get across your expertise, the camera and the microphone are secondary.
Harms: If they were to buy a few things are there any things that we recommend?
Kyle: Depending on how you’re doing it so right now we’re using web cams, which is one way to stream. It’s a bit more stable.
We’re mainly using it so that we can also show you screens so you can use a computer and webcam, or you can use a telephone.
If you’re using the telephone you already have a camera that’s fine, you don’t need to worry about that. You might need to buy a small tripod so that you can get your camera into a nice position. They are about £10-£20 on Amazon.
A full-length tripod one that can stand up to six-foot will be useful if you’re doing a wide view.
If you are doing yoga as an example and you need the whole of your body to be visible and the camera a bit further back from you, you’ll probably need something like that.
If you just have your phone on the table and you’re talking straight to the camera, then you can buy half-length ones. Again £15, £20 and as long as it can hold a phone that’s kind of all you need.
The thing you might want to invest in is a microphone.
The only reason for this is while the camera on an iPhone or Samsung or whatever you have is really good, the microphones tend not to be.
The microphone is good enough for you to have a call but as soon as you back away from your phone because you have a tripod set up and you’re doing yoga six-foot away, the microphone is going to pick up all the noise in the room.
You can buy shotgun mics.
You can buy really small one from shure they keep releasing new ones but I think it’s about £70 or so.
Harms: That one is quite expensive and in terms of microphones you’ve got a shotgun mic which attaches. Shure works and it has a nice app which can focus the sound. So for audio devices microphones they’re not cheap.
The typical advice we give is start first, do maybe a guide, two guides. If you feel like this is spot-on everything Kyle and Harms are telling us is great, let me up my production level.
The microphone should be the first thing, not the video microphone first.
I use something like this as it’s on my desk.
But apart from that audio first as it’s important, because the video can be slow but if the sound is not alright, there is something about it that just doesn’t appeal to an audience.
Kyle: Don’t feel you need to buy this stuff right now.
Just start and upgrade later if you really need to and start with the microphone. Then, if you do need to upgrade.
If you are doing more lessons like this, or classes like this where you can sit down, then you can use your laptop if you want.
Again, use a phone or your laptop doesn’t really matter, if you are using the laptop we both have a different webcam, we’re not using our Macintoshes webcam.
You don’t need to spend hundreds on these and your existing stuff is probably fine to start with.
People get hung up on the technical stuff whereas you don’t really need to.
We have such good technology already that we can produce video of solid quality immediately.
Harms: What I would say is if there is one video tip I would give you is have your camera positioned quite well and quite naturally.
If you’re doing yoga or whatever it is make sure there’s a nice frame setup, you may need someone to help you with that.
Or put an object there, frame it up and then you come around and get rid of the object and don’t do this please. You need to be comfortable but also make it comfortable for the viewer.
Don’t spend the cash to start with.
Start simple, low-tech even the low-tech stuff is really, really good. Allow reinvestment so when we go into tomorrow’s episode we will talk about an offer.
You may want to take a percentage of those profits or income and reinvest into better production.
That’s the sensible way to do business, not chuck loads of cash to start with, and that’s our opinion anyway.
You may say I’ve got loads of cash sitting there this is something I’ve always wanted to do, Harms and Kyle you’ve encouraged me. I’ve thought about the setup I know how to do; I’m going to invest as I’m going to do this properly from the get-go.
If that’s your scenario great crack on.
We’re not going to stop you from buying tech.
Number one is to set up a Facebook group.
Number two is add the link to that group to the resource list that you are now distributing and also let people know you’ve got a free group, you are opening it up to do X, Y and Z.
Kyle: All the distribution methods we talked about hit them up.
Harms: Also shoot a join the tribe video, a very short one like Kyle gave an example and then boost it.
The final thing is run some daily videos, lives straight from the group in terms of whatever it is you do. For example, yoga classes that are 25 minute, half an hour, 40-minute yoga classes.
That is it in a nutshell.
Kyle: None of these things should take that long so we’re giving you a pathway through, there are so many ways you can do this to launch an online business.
We just want to give everybody out there who’s in this situation one pathway through this, with a few simple steps that anyone can follow and that we know will work.
But yes, there’s a million different ways to do this, we’re just not interested in them because it’s too much.
Harms: Just try this method first.
If it doesn’t work for your particular thing that’s going on,
Kyle: My answer would be, try something else.
But the problem is if you are experimenting in six different directions at the same time, you don’t know which of those is the one working for you.
Harms: Everything we’ve spoken about so far can be done very quickly.
Kyle: We have been talking to people who run events, people who run classes, we’ve been talking in particular about yoga teachers, fitness teachers just as it’s an easy example and lots of us go to these classes.
But the techniques and tools we have been discussing apply to anybody who gets a bunch of people in the room, provides the service and gets paid for that business.
We’ve been talking about during the current lockdown. It’s hard obviously to do this, you can’t get a group of people into a room to pay you for your services.
We’ve been talking about how we make this transition from the off-line world of an event into the online world.
Some businesses are already set up for this and they’re doing really well right now because they have the infrastructure to go online and to run their business online.
Other people have been hit by this all of a sudden.
All the revenue or profit has dried up.
Specifically we’ve been talking about creating an ultimate guide, an ultimate resource list for people who are interested in what you teach.
You become the host of the party, you become the person who is controlling the conversation and helping the people out there to continue learning yoga, to continue learning pottery whatever it is.
By giving away your expertise, by giving away your value.
We’re going to be talking about how we start to generate revenue from the work we’ve been doing,
Harms: Because we’ve got two choices here.
One is that if you can sustain your business in regards to what we discussed previously, and you don’t have to get paid for it.
You may say, actually I can spend the next two, maybe three guides without that revenue coming in just completely serving the online community and continue to put that content up for free.
That’s great, it’s amazing, but for the people that do need the payment or do need to start generating revenue, there is no judgement here.
Just like Kyle said there are bills to pay, food shopping.
The reason we get into business is part of the passion and the enjoyment with what we do, so we generate revenue. For example, a business owner who has pursued maybe a couple of businesses in the past and they haven’t been successful.
That is not an easy process.
Many business owners are probably like, actually, there’s no way I’m going to be putting all of this effort in if there’s not going to be a return because I’ve got bills to pay.
If you are at that road where you say actually I’m happy to do it for free for now, but this would be quite interesting to know how I can monetise it in the future.
If you are in the place where I need revenue right now then absolutely continue reading this guide, it does benefit both sides.
Kyle: This is always going to be a balancing act.
We’re using a marketing framework or business framework called BATON which we’ve alluded to a few times over the guide.
That is, business, audience, tribe, offer and network, this is where we lay the foundations.
What is the value we’re providing the world?
Audience is how we get that value out into the world, tribe is how we start to bring people into our orbit, how we get people to join our group.
Now we’re talking about offer, talking about generating revenue from our tribe from the audience.
There’s always going to be this balancing act.
If you spend more time here building up your audience and building up your tribe and less time selling, less time in your offer section you’re going to have more people to talk to.
You are going to have a much larger group of people when it does come to a time when you want to generate revenue.
However, if you jump to revenue earlier it’s harder to build up the goodwill in this audience in the tribe, but you do need to get paid, so it’s going to be a balancing act.
Do you give away stuff and ask people to pay you later?
Or do you ask for payment now, which is going to limit the number of people you can talk to at any one time.
Harms: Network is a cool one.
It’s where we typically scale and we do more once we approve the concept and we will cover this.
Here is stuff that we can share with you because the network always depends on what your situation is.
Kyle: It requires you to have something that’s working, so you need to have business, audience, tribe, offer lined up and working.
There’s no point scaling up based on a business model that doesn’t work.
Harms: We’ve got five different ways in which you can generate and I put the title respectfully from the audience because this is respectful because we are going through coronavirus, people are locked down and in isolation.
We just had potentially 25% of the GDP and economy wiped out, job losses, people applying for universal credit, all sorts of stuff that people may have not done before. It could be the first time and they’re uncomfortable with it.
So when we sell in this environment and our business makes money in this environment we need to do it in a respectful way.
Because we don’t want to be seen to be taking advantage but we have to find the balancing act of somebody feeling like we’re taking advantage, and there are always going to be those people who think that.
But just let them think that and also do it completely for free when we know we’ve got bills to pay.
We need to find something in between.
Kyle: There is also the fact that businesses need to keep working so that we don’t have this massive recession.
We need people to get paid so people like yourselves, people running small businesses, I think self-employed businesses are 25% so a large chunk.
Going forward, we need these businesses to be in operation as otherwise it will get worse.
Harms: If you’re a sole trader, I think the thing that people often miss is an individual may hire two people.
An individual may provide a service to a business which is critical so that business can function and then that flow of money which flows through the system.
Once the money stops flowing to certain businesses and individuals, then this is why things start to fall apart.
I think employees don’t appreciate it massively.
Certainly 10 years ago when I was working in employment, I didn’t appreciate it.
I didn’t realise how intricate the flow of money is and if you start to create these dams in the process it causes havoc and chaos.
Kyle: When you are asking people to pay you yes, to feed yourself, but also so you can feed employees, so you can keep that money flowing into the system so that other people are getting paid as well.
It’s not just you money grabbing, if you do have a mental block about this I understand that, I get that totally and there are people out in the world right now who think that anyone charging anything is morally heinous.
But the problem is if we think about that then our economy will not bounce back and it’s going to get much worse over the next few years, even after the virus.
Harms: Because not all businesses fall into the category of the government help scheme.
If your business is structured in a certain way, if it’s a start-up and you don’t have a years’ worth of accounts or whatever the criteria is, it’s evolving all the time but not everybody applies.
Not everybody would also understand your business and people still don’t understand what an online business is and how you can generate revenue from it.
Hopefully we will demystify that.
Let’s dive into five different strategies and in regards to the easiest way to do it is simply sell something online.
The easiest thing to do for your particular niche that we’ve been discussing is to sell a class or a course, or a series online.
That’s simple.
We spoke about how they’re already getting free information, classes, and live videos from you. If this is already free, then what are they supposed to pay for?
Kyle: The free lessons that we’re providing in the tribe, we suggest that you build this Facebook group to get as many people into it as possible using your ultimate resource list.
Then once a day or once every couple of days you provide a free version of your product, you hop on Facebook live using a webcam or using the telephone or whatever it is, and provide a yoga class or business coaching or whatever it is you do, you do that for free into a group.
The problem Harms brought up is well if you’re doing this for free why is anyone ever going to pay you for it?
That’s what we’re going to be talking about.
We’ve used the free value, the free lesson to get as many people to us as possible.
Now we want to see if we can generate revenue from that. The first thing you can do is let’s say you’ve got one hundred people who are now attending your free lessons.
First thing you could do is change it from free to paid.
You’re going to get a drop off if you are currently servicing one hundred people.
Maybe only 10 of them are going to be willing to pay for it, it depends on how valuable your service is. It depends on how much you price that class as well.
Now this is going to be one of the simplest options.
It’s also the most likely to annoy people. If you bought people under one pretence, I’m going to be doing free lessons every single day and suddenly you’re like it’s one pound or £10 or £20, some people are going to be annoyed.
You have to be very clear about the messaging here.
Harms: Don’t say it’s free forever, that’s the key and this is marketing just be careful of what you promise.
It is messaging here, so you are using free lessons and free content to get people to but you are saying, at some point I’m going to be charging for these.
Maybe even asking the community how valuable is this for you guys, it takes my time to do it every day. Would you be comfortable paying a £2 a lesson.
You could do a survey and say how much you would be willing to pay for these live classes and then you could have options – £1, £3, £5, £8, £10, £15.
Kyle: When you make your previously free content paid you need to have something in place to replace a free content.
Let’s say you’re making your live sessions paid. There will still be people in your group and attracted to you who don’t want to pay anything.
You need to make sure they still have something so what we would suggest is you’re going to make the live sessions paid, so if they want to see you and ask questions or they have the additional accountability of being live with you on screen.
If there was that then they need to pay a few pounds, but then you make that live stream available for free as a recorded video let’s say a few days later or a guide later.
You’re still giving similar free content to the people who don’t want anything, but they just get it a bit later, that’s one way to do it.
Harms: Think of this like in regards to access when new people come in they get the recordings for free and as they mature, start to love you, like you and realise that this is great stuff, they can then experience live interaction with you for a paid service.
That can be whatever it is and that depends on what the niche is as well and what you can charge and how powerful your brand is, all of those are variable factors.
Kyle: it is going to be a matter of balance.
How many people do you want to give free material and how many people do you want to be paying for your material?
Again that’s going to be how much you charge for it and what additional value there is in a live session.
If there is interaction then that’s worth a lot more people to be in the live session and actually willing to pay.
Harms: It could be something like this and this is a made-up ratio but it could be 10% of this entire audience or tribe actually pay, and 90% continue to enjoy the free content.
People sign up for gym memberships who go once or they don’t turn up again, so there’s going to be that percentage of people as well.
Kyle: You don’t need that many people in the group for it to pay you and we’re going to talk about different ways.
But I’m going to use a thousand people in your group as a benchmark.
That is just charging.
That is just saying, okay, my live sessions I’ve been doing for free I’m now going to charge this is the cost, and you experiment with different costs.
You ask the community.
You say how much would you be willing to pay?
You make them part of that process and you explain to them why you’re doing it and why it’s still beneficial for them to do live sessions with you.
Harms: Number two is you can essentially rather than go direct to paid and have this level of access going on.
You can maintain one group, but what you say to the group is, are you willing to donate whatever you want and give them the open option to donate whatever they want.
They can essentially donate and say I want to support what you’re doing.
There are lots of new words coming, one is donate, one is support and patron.
For example, Kyle is a pottery, masterclass teacher. He is creating this piece of pottery live and demonstrating it, so what we could then do is say, okay Kyle, I love what you do, you’re providing value to me every day and I appreciate you’ve got bills to pay.
I will donate to you.
This is like an online version of say if somebody is busking, you’re listening to their music, or they’re doing a magic trick on the streets and this stuff is awesome and you donate something to them for that piece of work, art creation that they’ve just provided into the world.
It is an online version of that now the donations are pretty cool because you can set what you like, or you can give them the option.
It can be a one-off donation or it could be a monthly recurring donation as well.
Some apps can facilitate this.
Kyle: It depends on what platform you are using.
If you’re on Facebook, there are ways to set up Facebook supporters and for YouTube, it’s YouTube tips.
Each of these social media platforms tends to have a built-in way for people to donate to you. If you’re on twitch it would be through subscriptions, Facebook it will be the supporters and YouTube tips.
We don’t use this at the moment but what we do is we can tell you about these things as an option. So each of the platforms will have their own way for you to gather donations.
There are also third-party platforms like Patreon which allows you again to take from donations.
Harms: Within each level you can add an additional perk.
That’s what Patreon is very good at.
If you get to level one you get to chat to me, if you get to level two I’ll send you a piece of merchandise every year. If you get to level three I’ll come to your house and give you a high five. There are levels to benefit and perk you’re going to give depending on how much they donate.
The simplest way is just to keep it flat so you can donate whatever you want, but the benefits are, because we’re just starting out the perks you’re going to get are standard.
Say for example, if me and Kyle put a price on our slack group, we would say this is the price. Pay what you want, but regardless of what you pay the only perk is we will answer your questions and have in-depth discussions and you get a like-minded community within the slack group.
Kyle: You used the example of busking earlier but there are already lots of yoga groups in London who are on a donation basis. They will say the yoga class is free if you can’t afford to pay up fine, we still want to be bringing this service to you, we want to help your mental and physical health.
However we do take donations and the suggested donation is £5, £7.
The idea of a suggested donation is extremely powerful.
I used to do big charity board game events where people would come and we ran them for the mental health charity and it was free to come. Bring your own food and drinks but then I would stand up, give a speech and then send around a bucket basically and a card reader and say, the suggested donation is £5.
The compliance rate was huge, and most people will pay exactly that £5.
Whereas if I just sent the bucket and I used to do this before suggesting a price the average donation will be about one pound, but as soon as you say this is what everybody else’s donating.
This is what we suggest you donate everybody is like okay. It is still optional but you are anchoring, you’re giving that price point which people will tend to adhere to.
If you are taking donations, yes, you can say it’s free if you can’t afford to pay for it, not a problem. If you can afford, then the suggested donation is and you give a price.
Harms: The only thing you’re probably thinking is, doesn’t donation sound very charity based?
I would say to swap out the wording, patreon doesn’t use donations, they are supporters.
I’m keen on supporters because I am supporting your art, your work, your industry and your output. I’m supporting that.
Kyle: Tips sound like something extra and donation has legal and tax ramifications as well. Donation is treated under the tax law so yes, if it is for a service, then you might want to call it support or pay what you want is another term.
You’re still paying but you allow them to set the price.
Harms: Also the word tips for example and it’s not to be disrespectful but and another business who is not may be in the restaurant industry, we’ve got to think what does that word typically associate with, it associates with restaurants, bars and you’re tipping for service.
If you’re sitting in between and you’re like I need to make money, but I don’t want to take advantage in this situation and how can I help in addition?
You could also let your tribe know that during the coronavirus time 50% of your supporters’ fees, your tips or your donations are going to go to a charity and then you can select what that charity is.
That’s a nice way to be in between that if that’s where you’re coming from in terms of a place.
Kyle: That’s also if you are feeling uncomfortable with growing and charging and becoming big online and making money from this online.
If 50% of that or 70% or whatever percentage is going to a charity of your choice, then it helps you morally to grow and to do.
Harms: The more supporters you get, the more charitable you can be.
Kyle: Previously we talked about taking your free sessions and converting them into paid sessions.
The other thing you can do is you can add in additional sessions on top of your free session.
You have your free session let’s say at midday, every day you do that you work with people, you deliver whatever value it is you as an expert have.
Then at 1 PM you have a second session which is paid and it’s only for people who are paying or donating, it’s an additional session.
This means more work for you, but it’s a nice way to continue to provide free value to the people who want free value and have a secondary paid element on top.
Again if you’re stuck at home doing two hours’ worth is not going to be that much but it depends on your personal situation of course.
Harms: Think of it as a beginners class which is free for everybody and then there’s an advanced class afterwards which anybody paying for can also attend, which may happen in a separate group.
To do that practically you have a beginners group and you may have an advance group but keeping it simple let’s say there’s a beginners group and it’s free, and then there’s an advance group that is paid.
Kyle: That is one way to do it.
You have the beginners class for everybody and then we have intermediate or advanced, that will depend entirely on what your niche is.
If you’re doing high intensity training and you do an hour and then you have a second class that is an hour most people won’t be able to do a second class.
It’s going to depend entirely on what it is you are providing.
It could be you do the basic version where it’s you broadcasting you delivering content, and then the second session is more of an interactive session, where people get to ask you questions specific to whatever problems they are having.
They’re paying for the access at that point.
Another method is to have a structured course which is paid.
You have open sessions every day where you do general content again depending on what your expertise is.
But then you also have the paid sessions which are more structured, so it might be a seven-day course in how to build your yoga practice or 30 days how to build a business online if you are a business consultant.
It would be a specific structured program that maybe you start once a guide or once a month and you guide through a set of students.
Again you have the general free lessons where it could be just a half an hour workout, then you have the paid structured 30-day program, a weight loss program.
Where you’re working through with a group paid.
Harms: This could be for anything even if you’re a chef and you do live cooking classes you could have a beginners cooking 101, constantly running every day for free and then the advance people come join you whenever twice a guide for an advance cooking session.
Because they are not beginners and they’re paying they’re only going to join you in the advanced group.
It’s all about promoting your followers, your tribe, your customers from free into paying into a different access level altogether.
Kyle: It requires more work on your part because you are doing something in addition to the free work, whether or not you have the time for that up to you, but that’s a nice structure, a nice way to separate the free and paid levels.
There is one thing before we move on to the fourth I just wanted to throw in a quick note that for the first three we talked about, so paying for sessions, donations for sessions and then there are additional classes or additional sessions.
For all of these you could charge one offs, so £3 or £5 for a session. You could charge one off, one at a time.
Or for all three of these you can make them recurring so it can be you pay £10 per month and you have access to all of the live sessions, or you donate £10 a month or £5 a month and you have access.
If you put them on the recurring donation there’s a lot of benefits here, but that allows them as one of your followers, viewers to access all of your content for a relatively low price.
Let’s say it’s £5 you get to go to every single advanced session five days a guide, that is 20 advanced sessions £5 a month is nothing.
Also when somebody has started to subscribe, subscriptions tend to go on much longer and it’s far easier to build up a sustainable revenue base.
Whereas if you are each and every day saying make sure you pay for your session it’s just a lot of headache on your side.
Whereas if you get people on the low-cost subscription and then they get automatic access to all of your stuff every single day, then it’s a lot easier to build up a recurring, and you have to worry less about this revenue source.
For all three pricing models we’ve been talking about so far if you can, make it a subscription and make them recurring.
Harms: Also the tools and techniques in regards to patreon, tips supporters club they allow that as part of their tool.
Kyle: Yes that’s built-in because it’s a more sensible model as well.
Think about a group of people who are paying you every single month to continue to do the work that you do.
That’s where we want to get to and you can use relative pricing here.
You might say, okay, one session is £5, but if you sign up for a month, a monthly subscription is £10 a month but you get access to 20 sessions.
Suddenly people are thinking one session is £5 but now I have 20 sessions for £10, that’s a better deal and people will go for that.
There is no additional cost for you necessarily to provide for more people as you’re doing it online, you’re not getting them into a room.
If you get more subscribers that’s better.
Harms: That way you know you’ve got your business locked in and you can start taking it to another level in terms of education.
You know you’re going to get more customers, more viewers and then you can give them more, knowing that this is a sustainable income coming in.
Number four Kyle is quite an obvious one, but people often don’t use it.
I know people in my community that are accessing this now.
One is for yes for the revenue stream also because they’ve got the skill set in order to help other people within the industry and that is very much consulting, mentoring, coaching, one-on-one like live video like this.
For example, if Kyle was coaching me and I said, Kyle I want one-on-one service about online business, digital marketing. I need an hour of consultancy just to understand what you guys are talking about on the BBO show.
I’ll ask Kyle for his fee and typically we would charge a client £250 if we’re talking about an agency.
£250 to spend an hour with us and we say that is the fee.
Great, I’ll pay that fee and then Kyle and I will join each other on a video call like this and I’d talk about my online business and Kyle would say you need to do this.
We’re accessing the coaching, mentoring and each of these have their own nuance.
You will know within your industry or niche what a coach is, what a mentor is, what a one-to-one service means.
What a consultancy service means maybe they need somebody to do some technical work, maybe a technical provider and that’s the kind of thing that they’re paying for.
Kyle: It fits really easily into what we’ve been doing, you’ve been positioning yourself as an expert in your particular industry and as an expert that opens up the doors to one-on-one consultations, mentoring, coaching.
Again these are all slightly different and it will depend on your niche and your experience too.
The main challenge people have with this is people will sell classes, people buy books, courses whatever it is, but they won’t necessarily think to advertise the fact that they also do mentoring, coaching and one on one.
Normally a lot of people fall into this role because somebody comes to them and says, you know a lot about online business. Or hey, you know a lot about pottery or whatever it is I want to learn from you.
We’re suggesting instead of waiting for people to come to you if you set up a website or page, or just a PDF where you say I also provide these services, consultations, mentoring, etcetera.
You have a list of your packages and your pricing and you give people a way to contact you about the services.
If you are already sitting on top of a big community, a tribe of people who know you’re an expert in this field it makes sense just to have a resource where they can learn about how they access you one-on-one as a mentor or coach.
Harms: Coaches are needed.
Mentors are needed.
Think about the amount people going through a career change, emotional change, time management changes.
If you were a coach normally and you would see your clients face-to-face or they’d come to your office and you’d coach them, this is a really good time to switch online.
You can charge less; you can charge the same.
If you’re a yoga instructor you may even open up a new avenue like Kyle has mentioned where you do a one-on-one session.
Think about your day in terms of the start is the free access to beginners then have your advanced class and then you have your four slots, so in the advanced session you are saying, guys I’ve got my five slots now with my coaching clients.
If you’re interested in this head over to this link and you can book in that time with me.
At the top level you maybe have four slots for one-to-one yoga classes, pottery classes and coaches as well.
The amount of people who will be going through an emotional challenge or just not understanding they could have been in a career for 10 years or 15 years, 20 years and suddenly the industry has closed down and they’re like, I need to shift.
This is an opportunity to shift industry and career and that’s where they need a coach to help guide them.
Kyle: It’s a time of transition so if you are an expert in your field maybe there’s something you can do to people through whatever that transition is.
Harms: I like it because sometimes people don’t realise that actually somebody would pay for one-on-one service and why not?
I’ve done it on multiple occasions.
Harms: Number five the final one
Kyle: This is more of a bonus.
If this all works and the ultimate resource list is popular and starts spreading.
If the tribe, our Facebook group starts to fill up with people, all of a sudden we’re going to be in front of a lot of individuals who are interested in learning.
They’re interested in developing the skill we teach, so you have lots of interest and lots of traffic.
One additional business model that does open up to you is affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is the easiest way to talk about this on Amazon.
Kyle: Going back to the yoga mat back in my ultimate yoga resource list I have recommended three different yoga mats for different types of yogis, people who are learning yoga.
I can make the links in the ultimate resource guide special Amazon links which means when someone clicks on it and then buys that yoga mat, I will also be paid.
The customer will pay Amazon let’s say £10 for the yoga mat and Amazon will send me money because I’ve sent that customer to them in the first place.
I did a quick bit of research on the percentage of health products, which includes yoga mats is 7%. So let’s say I recommend a yoga mat that is £20, somebody clicks on that link in my ultimate guide and they buy that yoga mat for £20. Amazon is going to send me £1.40 as an affiliate fee.
That’s not much by itself, but let’s say 1,000 people buy that mat because they’ve seen my ultimate resource guide.
That is now £1,400 so it can add up, it takes a bit of time but this is the bonus revenue source you can add on to any online business.
Whenever you have attention, whenever you have people who are interested in your expertise, what it is you have to say, you can always add in these affiliate links. You do need to be clear about that.
If you are going to do this you should add it to your ultimate list or if you post them in your Facebook group you should say these are affiliate links and I will get paid a small amount for referring these products.
Sometimes they’re legally required depending on the platform that’s also just the right thing to do if you’re telling people I’m going to get paid if you buy these things, I think that’s fair.
Harms: The way people phrase it is it’s not going to cost you more by buying through this link
Kyle: But it supports me and the work we are doing, and these are the things I actually recommend. We looked at some of the reviews of yoga mats and there was a list of 10 yoga mats all Amazon affiliate links.
There was no commentary, it was just the whole purpose of the page was to get you to go to that page, choose a yoga mat, click the link and then the website owner gets paid a small amount by Amazon.
There was no value there, we are making sure we make genuine recommendations. And yes, if we get paid £1.40 when someone goes to Amazon that’s fine as long as we are upfront about it.
Harms: This model works for any company not just Amazon.
Kyle: There is also something called indirect qualifying purchases.
If somebody clicks on the link on my yoga mat, they go to Amazon to buy the yoga mat but they also fill their basket with a bunch of other things.
Some of those items I will also be paid a small percentage on, I will be paid 1.5% of those items.
Let’s say they go on a shopping spree and they add 50 items. You’ll potentially be rewarded for that because you have sent them to Amazon, you have sent them and they’ve gone on a shopping spree.
Amazon rewards you with a 1.5%, indirect affiliate fee, it will depend, not on all products.
Harms: If you’re wondering when I go onto a blog why does every blog have a top 10 list that sends me to Amazon.
This is why, because to help support their blog and to create these lists and can continue to review these products, we have to support them somehow.
The way they do that is through affiliate systems and programs.
You don’t get charged any more than that, but they help compile a list of things for you, so they’re doing a lot of the work for
Kyle: you. They should have used their expertise to put together this list, some websites don’t; they just grab stuff from Amazon and write a bit of blurb.
But that’s not what we recommend you do when you create the ultimate resource list, it is genuinely putting your expertise and your value add into this, into what you’re creating.
If somebody clicks on your yoga mat and goes to Amazon doesn’t necessarily buy it they don’t even add it to their cart, but later they go back and they add it to the cart then you will still make money.
Harms: In simple terms, they are tracking the movement that you are making through the Internet and where you made that movement from.
That’s a benefit of cookies and there’s pros and cons for it as well.
At time of producing this blog, we were both conscious of not defaulting to pitching a course on – how to sell on Amazon and cash in on the eCommerce gold rush. Benefiting from the revenue could be generated during a time when most businesses were facing forced shutdowns. Instead we shifted the focus on helping businesses owners understand the fundamental principles of taking their business online and presenting one clear pathway that always works in building an audience quickly.
Now it’s easy to share with you lot’s of different tools and tactics. But these tools and tactics come with a learning curve, software costs, specialist knowledge that needs to be hired and more blocks to getting your business online. To skip this and get results quicker and at low cost (you can of course come back to those tools once you prove a concept) we have shown you how to take control of the conversation by presenting valuable resources to your community. Through the use of a super list. We have shown you how to create this list, how to distribute this list, begin to build an online community from this list and then turn that online community into a tribe by hosting them in your new valuable group.
The final focus has been on converting this group of people into paying customers. Being conscious of how a pandemic can change people’s worlds, we have shown you 5 different ways in which you can respectfully sell your product/service to your new tribe.
Whether or not circumstances such as COVID-19/Coronavirus re-appear in the future, you will now have the confidence to pull out of your box of tricks, this strategy. Remember by fundamentally controlling the conversation and presenting valuable information to your tribe, you are doing your community a great service and often as a result will financially benefit.
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