THINK ON IT by Pavlina Aladjova

THINK ON IT Think Tank Member Magazine edition 1 November 2017

Think Tank Member Magazine edition 1 November 2017

SUCCESS IS A JOURNEY NOT A DESTINATION

Think Tank Member Magazine edition 1 November 2017

FROM THE DESK OF THE JONESES Dear Think Tankers, Congratulations on taking one of the greatest steps toward success, and for some away from failure. As you may know many small business owners, despite the talent, despite the passion, despite the drive, still fail. Now unlike them, you have committed to your success, you have committed to the journey, and to your goals, no matter how big, hairy and audacious they may be. For those of you who do not know us, the truth is, it doesn’t matter, because we are just like you, we are just a few steps ahead in the game of business. We are parents, business owners, husband and wife, best friends, muse, inspiration, frustration, and the unbeatable team that is the Jones Family. Truth is, it’s an extended Family, and that’s our secret sauce, we have always surrounded ourselves with the A Team, awesome staff, awesome business partners, amazing friends. Sometimes it’s difficult to hire the best, to pay the most, to go without to bring the talent. Now as your business grows, we cannot stress enough, hire talent, nurture talent, and surround yourself with people who are smarter than you at their genius. But you need to be challenged, you need to be held accountable, you need to have a fast track to the right answer. Hence the Think Tank. We want to impact 1000 Small Business Owners around Australia. The goals are big, but they are imminent. Why? Because, like Will Smith, do not get on the treadmill next to us because we will either beat you or die there on the Treadmill. That’s one of the key components of success. Are you willing to outwork your competition? Sometimes you don’t have to be the smartest, the quickest, the strongest, you just have to be the one that displays true grit. When things don’t go your way you show up again and again, and for the most part, you enjoy it, it’s exciting, it’s fun and it’s a challenge. It’s not the destination, it’s the journey, and the people on that journey with you, so pick them wisely. What determines your success is “What pain do you want to sustain?” So I ask you, “How are you willing to suffer?” Because you have to choose something. You can’t have a pain-free life. It can’t all be roses and unicorns. Choose how you are willing to suffer. Because that’s the hard question that matters. Pleasure is an easy question. And pretty much all of us have the same answer. The more interesting question is the pain. What is the pain that you want to sustain? Because that answer will actually get you somewhere. It’s the question that can change your life. It’s what makes me me and you you. It’s what defines us and separates us and ultimately brings us together. So what’s it going to be? Enjoy Edition 1 of the Think Tank Magazine, exclusive to you, our amazing members. Together we can change the world. Love The Joneses Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page 8 CREATING AN IRRESISTIBLE OFFER THAT SELLS AND BRINGS IN MORE CLIENTS

page 33 FACEBOOK ADS 101: A step-by-step guide

page 66 THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO DOMINATING GOOGLE ADWORDS

page 104 SCALE YOUR BUSINESS BY 350% IN A YEAR: 5 INSANELY EASY STEPS And How I Made Money On My Marketing Before I had to Pay a Cent. Read this simple 3 step guide on how I did it, and how you can too.

page 128 SALES FOR BUSINESS OWNERS: What you need to know about your sales mindset and becoming an effective salesperson.

Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

CREATING AN IRRESISTIBLE OFFER THAT SELLS AND BRINGS IN MORE CLIENTS THE MINDSET OF SALES You’re familiar with the word “offer”, yes? Business coaches, marketing blogs, even us; we use the word “offers” all the time because it is one of the most important components of your business model. However, some of you are struggling with it. You have what you think are the best offers in the world, yet you are:

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Not getting clients Losing money on each offer Not seeing any substantial ROI

You’re not alone - struggles and problems happen to the best of us. We started our RBT line of gyms having to sleep in it as we couldn’t pay the lease, Steve Jobs had a ton of failed product launches under his belt, Richard Branson has more failures than successes in his career! For service businesses like you and me, the importance of having a great offer is much, much higher than a product-based business. There are so many competitors popping up every single day and the only thing that sets you apart is…. An offer that brings in money and clients. In this guide, we’re going to help you overcome that struggle and come up with an offer that:

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Generates leads almost automatically Generates recurring revenue for your business

The importance of having a great offer for your service business Put yourself in the perspective of your target customer (which is something that you should do all the time). You have a choice of roughly 10-15 businesses in your niche who are offering the same services. What is your factor in making a choice? Logically, you would choose to work with a business based on two factors:

Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

CREATING AN IRRESISTIBLE OFFER THAT SELLS AND BRINGS IN MORE CLIENTS

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The reputation of the business The cost of working with them

However, most business owners don’t realise that the reputation or cost of their services don’t really matter if you have a good offer. An example of a great offer is the picture below.

What do we mean by that? If you give you target audience an offer that is almost criminal to turn down, they are more than willing to work with you. With this, you achieve two things:

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You reduce the risks and doubts of your target audience. When a lead engages with you, this means that he or she is comfortable enough to work along with you. Overcoming this obstacle is a major step towards getting more clients and irresistible offers allow you to do just that.

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You put yourself in an authoritative position. Instead of you going to the client, the client comes to you which puts you in a position of power. You now have the upper hand in negotiations but of course, you have to make sure that you are constantly delivering value throughout the engagement. Good offers also allow you to identify good leads and bad leads which we’ll cover on later in this guide.

THE #1 MISTAKE THAT SERVICE BUSINESS OWNERS DO THAT KILLS THEIR ROI Here are two examples of offers for service businesses: A $2499 per month retainer for a business consulting coach A $49 3 day trial that guides business owners with their marketing problems Which one are you more likely to convert on? Obviously, you’d go for the 2nd choice as it has more value for your money. The keyword here is value. Here’s an example of a valuable offer that is not a high-ticket product.

Yes, we preach that your business model should be competing on value not price, but unless you’re Apple or a super well-known business, high-ticket offers are going to lose you money. No sane person is going to spend 4 figures on a business that they know nothing about and that’s the number 1 mistake that service businesses owner do because they don’t feel that you are offering enough value. There’s also another side to this story. Another major mistake that people do is to take it to the extreme and offer too much value. We’ve seen some business owners offer 20-30 hours of consulting per week for free just to attract clients. It may be a great move morals and marketing wise, but you’re essentially losing money by offering so much value without anything in return. You could potentially kill your business before it even has a chance to grow. 10

Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

CREATING AN IRRESISTIBLE OFFER THAT SELLS AND BRINGS IN MORE CLIENTS

THE 3 THINGS YOU MUST DO BEFORE YOU COME UP WITH AN OFFER Going in with an offer immediately may work out, but it’s best to lay the foundations first before going in the market. The 3 basic things that you need to have are:

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A sustainable business model A unique value proposition (UVP) A unique selling proposition (USP) A SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS MODEL

This advice resonates strongly with the earlier advice of not giving too much value at the start. You want your offers to align with your business model so that your business is sustainable. A sustainable business model has four common characteristics: 11

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A growing recurring revenue A good profit margin Costs are kept down as low as possible Average lifetime value per customer is high

Since we are running service-based businesses, the bulk of our income will be generated through our clients. Many business owners think that to increase profits, they have to get more clients. While that’s true at the beginning of your business, you are going to realise quickly that getting new clients are expensive and the ones who are making you money are your existing clients. We reference this image all the time because it’s so important to understand the average lifetime value of a customer. 80% of your income will come from 20% of your existing clients, so the best way to increase profits is to increase the lifetime value of your current clients. THE TOP 20% OF YOUR CLIENTS GENERATE 80% OF YOUR PROFIT

The best way to do that is through a sales funnel which is basically a logical series of offers to upsell to your current clients.

Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

CREATING AN IRRESISTIBLE OFFER THAT SELLS AND BRINGS IN MORE CLIENTS

A unique value proposition (UVP) Your UVP is your businessâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; vision. Think of your UVP as your business statement or strategy. Your UVP should be the idea that defines your goals, your identity, and basically any decision that you will do in the future. For us, our UVP is simple: help our clients to build successful businesses. Your UVP could be very different from us but remember, it has to be a vision that you are willing to hustle for. For example, if you are running a gym business like RBT, your UVP could be to change your clientâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life for the better through workouts. If you are running a motivational speaking business, your UVP could be to motivate your clients to push harder in their lives. Your UVP is directly correlated to your business identity; if you want to be regarded as an authority in your niche, push offers that do just that- your offers must be aligned with your UVP. A unique selling proposition (USP) Your USP is what sets you apart from the hundreds of competitors in your niche. What sets you apart from Bob who runs the same business consulting agency like 13

yours? What sets you apart from Lisa who is running a yoga gym like yours? What makes you so unique that your clients want to come to you? If you don’t have one developing a USP is simple: think of the most powerful benefit that you can give to your clients. So, if you’re running a gym like RBT, your USP could be that you can guarantee fast and effective results to your clients; it’s that simple. If you struggle to come up with a USP, no worries. Follow this step-by-step flow to identify a USP for your business.

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Research your target audience and identify their pain points that can be solved by your business. Identify the pain points and separate it into two categories: a) pain points that are not solved by your competitors (a gap in the market) and b) pain points that can be solved BETTER by you (a disruption in the market). Craft several USPs in different forms; it could be through words or visuals - make it memorable. Gather feedback from your clients or leads about your sample USPs. The USP that receives the most positive feedback and is aligned with your UVP is the one that you should go with.

The two pictures are a great example of effective USPs:

Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

CREATING AN IRRESISTIBLE OFFER THAT SELLS AND BRINGS IN MORE CLIENTS

Even if you are not the best (yet) in your niche, a strong USP is always going to differentiate you from your competitors. This means that you have the ability to compete against the top dogs, so make good use of that. Your USP should always be:

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A benefit to your target audience. Nobody cares about how great or how long are you in business, they just care about what your business can bring of value to them. Resonate and appeal to your target audience. If you are targeting middle-aged men, then your USP should make them feel like they are connected to your business emotionally. This way, you earn more brand loyalty and trust which is always a good thing for your business. Short and simple. Keep your USP short and easy to understand. If you are using words to convey your USP, don’t go longer than 1-2 sentences. If you are using visuals, your target audience should understand what your business is about in a few seconds.

Once you are done with that, you’re ready to craft fantastic offers.

HOW TO CRAFT OFFERS THAT SELL: A STEP-BY-STEP FLOW STEP 1 - IDENTIFY YOUR CORE OFFER Your core offer is the main offer that your business revolves around. In most cases, your core offer is the one that brings in the most money to the business. Why do you need to identify your core offer? The core offer will be integral to your sales funnel (hence, the name core). You’re going to leverage parts of the core offer to:

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Bring in qualified leads Upsell your existing clients Increase profits (or whatever your KPI is) to the business

Characteristics of a core offer It needs to have a high level of commitment from your clients. For a core offer to work, you have to make sure that your client is going to put in 100% of their focus on your core offer; you need them to be able to expend their resources (time, money, etc.) Many business owners struggle with this part as they like they’re robbing their clients of their money and time - it’s not! As a business owner, your clients spend money on you for you to improve aspects of their life; remember, you are changing their lives for the better, so do that and don’t worry it. When you worry too much about taking too much away from your clients, you will come across two problems: a) you charge too little which hurts the sustainability of your business due to lower revenue and b) you lower your authority as a business owner. At our RBT gyms, we’re not worried about charging higher rates because we value ourselves and we are confident that we can pass on even more value to our clients. Lowering your rates is going to pass a signal to your clients that you are not confident in yourself, which will cause serious client retention issues. Below is an example of a core offer with different tiers:

Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

CREATING AN IRRESISTIBLE OFFER THAT SELLS AND BRINGS IN MORE CLIENTS

It has to be valuable to your client If you are running a service business, your core offer would probably cost your clients 4-figures a month - that’s a lot of money. How do you retain clients for 6-12 months, even years, when they’re spending so much every month? By giving them something of value and making sure their money is well-spent. The easiest way to do that is by actually spending time with your clients and making them feel that you care. We have personal training time for our RBT clients, Travis spends time to talk to business owners personally, many businesses have departments only for customer service and success. If you aren’t doing these things, do it in the next 30 days:

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Call your existing clients and have a quick 10-15 minute chat with them. Ask them how things are going and know their problems. Your goal is to genuinely build rapport and help them with their problems. E-mail your clients or better yet, send a handwritten note to your clients and thank them for their business. Let them know how much you appreciate working with them. Meet 2-3 clients every month over a coffee break. You might think that this is a waste of time but remember the 20/80 principle; 20% of your clients makes up 80% of your profits - go and spend time to build your relationship with the 20% 17

This picture below is an example of the texts that TJ sends to his leads which really helps a lot with conversions:

You may have realised something; to have a long-term client, all you need to do is to be a friend and not just a business entity. Since people like you and me are running service businesses, we are dealing with real people with real emotions so building relationships is something that you must do every time. Aside from building rapport, your core offer also has to make sense in terms of money spent. You have to give your clients these two things in your offer if you want to get more happy clients:

ď&#x192;ź

An offer that can achieve a good ROI. The ROI will differ based on your businessâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; KPI but the client has to see something in return for their money spent. If you are running a consulting business, clients want to see an offer that can bring them results in the next 6-12 months. Gym business - clients want to see that they can lose 1.5 lbs per week. Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

CREATING AN IRRESISTIBLE OFFER THAT SELLS AND BRINGS IN MORE CLIENTS

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Your offer’s ROI does not have to be amazing, it only needs to justify the money that your clients are spending on you. High in value with perks and benefits. Your core offer needs to have perks and benefits. As we’ve mentioned earlier, we offer personal training services as well as personalised diet for in addition to their regular training program for our RBT clients, Spotify offers offline streaming and exclusive releases to new albums; things like these make your clients love you and they are going to come back month after month but remember, don’t stretch yourself too thin.

It has to be valuable to your business Keeping your clients happy is great, but you also have to factor the impact of your core offers on your business. For a core offer to work it has to:

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BRING IN THE MOST MONEY TO THE BUSINESS. You are going to make the most revenue out of your core offers; your most valuable clients will also engage with your core offers - keep in mind. If your main KPI is not money, then you can replace the KPI with a goal that is important to your business. BE IN THE “MIDDLE” OF THE FUNNEL. What we mean by this is that your core offer should not be at the top of your sales funnel. The reasoning for this is that you can upsell your existing clients to bigger offers which increases the average lifetime value of your clients. Putting your core offer at the top of your funnel also plateaus your growth and you will have issues scaling your business past a certain point.

STEP 2 - COME UP WITH SEVERAL INTRODUCTORY OFFERS We endorse irresistible offers all the time because its effective and its much, much cheaper at generating leads for your business. What do we mean by irresistible offers? Literally, it is an offer that your clients cannot turn down because it’s that good; think of it as a bait that hooks your target audience to try out your services. Here’s an example of an irresistible offer by Paddy Power.

Coming up with irresistible offers are a struggle for most business owners because they find out that:

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It’s not attractive enough which does not bring in a good amount of leads

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It’s too generous to the point where business owners are actually losing money for each new lead It’s too similar to the core offer which, again, leads to issues in sustaining the business

We’ve come up with a simple way to come up with an irresistible offer. 1) Break down your core offer into major parts or pieces Think of this step as taking a small bite off a cookie. You want to offer your target audience a part of that cookie but not the whole cookie. You can break down your core offer into major parts which makes crafting an irresistible offer easier. Let’s say that you are a business consultant and your core offer includes coaching businesses with digital marketing. You can break it down into major parts like:

Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

CREATING AN IRRESISTIBLE OFFER THAT SELLS AND BRINGS IN MORE CLIENTS

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Lead generation training and strategies Social media management and marketing training Copywriting training and techniques

Simply put, break down your core offer into major components or areas of focus. 2) Break your components down even more Next, you have to break down your major parts in smaller pieces. Going with the business consulting example earlier, you could have something like this going for you:

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LEAD GENERATION TRAINING AND STRATEGIES Online sales funnels, Facebook and Google ads, content marketing for lead gen SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGEMENT AND MARKETING TRAINING Getting engagement from social media audiences, getting PR through social media, how to use social media for brand exposure COPYWRITING TRAINING AND TECHNIQUES Writing copies for cold traffic and warm traffic, writing ad copies for Google and Facebook, writing powerful e-mails that convert

Breaking down your major components achieves two things:

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It allows you to have more irresistible offers to test the market with.

Not everything that you do with your business is going to be a hit and that includes your offers too. Having many small components allows you to really test the market with each offer to find the one that works best. At the same time, you’re also not limited to only one offer which can limit the scaling of your business.

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It allows you to target more people and get more leads

You may find out that your offers attract different audiences e.g a business owner who is struggling with social media and another one who needs help with copywriting are going to react differently to your offers. Having a variety of offers allow you to target your audience who may not be aware of your services. Of course, if a topic is way beyond your abilities, it is better to lose some leads than to under-perform. 3) Choose the offers that might work best for you and your target audience If you’ve done market research, then this step should be a piece of cake. If not - no worries. 21

Now that you have a list of components to craft irresistible offers, it’s time to find out which one will work the best. Obviously, we cannot be 100% sure that an offer will work great, but there are some things that you can do to boost your confidence.

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Get feedback from your existing clients or leads

If you have existing clients already, ask them what’s the best part about your services. You’ll get different answers but you can easily find out the common theme that keeps your clients happy. You should also ask what are their biggest problems as you will be able to figure out the major concerns in your niche. If you are running a gym business, for example, your existing clients may say that finding a gym that has bodyweight training equipment is hard - you’ve got your potential irresistible offer.

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Get insights from your target audience

Now, some of you may not have any clients or leads yet and that’s understandable. A great way to gather information without any clients is to hang out where your target audiences hang out. Some examples of these include:

Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

CREATING AN IRRESISTIBLE OFFER THAT SELLS AND BRINGS IN MORE CLIENTS

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Local Facebook groups (a very under-utilised resource) Online forums or discussion boards that are based on your niche Meet-ups and local networking events Online communities such as Reddit

Remember, if all things fail, Google is your best friend. Here are some search queries for you to Google for if you get stuck:

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how to (insert a popular topic in your niche) (a topic of your niche) problems need help with (a topic of your niche)

These search queries should you give some insights on what your target audience really needs which can give you some help on deciding which offer will work best. 4) Sort your list of irresistible offers Once you’ve got a list of offers that you think are great, you’ll want to sort and separate them into different categories. We recommend separating it into these categories:

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SORT BY TYPE OF AUDIENCE: You’ll want to separate your offers based on the area that you targeting. If you are running a gym business for instance, you’ll want to separate offers that target people who need help with social media, people who need help with copywriting, and people who need help with PPC campaigns.

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SORT BY VALUE: You can also decide to sort your offers based on which one has the highest potential or ROI. If offer A can bring in a higher ROI, then you’ll want to give that offer more focus. SORT BY EXPERTISE: Obviously, you’ll be experienced in every aspect of your business, but if you are very good in a certain area, you can give that offer more focus.

Just in case you want a visual look on how to craft irresistible offers, hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s an infographic by us to help you with the process:

Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

CREATING AN IRRESISTIBLE OFFER THAT SELLS AND BRINGS IN MORE CLIENTS

STEP 3 - CRAFT YOUR IRRESISTIBLE OFFERS When you’re done with your list of potential offers, we’ll move on to the exciting part: actually crafting the offers. This section is broken down into 3 parts

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Channels to promote your offers The medium of your offers Creating irresistible offers

1) Channels to promote your offers There are several channels for you to promote your offers on

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Online/digital marketing (Facebook, Google, etc.) Traditional media (TV, print ads, etc.) Direct marketing (meetups, sales letters, networking, etc.)

Most of you already know that digital marketing is the way to go in 2017 as it is cheaper and brings in more results than every other marketing channel.

Digital marketing is powerful that even giant brands (Adidas, Pepsi, etc.) are actually cutting down on traditional marketing to pump more money into online advertising. For us, all of our advice and training are specifically for online marketing as it works very well for service businesses like yours. There are plenty of online platforms out there for you to choose such as:

 Google and Facebook (the two big ones)  Instagram  Snapchat  Musical.ly  Pinterest

A word of advice for business owners: don’t do the mistake of trying to advertise on every single online platform out there. It’s best to focus on 1-2 at a time; you’re not missing out by skipping some social media platforms, it’s just a more efficient use of your time. The key here is to find out where your target audience lurks around. The answer to that? Google and Facebook. Almost everyone is using Google and Facebook, so these two platforms should ALWAYS be the place to promote your offers. These two giants also offer a very advanced ad platform which means that you’ll able to target your offers easily with better efficiency, something that is not always present in other platforms. Choosing the medium of your offers

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CREATING AN IRRESISTIBLE OFFER THAT SELLS AND BRINGS IN MORE CLIENTS

This is where you can get creative; many business owners fall into the trap of just doing one thing that they are comfortable - don’t! If you only used to text and image ads previously, do more video ads. If you’ve done video ads already, try podcasts. For your reference, here are some types of mediums for you to market your offers:

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Text and image ads Video ads Podcasts or audio files Online contests and events

STEP 4 - SET UP YOUR LANDING PAGES AND AD COPIES AND PROMOTE IT We’ve covered this topic extensively in our previous blog posts (which you can check out on our website) We’ll give you a brief run through of what to do in your landing pages and ad copies Setting up landing pages for your offers If you don’t have coding experience or a web developer working with you, you can use drag-and-drop landing page builders like ClickFunnels and Unbounce to help you design landing pages easily. While you are to design your landing pages, the best one usually have:

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A clear description of what your offer is and how it benefits your target audience

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A clear description of who you are A clear description of how to take action on your offer

a) A clear description of what your offer is to your target audience and its benefits Your landing page has to tell your target audience what you are trying to solve for them clearly. A rule of thumb that we have here is that if a visitor does not know what your offer is after 5 seconds, then you’ll have to rework your landing page.

Your landing needs to have a compelling and benefits-driven headline. It has to:

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Tell your visitors how your offer solves their problems Engage your visitors emotionally with a headline that relates to their problems

Here’s a good example by Unbounce.

Next, your landing page needs to explain what your offer does in terms of benefits to your visitors. It has to:

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Explicitly state the problems that your offer will solve for your target audience e.g get more leads in less the time, lose more weight without a diet that is too restrictive, etc. Explain why your solution is better than your competitors Explain why your solution is unique and different than everyone else in the industry

b) A clear description of who you are Your visitors also has to know who are you are; they need to know how credible you are and if they can really trust your offer. An easy way to do this is to include a section in your landing page that basically is a 28

Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

CREATING AN IRRESISTIBLE OFFER THAT SELLS AND BRINGS IN MORE CLIENTS

short summary of your business. Think of it as an “About us” section. You can also add testimonials from previous clients or media mentions to further prove your credibility.

c) A clear description of how to take action on your offer The most important part of your landing page is the section where your visitors take action. Two tips to remember:

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Your call-to-action button or section should be very visible; make it contrasting in colour or larger in size Your call-to-action has to be easy to take action on. Do not lead your visitors through a complicated process all you need is an e-mail, name, and contact number.

A good thing to do is to summarise your offer at the CTA section to remind your visitors of your offer’s benefits. Crafting ad copies for your offers

There can be types of mediums for your offers but we’ll focus on Facebook ads for now as it is the easiest and most effective form of advertising for service businesses. a) Make an effective Facebook ad copy Crafting ad copies for Facebook is no different than one for a landing page, you just have to keep it shorter. The basics of copywriting applies to Facebook ads:

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Make it compelling and attractive to your target audience Give them a solution to their problems Give them an incentive to take action

We like to use the AIDA principle as the basis for our Facebook copies;

The principle behind it is simple. ATTENTION - You want to call out your audience or get them to notice you; the easiest way to do that is by literally calling them out in your ads e.g “Victoria small business owners”. INTEREST - Once you’ve got their attention, you need to drum up their interest in your offers. How do you cause interest? By including your target audience’s pain points in your ads. Everyone wants to know how to solve their pain points which is why it causes so much interest in your ads. DESIRE - You have to drive up the desire to take action in your target audience. The

Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

CREATING AN IRRESISTIBLE OFFER THAT SELLS AND BRINGS IN MORE CLIENTS

best way to do this is by offering a promise or solution to their pain points. For example, if you’re running a marketing business, you can drive up interest by including phrases like “Do you want get 2x more clients in half the time?” ACTION - Finally you’d want to include a call-to-action for your target audience. It can be as simple as a “Click here to learn more” prompt; just make sure that there is something for your readers to take action on be it a video, link, or sign-up form. Here are some examples of actual ads that we run on Facebook which got us a good number of leads:

b) Promoting your offers on Facebook The basics of promoting your offers on social media is simple; but getting it right is the real challenges. We assume that you already have knowledge on how to utilise Facebook ads to promote your offers but we’ll leave a summary for you as reference (these tips also work for other ad platforms):

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MAKE SURE THAT YOUR TARGETING IS CORRECT. You have to make sure that you are targeting the right local audience for your ads; having the right audience targeting reduces your cost per leads as well as increasing the likelihood of them converting on your offers.

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MAKE SURE THAT YOU START ON A SMALL BUDGET FIRST. Don’t go and spend up all of your ad spend in one day - keep it low and increase it slowly. A rule of thumb in increasing your ad spend is to increase it by 20-30% each time, no more than that. SPLIT TEST YOUR ADS Remember the part about having multiple irresistible offers earlier? You should also multiple ads to test which one works best. You should never stick to one ad for a long time as the effectiveness of it goes down over time. SET UP RETARGETING ADS The average conversion rate of a landing page is at 15-20%. That means 1 out 5 page visitors leave without taking action; you’ll need to re-engage their interest by using retargeting ads. Acquisio has a great guide on setting up retargeting ads over here.

CLOSING Now that you’ve got a kickass way to generate irresistible offers for your business, it’s time for you to go out there and try it out on your own. Remember, make your offers:

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Valuable to your business and your clients Easy to take action Align with your USP and UVP

Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

FACEBOOK ADS 101: A step-by-step guide Are you spending money on Facebook ads in 2017? Do you have a great ROI on your Facebook ads? Are you making money off your Facebook ads? If the answer to all the questions above is no, then you’re in luck. In this post today, we’ll cover Facebook ads from head to toe; you’ll finish this article with enough knowledge to teach your employees (and clients) about FB advertising. At the end of this post, we have a special offer for business owners like you to add $100,000 in revenue to your business in 90 days. Want to know more? Read on. Ready? Before we start ... At the end of this post, we’re offering business owners like YOU a chance to add $100,000 in revenue to YOUR business in 90 days. How? Well, you’ll have to stick around till the end of this step-by-step guide or scroll down to the bottom of this page and skip the post (but give it some love, yeah?) Let’s go.

INTRODUCTION TO FACEBOOK ADS Facebook has its own ad platform like Google AdWords. If you scroll through your Facebook feed nowadays, you’ll probably come across posts like these:

All of these sponsored posts are ads in disguise (although it’s common knowledge now). Facebook’s greatest advantage is the ability to display your ads to massive amounts of people who are interested in what you are offering. Here’s why. The ads that were shown above in the picture are not random; I did a Google search for SEO tools a while before. Facebook was able to detect and with the help of retargeting, I was shown ads that were related to SEO tools. Facebook’s ad targeting is extremely impressive (and creepy). I’m not the only one who is looking for SEO tools online, there could be millions of other people who are doing the same thing. This means that your ads are going to generate a bigger ROI and profits for you IF and ONLY IF, You do it the right way.

Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

FACEBOOK ADS 101: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE

Why should I use Facebook ads? What’s so great about it? Great question. We get asked so many times about Facebook ads. People don’t really know what is so good about it. They hear about success stories from other businesses but they don’t understand the true power of Facebook’s ad platform. We’ll tell you why. 1) Massive audience size and potential reach

The Earth has roughly 7.5 billion people living on it as of 2017. Facebook, on the other hand has approximately 2 billion monthly users. Do you see that? More than 1/4th of the people in the world are using Facebook. Even if only 0.001% of Facebook users are in your target audience, your ads will still be shown to at least 2,000,000 (million!) people. Due to the massive audience reach that Facebook provides, advertisers are spending over $10 billion every year on Facebook ads. If that’s not good enough to convince you, don’t worry.

2) People spend a lot of time on Facebook (and social media)

According to studies and research, your ads will be exposed to your target audience for at least an hour every day. Why is this important? One of the stages in a sales funnel is brand awareness; exposing your target audience to your products or services for at least 30 hours a month is going to skyrocket your brand awareness. At the same time, repeated exposure of your ads is going to increase social proof and reciprocity. Simply put, people who see your ads constantly are going to relate the products or services that you are offering to your brand.

An example of this is the Thermos. The name of the product itself is a vacuum flask but thanks to the brandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s effective ads, Thermos is the universal name for all kinds of vacuum flasks. You can do the same too for your brand! 3) Super-effective laser targeting

Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

FACEBOOK ADS 101: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE

Wanna see how much information can you get from Facebook ads?

That’s right. You have access to users’ hobbies, spending habits, lifestyle... even their income! You literally have every single detail of your target audience. This means that you can craft your ads to satisfy your audience’s wants and needs as well as having the ability to target a very specific group of people. You can also utilise the information given to you in crafting offers and determining your prices; an advantage that no other ad platform in the world provides. 4) It is cheaper than Google ads Advertisers usually pay $2-$3 per click. Compare that to Google’s ad platform where you cost per clicks of more than $10 is common then you’ll find out that Facebook is much more cheaper in generating traffic and revenue. Of course, there may be outliers where you’ll spend quite a bit on Facebook ads but that is very, very rare and happens only in the most competitive of industries as well as being a result of poorly targeted ads. 38

Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

FACEBOOK ADS 101: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE

What’s the difference between Facebook and Google ads, then? Actually deliver what you sell. Many businesses do the same mistake of blatantly OVER-PROMISING what they can offer. Here’s an example:

Let’s sum this up with a hypothetical situation. This is how Google ads work: Person A searches for the keyword “razor guard” on Google. Your ad is shown to person A. Person A clicks on it and makes a purchase. In this case, your Google ad has satisfied or fulfilled an individual’s demand. That’s fine but there’s one problem: There are only 1,000 searches for “razor guard” monthly. You know that your product is going to make your target audience’s life better; they will love it. But, how are you going to reach out to your target audience if there are only 1,000 people searching for your product every month? Here’s why that happens. When you enter the market with your product, your target audience may not know the products or services that you are offering because the demand is just not there. How are you going to generate demand? Facebook is the answer. 39

You know that your target audience are 20-30 year old males who are interested in grooming and fashion. So, you set your ads up on Facebook, target your audience, and you find out that your ads are going to be shown to a whopping 3,000,000 people worldwide; people who’s interests are related to your product. Instead of having 10,000 people searching for your product every month, it is now exposed to over 3 million people every day - a 300x increase. This is what is meant by demand generation. You can create a demand for an unknown product or service through Facebook. You are targeting people based on their actual interests, lifestyles, and habits, not keywords.

HOW DO I GET STARTED WITH FACEBOOK ADS? Before you get on with the ads, you should know these things first.

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Your target audience Your offer Your ad spend budget Your goals

While Facebook’s ad platform is great, it is not a magical tool. You have to know the basics to get the best results. If you don’t know what your target audience is, do some research. Don’t know what to offer? Read up more on core offers and irresistible offers. Let’s get started with creating your first Facebook ad.

Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

FACEBOOK ADS 101: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE

SETTING UP YOUR CAMPAIGN On your Facebook page, head over to the top right arrow and click on Create Ads or you can head over to this link: https://www.facebook.com/ads/manager

Next, youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll come across a page like this.

Awareness Brand awareness: Use this objective if you would like your target audience to be aware of your products or services. This objective reaches people who are likely to be interested in your brand and pay attention to your ads.

Local awareness: The same as brand awareness but more towards the local scene. Use this objective if you are running local events or activities and you want people to know about it.

Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

FACEBOOK ADS 101: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE

Reach: This objective is designed to show your ads to the maximum number of people as possible among your target audience. Use this objective if you want to advertise your products to as many as people as possible. Consideration Traffic: Use this objective if you want to send traffic or visits to your website. You can also direct visitors to your desktop app or mobile app with this objective. Engagement: This objective helps in achieving engagement with your brand. It could be through page and post likes, comments, claiming offers, or RSVP-ing events; the engagement objective is mean to drive user activity. App installs: Pretty straightforward. This objective is meant to send visitors to your app in Google Play (or the Apple Store). Video views: Instead of the standard text and image ads, you can also promote a video for your brand. Some examples of good video ads are behind-the-scenes videos, tutorial videos, and testimonials. Lead generation: This objective is designed to gather leads for your business. You can collect e-mails, names, and other information through this objective just like a usual lead form. Conversion Conversions: This objective is designed for visitors to take action on your website or app. For instance, you can set up a conversions campaign to get more downloads on your free e-book landing page. Product catalog sales: This objective will advertise your catalog on Facebook in an effort to drive sales on the spot. The photo below is an example of this objective.

Store visits: This objective is designed to bring visitors to your physical store. Restaurants, barbershops, and brick & mortar stores are some of the examples of businesses that would work well with this objective. ----Now that you know what each objective is, it’s time to set-up your ads. You can test the objectives in your campaigns but for today’s post, we will go with the Traffic objective to drive visitors to our website. So, go ahead and click on Traffic and you’ll come across this screen.

We recommend turning on Create Split Test as we’ll be testing 2-3 different ad copies for our campaign. How do split tests work and why? Facebook’s split tests allow you to split your target audience based on the ads that will be shown. If you have 3 different ads, each of them will be shown to unique groups of your audience. For instance, if your target audience consists of Person A, Person B, and Person C, each of them will see different ads of yours.

Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

FACEBOOK ADS 101: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE

Use a campaign name that will allow you to identify the objective of your campaign. If you are going for visits to your website, name the campaign something like “Traffic for (website name)”. You’ll come across this screen. Click on Website and Messenger.

Then, click on Audience in the Variable column.

You can play around with the other two options but based on our experience, split testing with different audiences delivers the best results. Then, click on Create New Audience and define your target audience. Since we have split tests on, try to go with different target audiences to find out which part of your target audience is the most effective in showing your ads. You can also click on Test Another Ad Set to add more target audience. These are 4 simple but extremely effective tips to actually improve your profit margins by 30%.

Then, youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll come across this pop-up box. Everything in here is self-explanatory. As weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve mentioned earlier, having an understanding of your target audience is going to help a lot. Put in the details and try to be as specific as possible.

Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

FACEBOOK ADS 101: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE

What if you don’t have enough details about your target audience? Don’t worry; let us tell you a trick. In the Detailed Targeting column, click on the box and you’ll see suggestions about your target audience. You can type in your niche or industry in the box and Facebook will suggest your target audience. You can also type in interests such as “entrepreneurship”, “male grooming”, and things like that.

For starters, we don’t recommend messing around too much with the default options. We’ll cover the rest in a more detailed guide soon but we’ll leave it for now.

Now, it’s time to set your budget. We recommend starting off with $10 per day for 30 days, so go ahead and put in $300 as your budget. Of course, the budget is variable and you can put in an amount that you are comfortable with. After that, you will come across a page to select how your ads are displayed.

You can choose any one that you like but we recommend choosing the Single Image option. Why? Because that option allows you to create up to 6 different ads with no additional charges. 6 ads are more than enough to determine which one works best. Now it’s time to choose your images. You can either upload it from your own library or choose from a range of free stock photos.

Now, take a very close look at the image size and final detail on the right. Facebook does not like images with a lot of text in it. If your image is 20% text, your ads will be penalised by Facebook. Use this page to check if your image is OK with Facebook’s standards. 48

Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

FACEBOOK ADS 101: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE

Once you are done with that, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s time to move on to the ad copy. Insert your landing pageâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s URL into the Website URL box.

This is where most ads succeed - and fail. The key here is to write a short but powerful headline and description.

You have to include a powerful hook to attract visitors. One of the easiest ways to do that is by including your lead magnet and a benefit in the title. 50

Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

FACEBOOK ADS 101: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE

If your lead magnet is a checklist, then write something like “200% more traffic in 4 weeks - Download the FREE checklist now!”. You don’t have to stick to that template which is why split testing is so important. You have 6 different ads to test; make the best out of it. In general, the headline should be attractive and value-driven while the description should be short yet effective in conveying your offer. If you can’t come up with a great headline and description, just keep it simple, short, and clear. We’ll include examples of great Facebook ads later on. Don’t forget to scroll through how your ads look like on desktop, mobile and other ad placements. You don’t want the keywords in your headlines and descriptions to be cut off. Congratulations! You’ve set up your first Facebook ad but you’re not done yet.

IDENTIFYING KEY METRICS How to measure your ad’s results You have to understand Facebook’s latest ad structure.

In layman terms: Campaign (first tier): This tier is your goal or objective. If the goal of your ads is to increase sales or to get more leads, then it belongs in the campaign group. Ad set (second tier): Think of ad sets as categories or sub-topics. For instance, you can have a set of ads that target Sydney while another set of ads target Melbourne. Ad (third tier): This tier comprises of each and every ad in your campaign. Understanding the ad structure is going to help you be more organised and efficient in measuring your key metrics. Now, to have a look at your adâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s metrics, head over to the Ads Manager page.

You will come across all of the campaigns that you have on your Facebook account.

Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

FACEBOOK ADS 101: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE

Click on any of your campaigns and you will be redirected to the ad sets of that particular campaign. Then, click on any of your ad sets and you will be redirected to each and every ad for that particular ad set. This is where Facebookâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ad structure comes into play and having a good understanding of it is going to help you out.

For each and every tier of the structure, you will have key metrics to help you measure your performance.

Results: This will show you the final results of your campaign. If your campaign was to generate leads, the results would be the total leads generated. If it was to get more clicks on your ad, it would be the total link clicks. Reach: The number of people who have seen your campaign. Cost per result: The amount that you pay per action. This means that if you are generating leads, it would be the cost per lead or cost per click if you are driving clicks to your ad. Amount spent: The total amount of money that youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve spent so far on the campaigns. 53

In the ad sets group, you will see an additional metric. Budget: The daily or lifetime (the total duration of your ad) budget of your ad spend. In the ads group, you will see another important metric. Relevance score: A scale of 1-10 that measures how well your ads perform in the market. A higher relevance score would contribute to lower costs just like Google’s quality score. Ideally, you’d want to have a cost per link click of $2-$3 while your cost per lead or cost per acquisition should be less than 20% of your product or service’s price. That means that if you are trying to sell a $50 product, your cost per acquisition should be less than $10. If it’s anything more than that, scrap the ad and make a better one. ------Eventually, you’re going to have to track conversions that happen outside of Facebook. Thankfully, Facebook has something called pixels that allows you to do just that. Think of pixels as little spies who help you keep track of your conversions; leads, purchases, and sign-ups are just some of the things that Facebook pixels can track. Here’s how to set up Facebook pixels. Click on Ads Manager < Assets < Pixels

Then click on Set Up Pixel. If you don’t see Set Up Pixel, look for Create a Pixel.

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FACEBOOK ADS 101: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE

You should come across this page. If you don’t, no worries; you are still on the right track.

If you are using on of these tools or platforms, click on Use an Integration or Tag Manager.

 Shopify  WooCommerce  Magento  BigCommerce  Google Tag Manager  Segment

You’ll come across this pop-up box. Just click on your option and Facebook will give you a step-by-step guide on integrating Facebook pixels.

If the above platforms are not used by you, click on the 2nd option (Copy and Paste the Code). You will have to manually copy and paste your pixel into the <head></head> tag or header of your websiteâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s template. Thankfully, Facebook has a guide for every website platform over at this page. Check it out to have a look at how to implement the code in your website.

(This part is technical and might take some time to understand. Get someone knowledgeable to help you if you are struggling with it) Next, you are able to track conversions on your page with event codes. There will be 3 options: basic, recommended, and advanced. If this is your first time, we recommend sticking to basic and recommended first.

Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

FACEBOOK ADS 101: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE

Next, you will come across a list of events.

Search: A conversion is tracked when someone searches for something on your website. View Content: A conversion is tracked when someone visits a content page on your website e.g product description pages, information pages etc. Add to Cart: A conversion is tracked when someone adds an item to your shopping cart. Add to Wishlist: A conversion is tracked when someone adds an item to their wishlist. Initiate Checkout: A conversion is tracked when someone lands on your checkout page or clicks on the checkout button. Add Payment Info: A conversion is tracked when someone adds payment information to your website. Purchase: A conversion is tracked when someone lands on your order confirmation page or clicks on the purchase button. Lead: A conversion is tracked when someone signs up or acts on your lead form. Complete Registration: A conversion is tracked when someone completes a registration on your website (create an account etc.) 57

Custom Event: Can be modified if none of the events are related to your conversion goal. Next, you’re going to have to edit the event code to fit your conversions. Let’s take the Purchase event code as an example.

Copy the code and edit the lines in blue. Change the number in the value: line to your conversion’s value. In this case, my conversion is worth $247.35 so that’s my input without the currency symbol. In the currency: line, change “USD” to “your currency” if the USD is not your default currency. Use this resource to identify your currency’s three letter code. Once you’ve got that done, copy the event code into the relevant pages. For purchases, the easiest way to track conversions is by pasting the event code in your order confirmation or thank you page. The event code should be pasted in between the >script<>/script< tags of your order confirmation page just below the >head<>/head< tag.

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FACEBOOK ADS 101: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE

Once that is done, save your progress and head over to this page to download Facebook’s Pixel Helper. This extension will help you to determine if your pixels are working or not. Once your pixels are implemented properly, you’ll be able to track even more metrics such as your return on advertising spending (ROAS) and others.

How to write ad copies that generate incredible ROI Even the most accurate of targeting on Facebook is useless if you can’t write ad copies that sell. Here’s the truth about Facebook. People go on Facebook to keep up with their friends and read up on the latest news and updates. If you’re going in with a hard-sell mindset like you do in traditional sales in your Facebook ads, you are going to get yourself in trouble. With that being said, there are two key elements of a great ad copy: persuasive copywriting and attractive imagery. You can have three kinds of styles for your ad copy; the short copy, the long copy and the video ad. THE SHORT COPY You should go with a short copy if your product or service’s niche is well-known to your target audience. Great ads have these 3 things:

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Your target audience’s problem

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Your solution

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The value or benefit that you can provide to your target audience

Of course, you don’t have to follow the template exactly like it is. The best ads are the ones that are creative. Anyway, let’s have a look at some of the most effective short copy ads that we’ve seen on Facebook.

Dollar Shave Club hit gold with their ad. Here’s why it worked:

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The ad brought up their target audience’s pain point by telling them to stop getting ripped off by expensive razorblades. The next sentence in which they claim that their razors are among the best in the world solves that problem by offering users a significantly cheaper and better option.

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The ad also minimises their target audience’s risk; there is no monthly commitment needed as well as no membership fees. Being upfront about your terms and fee structure is one of the best ways to reduce your customer’s doubts - Dollar Shave Club did this well.

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The image shows the minor difference between their razors and their competitor’s razors. DSC did a great job at showing customers that their products are just as good as their competitors while being 3x cheaper.



To top it off, the ad has a call-to-action for people who are interested.

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FACEBOOK ADS 101: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE

Digital Marketer did a great job of displaying social proof and authority in their ads. Here’s what you can learn from them.

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Digital Marketer provides value to their target audience by explicitly stating that the information contained in the blog post is exactly how they run their business. When a brand as well-known as Digital Marketer exposes their business model, visitors will naturally be interested in knowing what makes them so successful and sustainable.

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The ad managed to grab their target audience’s attention by mentioning two giant brands in the ad. Starbucks and McDonald’s built up an empire with this business model; that is a powerful hook that utilises social proof to attract people to click on the ad.

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The blurring out of the image is a simple yet effective way to generate more clicks. If Digital Marketer showed everything in the image, their target audience might not even bother to click it since they’ve already got the information that they need from the image.

Another great ad from Digital Marketer. Why is it so effective?

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People want to achieve things quickly. By emphasising the 60 seconds timeline, the ad generated more clicks because who doesn’t want to achieve something in a minute? Remember this, your lead magnet should be quick and simple; you don’t want to bore your visitors at the initial stage of the funnel.



Just like how people want things to be fast, they also want it to be simple. By saying that there are only 5 blanks to be filled, Digital Marketer has successfully presented their lead magnet as a very, very simple task.

Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

FACEBOOK ADS 101: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE

DoorDash goes for the one sentence route. It works because:

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DoorDash knows that there is no reason for them to include fluff and unnecessary words in their ad copy. They know that their target audience wants their food to be delivered to them efficiently, simple as that. By including the words quick, easy, and favorite, DoorDash was able to solve all 3 of their target audience’s pain points in a single sentence.

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The image does well to attract attention. By including photos of food, DoorDash was able to convey it’s business model easily.

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Just like Dollar Shave Club, DoorDash minimised its customer’s risks and doubts by offering a first delivery of $1 with no minimum order. That is a fantastic deal even if you are not a fan of food deliveries. THE LONG COPY

The infamous Tai Lopez ads on Facebook are more of a laughing stock these days but you can’t deny the fact that he does have some copywriting skills up his sleeve (or someone who can write it for him)

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Notice that the ad is positioning the reader as a hero. One of the best ways to turn cold traffic into leads is by making them the star of the show, not your product. Tai Lopez has managed to turn his product from a generic marketing guru book into a tool to help his visitors turn their life around. This can all be done by positioning your target audience as heroes and enabling them to do so by using your product or service.

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Tai Lopez plays the us against the world card here; he sparks fear and anxiety in his readers if they don’t take action with the line “You either join the masses down there”. Remember, no one wants to be just one of the masses - take opportunity of that fear and you will be on your way to writing great ad copies.

Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

FACEBOOK ADS 101: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE

Lastly, here is an ad that we did for our RBT gyms. We generated over six figures in revenue with ad copies like these; here’s why.

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We grabbed our target audience’s attention by literally calling them out. We knew that beating around the bush is going to get us nowhere, so go for the direct call-out if you know your ads are targeted well.

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Instead of the standard limited time offer, we went for a subtle yet effective scarcity angle. By saying that only 15 men will be selected for the program, we managed to persuade our target audience to act on the offer - they definitely do not want to miss out on this opportunity.

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We also stated the benefits of our offer clearly in the copy. Our research was top-notch hence we were able to come up with benefits that resonated with our audience’s pain points.

CLOSING Now that you’ve got everything that you need to know about Facebook advertising, it’s time for you to further boost that knowledge by reading up on how to craft excellent ad copies. Just like we promised at the start, we’re offering business owners like you an amazing opportunity...

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO DOMINATING GOOGLE ADWORDS So, you’ve decided to take on paid advertising as a means of marketing your business. Unfortunately, paid advertising is not as simple as putting in money and seeing your sales skyrocket instantly. Why? Because putting all of your money into something that you don’t have a clue about is a surefire way to burn your budget quickly. That’s why you hear horror stories about paid advertising all the time; it’s because businesses spend their money blindly without knowing what’s going on. We’re going to help you avoid that (or fix that) in this blog post. This is not a fluff guide either; we’ll tell you what Google AdWords is from A-Z as well as including actionable tips and techniques to guarantee that you have maximum ROI from your ad spend.

Before we start... At the end of this post, we’re offering business owners like YOU a chance to add $100,000 in revenue to YOUR business in 90 days. How? Well, you’ll have to stick around till the end of this step-by-step guide or scroll down to the bottom of this page and skip the post (but give it some love, yeah?) Let’s go.

Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO DOMINATING GOOGLE ADWORDS

What are Google Ads? Google Ads is a form of online paid advertising. Customers pay Google to have their ads placed on top of Google’s result pages for relevant keywords. Here’s an example: I Googled the term, “create a website”.

Can you spot the difference between the Google ads and organic search results? If you did, great! Google Ads allow you to be on the top spots of a search term’s results page which is a huge advantage particularly in competitive industries. Now, technologically-savvy people like you may be aware of the ads so you probably won’t click on them which makes you think, “I don’t believe ads are very effective”. Well, you’d be surprised to know that the average ROI for an effective Google Ads campaign is 350% of the total ad spend. That’s right. For every $1 that you spend on a good AdWords campaign will result in a return of $3.50. Are you convinced now about the effectiveness of Google ads?

How does Google AdWords work? The principle behind how AdWords work is very simple and can be broken down into 3 major components.

  

Keywords Pay-per-click (PPC) Quality score

KEYWORDS Keywords are the essence of paid search. What you do in every AdWords campaign is to insert a list of keywords related to your product or service that you’re trying to advertise. For instance, let’s say that you are running a gym business in Sydney. You will most likely target these keywords: australia gym best gym in sydney gyms near me sydney gyms with yoga Now, one thing that you’ll notice is that the keywords are geographically-targeted. This is one of AdWords’ biggest advantages that we’ll cover later in this post.

Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO DOMINATING GOOGLE ADWORDS

Basically, if you run ad campaigns for these list keywords, your sponsored link will end up at the top of the results page. This image will show you exactly what I mean. I googled the phrase “best gym in sydney”

As you can see, the first 3 results of the homepage are all ads hence the exposure that Google offers is very, very powerful and you’d be unwise to not take advantage of it. Clicking on these ads will lead visitors to the landing page of the website. Hence, it is important to make sure that your landing page is actually relevant to your ad copy. For example, don’t advertise about your latest product discounts only to redirect people who click on the ads to your blog which makes absolutely no sense. We’ll cover this topic later on in the article. PAY-PER-CLICK (PPC) Pay-per-click advertising means that you only pay Google when someone clicks on your ad. This means that even if your ads are shown to 100,000 people, it will cost you nothing if no one clicks on it.

This is a fair model for most businesses as if you would have to pay for each time someone sees your ad (also known as impressions), it would cost a lot for virtually no returns. With that being said, some businesses do run campaigns where they pay for impressions. These type of campaigns are usually done to spread brand awareness rather than generating sales, revenue or leads which is what we will be focusing on today. How does PPC work? The PPC model runs like an auction bidding system. For each keyword, you will be competing with other websites based on a maximum cost-per-click (CPC). CPC is the amount of money that you are willing to spend per click on your ads. Just like an auction, the person who is willing to spend the most on a click is the “winner” which in this case translates to being the first result in a search engine results page (SERPS).

Fortunately, you don’t have to guess in determining what the optimal CPC is for a keyword; Google does that for you at no cost.

Think Tank Member Magazine/edition 1 November 2017

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO DOMINATING GOOGLE ADWORDS

Head over to Google’s Keyword Planner and click on “Get search volume and data trends”. After that, enter your keyword (or list of keywords) and click on “Get search volume”. You can fiddle around with the targeting options but we’ll cover that in detail later.

Then, you will come across a page that details your suggested CPC and average monthly searches.

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AVG. MONTHLY SEARCHES How many people are searching for your keyword in a month COMPETITION Number of advertisers that are bidding on this keyword; higher competition = more people bidding on the keyword SUGGESTED BID The amount to bid per click if you want to be in the top spots for the keyword. Do note, however, that this is an estimate and the final figure will vary from time to time.

Do not be fooled by the competition and suggested bid column. A common mistake that people assume when they see high competition and high suggested bids is that it is too competitive and a massive waste of money . Let’s set the record straight. Do you really think that advertisers are foolish enough to spend tons of money in a very competitive keyword? The answer is no. Just like trading, a keyword that is high in competition and value is also a very profitable keyword. Likewise, if a keyword has low competition and low suggested bids, it does not mean that you’ve encountered a golden opportunity. What is the point of spending on keywords that are not competitive if they cannot generate sales or leads for you? Like we’ve mentioned earlier, having the highest bid for a keyword will increase your chances of being on the top spot on the SERPs. Now, why did we say chance instead of a guarantee that you will be number 1 in the rankings? The section below will tell you why.

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QUALITY SCORE Google does not look at CPC as the only factor to rank your ads. These are some of the many factors that Google considers when ranking your ads: 1) Click-through rate 2) Landing page relevancy and copy 3) Relevance of your ad text Now, before we explain what affects your quality score, we need to cover some basics first. How to find out your adsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; quality score? On your Campaigns page, click on Keywords. Then, click on Columns < Modify columns.

Then, scroll down and click on the Attributes column. Follow that up by clicking on the arrow next to the Qual. score column.

Now, you’ll be able to see your quality score in your ad reports.

How is quality score counted? Quality score is rated on a scale of 1 to 10. The higher your rating, the better your ads’ quality score is and the higher the chances of your ad being the first result in SERPs. How is quality score determined? As we’ve mentioned above, quality score is based on click-through rates (CTR), ad relevancy, landing page relevancy and other factors which will be covered some other time. Click-through rates (CTR) Click-through rates is the number of clicks on your ad divided by the total number of impressions (ad views). If your ad is shown to 100 people and 10 of them clicks on it, your click-through rate is 10%. A higher click-through rate will definitely improve your ad’s quality score. Why? Higher CTR’s means that your ad is actually relevant and attractive enough to your target audience. Logically, Google is going to rank an ad that is popular much higher compared to an ad that brings in very few clicks. Later in this post, we will show you how you can increase your click-through rates easily. Landing page copy and ad text relevancy Back in the early days of Google ads, advertisers were notorious for misleading visitors to landing pages that are not even related to the ad copy. For instance, company A set up a campaign targeting keywords in the t-shirt industry. However, their business revolves solely around sunglasses - no t-shirt’s at all! Google came up with the quality score metric to weed out advertisers who purposely mislead visitors to irrelevant landing pages.

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Today, Google’s algorithms are smart enough to determine if the landing page is relevant to the ad copy which prevents cases like these from happening. Just as you’ve expected, landing pages that are relevant are going to have higher quality scores as compared to landing pages that don’t really match the initial ad copy. For example, I searched for “buy new laptop”.

The top results are exclusively made up of sites that are offering new laptops for sale. Hence, there are no “secret” ways to game the algorithm; give people what they want and Google will reward you for that.

Is Google AdWords effective for my business? Yes. Google AdWords is effective for all kinds of businesses. One thing that business owners ask all the time is this: “Will AdWords work for my business?” Of course, it works! Businesses all over the world are generating more than 350% ROI on their AdWords campaigns. So, why can’t you? Now, before you go all out on spending your money, you should understand what Google ads is for. Google ads is all about search intent and giving people what they want. What do you mean by search intent? Basically, your ads are presented to people who are searching for what they want. Google = search engine. No brainer, right? Unfortunately, this is where most businesses fail in their paid advertising campaigns. Google is not for brand awareness; that’s Facebook (which we will cover next week). When someone searches for your keyword, give them what they want! Let’s have an example for the keyword, “best website hosting”.

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I’m going to bet that the top 3 results generate tons of traffic and clicks on their links. Why? Because they give users what they want. Let’s look at an example of an ineffective ad. I searched for the term “how to buy a second hand car”.

The top 2 ads are going to have terrible click-through rates and quality scores. They are only at the top because no one else is bidding for this particular keyword. This is a perfect example of what we’ve mentioned earlier in making sure that bidding in less competitive keywords may not be the best choice as well as why your landing page and ad copy matters. The keyword “how to buy a second hand car” means that the searcher is still in the early stages of the buying process. He or she is trying to get more information on how to buy a proper secondhand car rather than buy one outright. So, it doesn’t make sense for advertisers to promote their products to audiences who are not even in the final stages of the buying process yet; this ad is just a huge waste 77

of money and resources. What makes an effective ad?

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Advertise a service or product that people are searching for online. One of the biggest mistakes that people do on AdWords is by advertising products or services that their target market is unaware of.

Remember Google ads are for supplying demand rather than creating demand. If you have a brand new product that is unique to your target market, SEO and Facebook ads are going to be better in terms of ROI. We’ll teach you how to do keyword research later.

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Laser-target your audience. One thing that sets profitable ads from other ads is that they target users in their niche who are in the final stages of the buying process. For instance, targeting the keyword “best marketing agency in sydney” is a wise choice as this means that visitors are more likely to take action. In this case, people who search for this term are probably looking for marketing agencies to hire. The more accurate and narrow your targeting is, the better your ROI as proven by businesses who have done well in AdWords campaigns.

An example of a profitable keyword.

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Your CPC is less than 10% of your product or service margins. If you are spending more than $10 per click on your ads, you have

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to make sure that what you’re selling is a high ticket offer.

If you spend $10 per click to sell a $20 product, that is going to bring you losses rather than profits. As a rule of thumb, never spend more than 10% of your margins on CPCs. You also have to keep in mind that a click does not guarantee a purchase which is why you have to keep your CPC’s as low as possible.

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Your website and landing page is great. Now, the real task in making sure your ads work great is by having a responsive, functional, and high-converting website.

If your website is terrible, even the best of ads won’t save you. Like we’ve mentioned earlier, a click does not guarantee you a purchase. Read up more on writing great copy and UI/UX optimisation tips to have a higher chance of converting visitors who click your ads into actual paying customers.

How to get over 350% ROI on Google ads Now that we’ve got the basics of Google ads done, let’s move on to the great part; Generating sales, revenue and leads through great ads. In this section, we’ll cover 5 key ingredients in crafting a profitable ad.

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Keyword research Setting up ad campaigns and ad groups Writing great ad copies Measuring key metrics

Let’s go.

KEYWORD RESEARCH How to find and dominate profitable keywords In this section, we’re going to reveal the secrets to finding profitable keywords that will grow your business easily. Let’s get on with it.

STEP 1 Start off by writing down keywords that are relevant to your niche. We’ll use a sample niche for this post; let’s imagine that we are running a business coaching agency in Sydney. Think of a few keywords off the top of your head, for example; business coaching agency business consultant in sydney best business coaches in sydney business coach for small business It doesn’t have to be complete, just think of 3-4 keywords off the top of your head to get things rolling. STEP 2 Head over to Google’s Keyword Planner. Login to your account and go to Tools < Keyword Planner

Click on “Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category”

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Then, you will come across this section.

Your product or service: Enter your list of keywords here. You can separate them by using commas or by hitting enter to make a line break. Your landing page: The page that you want your target audience to go to. Google will generate a list of keyword ideas for you based on the landing page. Your product category: You will have a list of categories to choose from which fits your product or services. Google will collect keyword ideas from this category. You do not have to be super accurate here, just make sure that the general category of your ad is exact. Targeting: Choose the location that you’re targeting, we’re using Australia as an example. Then, click on Get Ideas (we’ll cover the advanced targeting options in a while)

This section should appear on your screen. The top part of the section are keywords that were entered by us. Below that section are keywords that have been generated by Google based on our niche. Now, how do you choose the best keywords to target? You will notice that the keywords that we’ve initially entered have zero stats. This simply means that Google does not have enough data to collect meaningful stats about our keywords. However, do not think that no stats = no searches. Long-tail keywords (we’ll cover this in our upcoming blog posts) are usually not recorded by Google so don’t be so conclusive in deciding whether a keyword is worth it or not. With that being said, the section below is where you’ll find the best keywords. Scroll down the keywords page and you will see (usually 700) other keywords that are related to your niche. What people usually do is to sort by avg. searches per month, but if you want to gather profitable keywords, sorting by suggested bid is the way to go.

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As we’ve mentioned above, higher suggested bids means that advertisers are willing to compete and spend money because the keyword is profitable! Look at the first result. There are only at best 100 searches per month for that keyword but advertisers are bidding as high as $87 for it. Do you think advertisers would throw their money at keywords that are not profitable? However, you have to keep in mind about the keyword relevancy that we’ve talked about earlier. The other keywords are great, but as small business coaches, we are not offering loans or funds to small businesses. So, these keywords are profitable but they are not related to our niche. Let’s scroll down further.

Now weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re starting to have some profitable keywords that are related to our niche. These keywords have good competition and high CPCâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s which means that these keywords are very likely to be profitable. You may have noticed that Google are giving you estimates of the average search traffic rather than an exact number. Let me tell you a trick to obtain accurate values of your estimated search traffic. First of all, click on the arrows next to the keywords that you want.

Then, you will see this section on your right. What you need to do is to set your bid range to the maximum value.

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By doing this, you’ve already gotten a more accurate number of how many clicks to expect per day for your target keywords. Now, click on Review Plan.

See that? You’ve got a more accurate estimate now which also includes the estimated number of clicks per day, cost per day, CTR and your average CPC. One thing many people don’t check is the Ad group ideas tab.

This tab will include groups of keywords that make it easier for you to choose your target keywords. However, some of the groups don’t make much sense so it’s best to review it manually before you add it to your keywords list. Great! You’ve got your keywords sorted out. Let’s move on to the next step.

KEYWORD MATCH TYPES You can set the restrictiveness of your keywords in AdWords. Depending on your goals, you can choose between 4 match types. HOW TO CHANGE KEYWORD MATCH TYPE Go to Campaign < Keywords

Then, select the keywords that you want to adjust and click on Edit < Change match types You will see 3 options: broad match, exact match and phrase match. BROAD MATCH: This match type gives allows to get the most clicks out of all the match types since you are exposed to the widest audience. In broad match, ads will be shown to people who search for any of your words in your keyword. For instance, if you have the keyword “business coach”, your ads will appear when people search for “business tips”, “marketing coach”, ”business consulting”, basically anything that contains the words in your keyword. Broad match keywords will also factor in synonyms; that means your ads will also show in searches such as “marketing consultant” or “marketing help”.

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However, since your reach is so wide, you may also have situations where your ads are shown to people who are not within your target audience. As you might have guessed, clicks on your ads from people who you are not targeting is a waste of money and will deplete your ad spend budget quickly. EXACT MATCH: Exact match is the total opposite of broad match. Your ads will only show a person searches for the exact keyword that you are targeting. So, our ads will only show when some searches for “business coach”. The great thing about this is that your ads will be laser-targeted to individuals who are more likely to convert on your products or services. However, you will be getting way less traffic to your website compared to broad match keywords. Once again, it is a matter of what your goals are in deciding which match type to choose. PHRASE MATCH: Phrase match offers more flexibility than exact match keywords as well as being more restrictive in comparison to broad match keywords. For the keyword “business coach”, our ads will appear when someone searches for phrases like “business coach in sydney”, “best business coach”, or “hire a business coach”. 87

That means that your ads will show when a search that contains your keyword in the same order is done. It doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t matter if there are words in front or behind of your keyword; as long as it is in order, your ads will slow.

SETTING UP AD CAMPAIGNS AND AD GROUPS How to save money and get more clicks Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll start off with a basic campaign to get you accustomed to the targeting options for your ads. First off, go to Campaigns then click on the red +Campaigns button. Then, select Search Network with Display Select.

Next, type in your campaign name and I suggest choosing the all features option.

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Next up, you will come across the Locations tab. In this tab, you have the choice of choosing target region; everything is pretty self-explanatory. You just have to identify your target audienceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s location. In our case, we want to target Sydney residents for our ads.

You can expand the location options to make adjustments to your targeting. The default settings for this is the first option which targets people who are in your location or people who have searched for keywords in your target location. In our case, if we chose the default option our ads would be shown to Sydney residents as well as people outside of Sydney who search for our keywords, e.g “business coach in sydney”. There is no right or wrong choice for this; it all depends on what your niche and goal is. In our case, we only want to target business owners who are in Sydney so we’ll go with the 2nd option.

You will then reach the bid tab. Here, you can decide to choose your bid strategy. If you are a first time user, we strongly recommend choosing Manual CPC as you will have the most control over your budget - especially if you don’t have too much to spend on paid advertising. The default bid is the maximum CPC for your ads. So, in our case we don’t want to spend than $10 per click. Budget is the total amount of money that you are willing to spend a day. So, if one click costs $10 and we have a budget of $100, after 10 clicks the ads will stop showing on Google until the next day.

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Next, you will come across ad extensions. Basically, you can extend your ads with phone numbers, reviews, and other extra info. We recommend you adding extensions to your ads as they have been proven to increase click-through rates and quality scores. You can read more about them by clicking on the “?” button next to each extension.

You can also schedule how long your ads last as well as the times that they are shown to your target audience. End date is simply the date that your ad campaign stops while the ad scheduling section allows you to set when your ad shows. If you have data about your audience, you can tweak it here for the best results but in our case we’ll just leave it as it is.

Now that you’ve got the structure of your ads set up, it’s now time to craft the copy.

Setting up your ads on AdWords

Ad group name: We suggest writing down a name so that you won’t get confused about your ads group. Final URL: This is the URL that you’ll be redirecting your visitors too. It is best to use a landing page that is relevant to the ad copy as your final URL.

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Headline 1 and 2: Each headline has a limit of 30 characters and is separated by a dash as seen in the image above. Make good use of the limits; don’t include unnecessary words. Path: An option that is neglected and often misunderstood by advertisers. The path is the green URL below your headline. The green URL is for display only, your visitors will not be directed to the green URL. Include keywords in your path for help people understand the purpose of your ad. In our case, we used the words “free calls” to convey that we are offering free consultations calls to business owners. Description: The description or body of the ad. You only have 130 characters so use it wisely.

WRITING GREAT AD COPIES How to write ad copies that sell Unlike typical copies, you only have 60 characters (including spaces, hyphens, periods etc.) for your headline and 80 characters for your description. So, you only have 140 characters to sell your product; exactly the same character limit that Twitter has. Here are some tips on how to write a great ad copy: 1) Use a headline with an attractive call-to-action

In the ads above, both of them have clear call to actions. The first ad goes the no-nonsense route; there are literally waiting for you to take action by selling your car on their website. The second ad tries to attract clicks by using the word “free” which is powerful when used properly. When in doubt, ALWAYS include call to actions in your headline. Not only will you increase CTR’s, you are also more likely to attract visitors who are in the final stages of the sales funnel. 2) Include numbers in your headlines if possible

Studies have shown time and time again that including numbers in your ads will increase conversions and traffic. Why? By using numbers, you are able to drill home the advantages of your business. Include phrases such as “Over 239,000 sales” or “Get 30% off” in your headlines; it makes a world of difference. 3) Make your target audience the hero. 94

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What’s great about this WooCommerce ad? They use the word “yours” in their ads. The sweetest word to a person is his or her name; however, since we are not at the stage of having names in ads yet, so “you” is the next best word to include. Make your target audience feel great! Make them feel that your ad is one of the best things to have ever happened in their lives. 4) Include irresistible offers in your ads.

Shopify’s ad has everything a great ad needs; A headline with a call to action, numbers, and more importantly an irresistible offer. Who would turn down a 14-day free trial to one of the world’s biggest e-commerce websites? An irresistible offer is an offer that would be almost criminal for your target audience to down because they are so good. We have a blog post that covers the basics of irresistible offers, check it out over here.

Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the biggest secret to writing great ads? The biggest secret is to test it! Testing is the most important thing to do in crafting a profitable ad. We are giving you tips on how to increase your chances of success but at the end of the day, every ad campaign is unique. The only way to find out if your ads work or not is by setting up 3-4 different ads and split testing them for several days - thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the key to having a profitable ad campaign.

Adding the final touches to your ads

You will be prompted with a box to enter your list of keywords. You can insert your own or include suggested keywords on the right.

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Finally, set your maximum CPC and save your ad group. Congratulations! Your first ad campaign is up!

Tracking key metrics for your ads The default AdWords’ stats are good but you’ll definitely need advanced analytics to really determine if an ad is profitable or not. Remember when we talked about how getting a click does not guarantee a sale? That is why we need to track the most important stat of them all; conversions. Here’s how to do it. Go to Tools < Conversions and click on the red + Conversion button.

You’ll be presented with a host of options. In our case, we’ll be clicking on Website as we’re going to track sales.

Next up, we need to have a name for the tracking code. In this case, we are going to track sales so we’ll go with the name, “Sales”.

Then, we have to tell Google the value of our conversion (sales). Let’s say that our product sells for $50; we’ll choose the currency and key in our value.

What if you are tracking signups which are and have no monetary value? Easy. 98

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Set your currency to no currency and enter your value. Logically, 1 is the best value as only one person signs up each time. This means that for each conversion on your landing page, Google will track that even if there is no monetary value attached to it.

The conversion count is a personal preference. In our case, we want to count the number of visitors who make a purchase as a conversion rather than counting the number of purchases per visitor.

You should also choose the category of your conversions. For us, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sales. Pretty self-explanatory.

Attribution models are tricky to understand but you need to know about them. Simply put, attribution models help you map out your target audienceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s journey before making the conversion.

For example, a visitor may have gone through this search timeline before clicking on your ad and making a conversion: “how to hire a business coach” < “best business coach near me” < “business coach sydney” This is an example of a customer’s timeline before making a conversion. There are 5 attribution models to help you understand your customer’s timeline.

This section is measured in terms of credit. Simply put, the more credit a keyword and its corresponding ad has, the more important and effective it is in getting conversions. Last click: The keyword and corresponding ad that is displayed on the last click is given 100% of the credit. This means that “business coach sydney” gets 100% of the credit for the conversion. First click: The first keyword and corresponding ad is given 100% of the credit. In this case, “how to hire a business coach” gets 100% of the credit. Linear: The credit is distributed evenly among all the keywords. In this case, each keyword is credited 33.33% for the conversion. Time decay: The keyword that is searched closest to the conversion gets the most credit. So, “business coach sydney” will receive the most credit while “how to hire a business coach” gets the least credit. Position based: 40% of the credit is given to both the first and last keyword while the remaining 20% is distributed evenly among the keywords in between. In this case, “how to hire a business coach” and “business coach sydney” will each receive 40% credit while “best business coach near me” gets 20%. Finally, when you are done with that, you will need to paste the code to your landing page.

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If you have a “Thank You” page or something similar after a conversion, choose the first option and paste the code in your page’s <body></body> tag. If you would like to track conversions on a button instead (such as a Buy Now button or a link to another page), choose the second option and follow Google’s guide. Finally, you’ll have to track 2 more metrics to ensure that your ads are profitable. Total number of conversions: The number of people who took action (sales, signups, etc.) on your landing page. Cost per conversion (CPC): Not to be confused with cost per clicks, cost per conversion is the amount you spend to acquire a sale or signup. It is obtained by taking your total ad spend and dividing it by your total number of conversions. Ideally, you would want a 10% conversion rate but anything above 5% is very good. -----In a nutshell, Google AdWords is a great tool to market your business and generate good returns. Just like every other promotional tool out there, the key to success is by testing everything and not putting all your eggs in one basket. Just like we promised at the start, we’re offering business owners like you an amazing opportunity...

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SCALE YOUR BUSINESS BY 350% IN A YEAR: 5 insanely easy steps And How I Made Money On My Marketing Before I had to Pay a Cent. Read this simple 3 step guide on how I did it, and how you can too.

Here’s something that all of us would probably agree with: Scaling and growing a business is incredibly tough You’re always looking for ways to increase profits for your business. Maybe you spend too much of your time thinking about how to grow and scale your company. You want to work less and reduce your overhead costs but don’t know how. HERE’S THE DEAL: There’s a really simple strategy that you can use to scale your business quickly. Personally, this has been the single most effective strategy in scaling all of my businesses... ... a strategy that has been constantly generating six-figure revenues as of today. In this post today, I’m going to lay out the details of my strategy as well as walk you through it step-by-step. At the end of this post, you’re going to know the EXACT steps and techniques that I did to increase my business growth by 350%. Just a quick note before we move on...

I’ve included an exclusive complimentary offer to add $100,000 in revenue for your business within 90 days at the end of this post. Do take some time to check it out. With that being said, let’s get on with the strategy.

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THE THINK TANK PLAN The Think Tank Plan is a strategy that we (the SBPC team) have developed and perfected based on a mixture of our success and failures in previous experiences. By the end of this strategy, you will:

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Be able to manage and scale your business more effectively Increase your business growth, customers and revenue by 5-10x in the coming years Become a leader or authority in your niche

Why Is Scaling Company Growth So Important? Having a well-structured business scaling strategy could literally make or break your company’s success. When we started our RBT gym businesses, we used to have 50% net profits at the beginning of our operations which is absolutely brilliant. But as we started to scale, our profits were actually getting lesser by the day. What we did next was the key in conquering the challenges that came from our business growth. Before we move on, there are 3 things that you need to master before you begin to scale your company. This is an overview of the 3 key masteries to understand before you go on.

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MONEY MASTERY Understanding your cash flow and how to increase it by 10x Having a complete understanding of how your money flows in and out is crucial in running a business, regardless of whether you’re expanding it or not. We hired Simone, our general manager, to help us out with our cash flow management. She helped us with the whys, whens and whats of our spending which led us to have a cash flow that was 10x more than what we originally had. These are the things that you should look at if you want to achieve a great business growth and cashflow: -----GET A GOOD UNDERSTANDING OF YOUR MARGINS You should have your business margins planned out as soon as you can. You can build off your plan from these 3 questions:

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What is my break even point? Where can I reduce my costs? What is my net profit margin?

We’ll explain these points in detail later on in the article. -----Measure key performance indicators (KPIs) that actually matter You must also have an understanding of what KPIs to track for your money. These are a few examples of what I ask myself to give me a better view of my my KPIs:

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How much do my leads cost?

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What is the percentage of the overall wages for my business? What should the percentage of my profits be to sustain my business? What are my total expenses to run the business?

-----Analyse the profitability of the business to plan a solid business growth strategy You should also spend some time to analyse the profitability of your business to make sure that you are not losing money especially in the long run. Here’s some sample KPIs to include in your analysis:

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What is my return on investment? What is my average revenue per customer? What is my customer lifetime value and customer acquisition cost?

-----Figure out your break even points to bring in more revenue A break even point is where the total revenue of your business is equal to your total costs. After the break even point, you’ll start to make money or profits. Knowing the break even points of your business is essential in making sure that you get the operations of your business right especially in determining your pricing or rates. The following graph depicts our break even point and profit curve. After the break even point, you can clearly see that revenue rises substantially faster than the cost which means that profit is also rising rapidly.

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-----Discover the area of your business that brings in 80% of the revenue Some areas of your business contribute as much as 80% of your total revenue. For instance, our $97 a week transformation challenge program for our RBT gyms brings in the bulk of our revenue compared to our other programs. This leads us to the famous 80/20 rule by the famous economist, Pareto. THE TOP 20% OF YOUR CLIENTS GENERATE 80% OF YOUR PROFIT

How? 20% of your customers makes up for 80% of your total revenue - something that is heavily overlooked by business owners everywhere. Simply put, 20% of the people who pay you want to pay you more money. This is the perfect time to analyse your products or services and find out the core offer of your business that drives in the majority of your incoming cash.

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TIME MASTERY Achieve more with efficient time management Understand the productivity of what you do and when you do it to cut down the amount of time spent on work Ask yourself this question: Are you really that busy? The people who make $100,000 a year or $1 million every month all have the same amount of hours in a day, but the end results are very different. Why so? The key here is to make sure that the quality of your tasks are fantastic. You donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have the luxury to waste your hours on unproductive habits and activities as a business owner.

One of the biggest struggles that business owners have is that they tend to work both on and in the business. What happens when you try to handle every single aspect of your business single-handedly? You will get burned out. Quickly. Delegate your tasks to trusted employees. If you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have employees under you, outsource your work to quality workers online. As the owner, you need to spend more time working on your business rather than in it, so try to reduce your workload 109

as much as you can. Having a strong work ethic is excellent, but if you put in too much effort on the wrong stuffs, you will end up in more trouble rather than success. -----Construct meaningful KPIs for yourself and your staff to increase productivity and achieve greater end results You need to maximise every minute of your time that you are working on. How do I do that? You do it by setting meaningful KPIs to your daily schedule. Hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s an example of a KPI-optimized schedule: As you can see, you have 90 minutes to finish a blog post for your website. You can take a break in between the 90 minutes, go for walk, maybe a cup of coffee. But, you must make sure that by the end of that 90 minutes, your blog post is done and dusted. What happens when you go over the 90 minutes and drag on with your tasks? You start to become unproductive!

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This principle also applies to how you manage your staffs’ schedules. The truth is, the traditional way of scheduling your staffs’ work will result in reduced productivity as well as a poor end result. Business owners don’t even know that they are the ones who are set their staffs up for failure. How can I fix that? Start off by implementing meaningful KPIs to every hour of the workday for your staffs. You could come up with goals such as 1 1500-word article needs to be written by your editorial team from 9am-12pm. Make sure that every hour counts and has a meaning to it. Business owners also make another major mistake which negatively affects productivity among employees. That mistake is leaving major tasks and decisions to be made at the end of the day. Research has shown that the first 3 hours of work is the best time to achieve maximum productivity. The first 3 hours is where you are the most innovative, creative and focused, not at the end of the day. What all of us have been doing all this while is completely wrong! Fix this situation by moving high-quality tasks and major decisions to be done at the start of the day. As the day goes on, we start to get decision fatigue which leads to poor decisions and end results. This technique will help us to prevent that thus leading to greater productivity and better achievements overall. -----Structure your day and make sure that your daily time markers are correct to become more productive All of us wake up with a set of habits every day. You could be up in the morning, head in the shower, brush your teeth, have a coffee and head to work. These are some examples of daily time markers in our lives. We do these things subconsciously, which is why it is so powerful in creating a more productive you. Unfortunately, for most of us we haven’t designed our daily time markers for optimal success. 111

Here’s the deal: You can and should make a conscious effort to become more productive. Want to know how simple it is? Write the things that you want to do in a piece of paper and practice it for 90 days straight until it becomes your new subconscious habit. Voila! You are now more productive. You should also do this with your work routine. Let’s say that sales is the biggest issue that you have for your business right now. Instead of waiting till the end of the day to hit those calls, do it right when you arrive at work! Going back to the decision fatigue comment, it makes complete sense for you to tackle your problems at the start of the day when you are in the best form of your life. Once you start feeling fatigued, go have your lunch and take a well-deserved break. When you come back feeling energized, have a go at solving your problems once again! Before we move on... Talking about sales, a common KPI for business owners to implement on their sales staffs is to have a set amount of calls each day. Let me tell you why this is a loss to the business: Calls don’t mean a damn thing! Over here at RBT, we use conversations as a KPI instead of calls. Why? Having a conversation actually means something. A conversation builds rapport with the potential customer, a call does not. I set a target of 4 conversations in a day for my sales team. I don’t mind if it takes them an hour or 10 hours, just have 4 conversations and they’re good - they don’t even need to be sales! Well, nobody wants to work for 10 hours that’s for sure which is what motivates my team to be more productive and efficient in their work.

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The moral of this story is, manage things that actually have an outcome. Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t waste your time on fluff KPIs, you have more important things to achieve. -----Time chunking to save time and efforts Put every aspect of your business into chunks. For instance, incorporate actual sales calls into your sales training. Put your content creation into your marketing pieces. This saves time and energy, as well as helping with organisation and effectiveness in the long run. -----Genius-level tasks Hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a brand new concept that may be hard for you to take in: The faster that you can NOT be the lynchpin in your business, the faster your business will grow. Did I get that wrong? Definitely not. Genius-level tasks are tasks that are way out of your reach, skill and experience-wise. For instance, if you are not a technical founder, then you should get out of the technical side of your business and get someone skilled to do it for you. If you have enough money, promote your part-time employees to full-time employees. Why? 113

You will reach a point in your business where YOU become the obstacle in your company’s growth. At that point, you will need to sacrifice two things: your ego and your money. You will need to hire someone better than you to help you scale your business. If they are not better than you, then make them better than you because that is your job as a leader; to make your people better. Hire a few skilled people to help with your genius-level tasks and position them in the marketplace as people who are better than you. Then, you will have yourself a well-oiled system - a system that is capable of scaling your business exponentially.

DELIVERY MASTERY The Art Of Gaining More Loyal Customers For Your Business Actually deliver what you sell Many businesses do the same mistake of blatantly OVER-PROMISING what they can offer. Here’s an example:

Banter aside, it is crucial to never take on what you can’t do. Your reputation and trust is on the line here. -----Reduce your complaints to virtually zero and gain more customers with this handy technique Most people over-promise and under-deliver. You want to under-promise and 114

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over-deliver. That’s what you need to do all the time. This is not just limited to customers either, give your employees some love too.

Here’s a list of things to do that can help you over-deliver:

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Give unexpected bonuses and incentives to your employees Include small gifts when delivering the final product to your customers Include hand-written thank you notes in your product packaging Show appreciation to your employees with a surprise celebration on their birthdays with the whole team

These are all small gestures that go a long way in building reputation and trust in your business. Fact: you get raving fans from over-delivery, NOT price It’s been quite a long read so far, take a break and come back to this page in a while :)

Where to focus to scale your business Focus on authority positioning to double your revenue Here’s what I harp upon all the time; be a generalist and you lose, be a specialist and you win. Do you have a business that focuses on a specific niche? If you don’t you need to 115

identify one NOW. You can literally double your profit margin by specializing in a niche without a significant change in your costs. What happens when your profit margin grows? Your business grows. The infographic below perfectly explains why you should never, ever be a generalist. Now that you have a clear understanding on the 3 things that you need to master, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll head on with the big reveal.

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The 5 Simple Steps To Grow Your Business By 350% There’s only 5 key metrics that you need to improve to increase your business growth by 3.5 times in just under a year. These are the 5 factors:

This is what you need to do to these key metrics to triple your business growth: Increase everything by 30% It’s that simple. Here’s a chart of how your key metrics would look like with a 30% improvement.

It’s that easy. As you can see from the chart above, a small 10% improvement in the 5 key metrics

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brought in an extra $75,000 in profit. A 30% improvement would net an additional $339,116 in profit or more than 350% of the original profit, which is absolutely massive in terms of your business’ growth. That’s total bullsh*t, Travis. You’re just calculating some imaginary numbers to fool us. Not really. 30% is a completely achievable figure and you can do it in less than a year. I built 14 gyms and generated over $450,000 in a month with this EXACT strategy. Here’s the best part: In the following section, I’m going to show you a list of INCREDIBLY effective techniques to improve your key metrics, step-by-step.

Optimising and scaling your profit margins

The photo above is a detailed (but not definitive) list of things to consider while calculating your margins. Ask yourself critical questions to get a better overview of how to improve your margins. Some examples include:

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Can I find more cost-effective marketing options? Am I spending too much on the back-end of my website? Am I spending too much on wages relative to my revenue?

At the very least, you need to have these 4 questions answered which will help you tremendously in optimising your profit margins: 118

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   

When is my break even point? Where and how can I reduce my costs? When will I make my first $100,000 in profits? When will I make my first $200,000 in profits?

If you’ve already made $200,000, aim bigger!

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When will I make my first $1,000,000 in profits?

These are 4 simple but extremely effective tips to actually improve your profit margins by 30%.

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Tips and techniques to improve your conversion rates

We know our margins now, and weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re getting more leads. However, all of that is not going to grow your business without a good conversion rate. The photo above are some of the things that we go through to improve our conversion rates. For us at RBT, test and measure is one of our favourite conversion optimisation techniques. Hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a test strategy that we did for our weekly packages: We bumped up our $97 a week packages to $127 per week. However, we offered a 3 month discount for clients who subscribed to the annual package. We were essentially offering a buy 9 month, free 3 months deal, which when you work it out is exactly the same as our original $97 a week package - with a spin on it. Running a business is always a test and measure. There will always be changes in how you run your operations in pursuit of success. Sure, the foundations of your strategy is more or less the same but using the exact same template for different businesses is definitely a recipe for disaster. You need to adapt to be the best.

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Sales process flow-chart

The above is a sample of what a sales process flow-chart looks like. I know that 43% of people who see my ads click on it, and 54% of people who signed up through my landing page turns into actual paying customers. This flow-chart is incredibly important in knowing which part of the funnel is slowing your scaling efforts. For instance, I want to improve my landing page opt-in rates. How do I do that? Simple.

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Write a better copy for my landing page that includes value-packed CTAs to promote readers to take action Design a better landing page or hire someone to take care of the UI/UX aspect of the landing page to promote conversions Include an irresistible offer to persuade readers to take action

You can have a look at a blog post that we did recently which covered the entirety of creating an offer that is guaranteed to bring in leads and sales to your business. For convenience though, I’ve included an infographic that aptly describes the elements of an irresistible offer.

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Improving your average sales to attain greater revenue If I could sum this section in a phrase, it would be: high-ticket offers. Remember the 80/20 rule? 20% of your customers make up for 80% of your total revenue. You’re literally leaving money on the table by not crafting a high-ticket product or offer. That’s right, 20% of your customers are willing to fork out insane money for premium products. So, why are you not taking advantage of that? If you don’t do it now, someone’s going to take that opportunity away from you. You don’t want that to happen, do you?

Example of a high-ticket product. Innovate an exclusive product and up-sell that offer that to your most valuable customers. You don’t have to worry about being too expensive or costly in regards to your premium product. If you can provide an amazing service (remember the over-delivery part?) as well as providing the experience and outcome that is expected of a premium product, there is absolutely no reason for you to shy down on your offers. There are other factors for you to work on in order to improve your average sales, but up-selling or even cross-selling high-ticket products is the single most effective way to increase your average sales. I have included a photo below to help you with determining what to manipulate in 123

improving your average sales.

MARKETING The grand-daddy of all business operations and something that many businesses struggle at.

Get this: Organic reach on Facebook is dead. The way to build up your brand on Facebook is through well-optimised Facebook ads. Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t believe me? Have a look at Coca-Colaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Facebook page.

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That’s right. Coke is failing to crack 1,000 likes on a post despite having over 100 million likes! So, what should you do?

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Read up a lot of material on Facebook advertising. Facebook has their very own advertising course for their platform, which is all you need basically to run great ads. Catch up with the latest Facebook trends and updates. Head on over to HubSpot or Kissmetrics to get actual insights from people who are knowledgeable in Facebook marketing. Actually take a shot at running your ads on small budgets monthly. I’d suggest a maximum ad spend of $10 daily to get a good feel of the editor and test your ad’s effectiveness. This advice also applies to AdWords. The only difference between these two platforms is shown in the image below.

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Contrary to popular belief, PR is still not dead. I am a regular columnist for Women’s Health & Fitness Magazine over here in Australia and that’s been generating a good amount of buzz and hype for my RBT gyms. If you can’t do it yourself, hire a PR firm to do it. It still works and it’s going to bring a good amount of exposure and leads to your business, particularly if you are in the service industry. Now, the key to any sorts of marketing is to include the correct call-to-actions. For instance, we ran promotional offers on brochures and in magazines nationwide for our gyms. The call-to-action was simple yet incredibly effective. I included a mobile number in the promotions and anyone who was interested could just text the number and get a response from my sales team swiftly. That strategy brought in a significant amount of leads who unsurprisingly turned into loyal longterm customers.

NUMBER OF TRANSACTIONS

Call cycling is simply the act of cycling through your customer base and giving them a call for up-sells. Call them up and have a cracking conversation to go with it. At the end of the call, tell them about a special premium offer that you’ve set up exclusively for loyal/VIP customers. Heck, you don’t even need to call to execute this strategy. You could just post the irresistible offers on a special Facebook group for your clients and watch them come to you. Here’s a killer strategy: Plan a VIP night or a special seminar for your customers only. Then, let them know 126

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that they can bring one and only one friend along to the event. Now, you’re not only able to sell your products to your clients, but you also have access to a room of potential new clients - just what you need to scale your business effectively. All of these strategies boil down to one very important concept - the law of reciprocity. When you over-deliver, you’re giving your customers than what they expect. Naturally, they’re going to feel that they owe you something and what does that translate into? More sales and more business.

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SALES FOR BUSINESS OWNERS:

What you need to know about your sales mindset and becoming an effective salesperson

So you have a business running, a fancy website with the latest UI designs, some cool business cards… All of these are great and it will definitely contribute to the success of your business, but do you know what the most important thing in running a business? Knowing how to sell your products or services. That’s right; nothing is more important in a business than understanding sales and applying it to your services. It is, however, a skill that is often misunderstood or neglected by many business owners. Here’s the thing; There are many successful businesses in the world that are not the best in their niche, but they are the best in terms of selling. McDonalds do not have the best or healthiest burgers, but they made it as a mega-corporation because of good marketing decisions and more importantly, great marketing and sales efforts. In this guide, we’ll give business owners like you a no BS sales guide. It won’t make you the best salesperson in the universe, but it will guide through the whole concept of sales and understanding how to apply it when you are promoting your business. WHAT IS SALES?

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Movies like Leonardo DiCaprio’s Wolf of Wall Street and The Boiler Room paints salesmen as men in suits who try every single trick in the sales playbook to make money; movies like Mad Men glorifies the role of a sales executive as people who can manipulate the mass public for their benefits. So, is sales just like the movies? It’s not far off from that. There are people in real life who make money off squeezing every single cent out of their customers, executives who live by learning how to sell their whole lives, college graduates trying to move up the ranks at the car dealership. Really, sales boils down to one thing: provide enough value for someone to justify their spending. That’s right, the best salespeople in the world have the ability to make their customers feel like spending money is the right choice. The easiest way to do that? Provide value. You see, the power of value is so great that ethically immoral MLM companies and scams like Ponzi schemes are able to make millions, if not billions, of dollars by just selling the promise of value.

We do not endorse these shady companies, but it goes to show you that value is such a powerful factor in influencing a buyer’s decision. Of course, if you want to run a successful business, you will have to deliver on the value that you’ve promised to your customers. Over here at RBT, we give our clients the idea of achieving their fitness goals. What do we do? We take them under our wings and push them to the limits, we give them 200% of 129

our support and motivation, we treat them like brothers and sisters in arms with our programs - and they achieve their goals, just like how our initial promise was. The same thing happens with our consulting business. We take in clients who need help with their business, give them an idea of what to expect, and we make sure to execute it damn well. Our clients are happy with what we do and theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re happy because we provide enough value to them.

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Besides providing value, sales is very much like making a friend; you have to build rapport and relationships to “make it”. Your customer or client has to see you as someone who is trustable - not someone who only sees dollar signs. In summary, sales is:

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Providing values and benefits to the buyer to justify their spending. Building rapport and relationship with the buyer to build trust.

If you think that sales is just like opening a book and knowing every trick in that super-secret sales techniques book, forget about that - more so if you are a service business.

I suck at sales… I won’t do it or I’ll just delegate it Stop right there. First, no one sucks at sales. Some people are naturally charismatic, but 99% of the most successful business owners are people who are just like you and me. Secondly, if you are reading this guide, hiring a salesperson is probably not within your budget right now nor is it a good idea… yet. There is always this negative notion going around business owner’s minds that they can’t sell, they don’t have the ability to do sales, they think sales is a waste of their time Listen, if you think that you suck at sales, then to overcome that obstacle, you’ll have to actually do sales. You’ll have to pick up the phone, meet some people in events or over coffee, or write some letters. Once again, NO ONE SUCKS AT SALES - NOT EVEN YOU! Hiring a salesperson is also not as easy as picking some fresh grad to work for you. If you want to hire a competent salesperson, how are you going to convince the person that your company is a great place to work? How are you going to sell him or her the vision of where your company is going to grow? How are you going to the growth prospects of working at your business? Seriously, sales is all about communicating and building rapport. Stop thinking of sales as an exclusive skill; it is just an extension of effective communication between people - it’s that simple. When you think of sales as just a way of communicating with someone, the burden 131

will slowly be lifted off your shoulders.

The 3 biggest mistakes in sales

Have you ever met a salesperson who was too pushy about the thing that they’re selling? You know what we mean, the rapid-fire sales pitch, the constant talking, the super aggressive and direct approach It’s annoying, right? Your potential customers can smell desperation from a mile away, so you need to calm down and really try to build a relationship first before you go in for the close. One of the biggest causes of desperation is when you try to sell the product instead of the solution. It is so important to understand the difference between selling a solution vs. selling a product. This same advice applies to offers also; no one cares about how massive your company is or how advanced your technology is, they only want to know how can you solve their problems. If you are running a gym, how can you help them to achieve their fitness goals? If you are running a marketing business, how can you help them to achieve a good ROI on their ad spend? The moment that you shift from trying to peddle products to actually selling the benefits of your product to your clients - that’s when you stop being desperate in your clients’ eyes.

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Another thing to keep in mind is that if you don’t get a sale in the first meeting, that’s fine. But do not push a client too much if they don’t end up working with you. Your clients do not have an obligation to work with you; being pushy is going to push your clients away. It’s always better to take a few meetings to land a client rather than to lose one right away. Being impatient That’s right, you have to actually calm down and take a breather when you talk to someone. Talking super fast about your services and products is not going to tell your target audience anything! Which one do you think your customer is going to understand more? “Hi, there - wearearesults-orientedmarketingagencywithaknacktohelpbusinessownerslikeyou….. blah blah” “Hey, how’s it going, mate? So - what are you looking for help with?” Very clearly, the second sentence comes off as more clear and less desperate. Sales is not about firing off every single thing about your services as fast as possible, it’s about understanding your customers’ needs and finding a solution to it. This means that at the sales “pitch”, take some time to have a chat, introduce yourself, and really just enjoy the occasion. Since you’re running a business, you’re going to need long-term and valuable clients and the only way to achieve that is if they like you.

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One more thing that you should realise is not every sale is closed in one meeting; we would make sure to keep in touch with our leads every day for our RBT gyms - that’s how we got our business to grow steadily. Multi-million dollar sales are closed in months and even years, so it’s unrealistic to expect a sale the at the first meeting. Usually, it’d take about 2-3 meetings for you to get a client. If you are charismatic enough, you can do it in one meeting, but it’s not a failure to take 2-3 tries to close a sale. Besides, having a few meetings is also good for your business. Why? Sure, you may close the sale the first time but one meeting is usually not enough for you to gauge the interest and lifetime value of the client. Let us paraphrase this: Would you rather spend a few days gauging if a client is valuable to your business or lose a year or two with the wrong client? Being too sales-oriented We said that sales is all about building relationships and rapport; that means you should never, ever talk to your potential clients in a sales tone. Yes, you should try to push them and engage them in making them your clients but remember, your client is also human. Just like how people can detect desperation, they can also feel it if you are trying to sell too much. So, how do you avoid being too much about sales and too little about building a relationship? The simplest thing to do is to stop thinking about the “close” or the sale. That’s right; the more that you think about closing the sale, the more that you are going to talk like a salesperson. Your goal is to build trust rapport - remember that. If you didn’t close the sale, you can try again, but if you fail to get your potential client to trust you in the first meeting, getting him or her to change her mind is going to be a massive task. An easy way to remember that is this: if you make a friend at the end of the day, that’s great. Do you talk to a friend about how this “$499 course is going to change your business’ ROI”? Do you talk to a friend about how your course is going to “revitalise the business in the future”? No! People are already in self-defense mode the moment you try to sell something to them; speaking in a sales-oriented tone is going to make things worse.

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Get to know more about the person, genuinely be interested in what’s wrong with his or her life, get to know how much they love their kids, get to know how much the business means to them…. All these friendly interactions are going to help you overcome objections (something that we’ll talk about later in this guide).

The mindset of sales Now that we’ve got the mistakes cleared up, there’s one final mistake (or habit) that’s costing business owners like you. The biggest mistake in sales The worst thing that you can do in sales is to be afraid of rejection. Fear of rejection is why you think your business sucks, it’s why you think you are not as good as your peers, it’s why you think you can’t sell anythingIt’s because you are afraid of rejection.

You are afraid of getting a “no” from your clients, you hate that feeling. Guess what? Every successful company under the sun were rejected plenty of times before they made it. Airbnb was rejected 7 times before it got funding, Walt Disney and JK Rowling were both personalities who have more rejections than success, Steve Jobs was rejected from his own company! Here’s the truth: Realistically, you are going to get rejected in your first few sales meetings and that’s perfectly fine. These rejections are not failures - they are opportunities for you to learn what went wrong and what to do better the next time. 135

You may try 10 times, 20 times, 30 times, and you’ll learn to deal with rejections along the way. You know what happens after the 50th rejection? Nothing. Nothing happens because you are used to rejection, it doesn’t bother you, it’s just a word! Think of it this way, you have the option to say “yes” and “no”; so why should you be bothered when your potential clients say no?

Your clients are not rejecting you, they are rejecting your offer - there is a key difference. You were rejected not because you are an awful person, but it’s because what you were offering does not offer enough value to your potential clients. The faster you realise that rejections are targeted at your offers rather than yourself, the better you’ll be at handling it and (hopefully) sell more. The best way to learn that? It’s by getting rejected time and time again. Experience is the best teacher and no book or guide (not even ours) can give you the ultimate lesson in learning how to deal with rejection and leverage it to your advantage. With that being said, here are some tips to help you attain a great sales mindset to guide you in growing your business. Understand why you were rejected constructively. The knee-jerk reaction to getting rejected is “I’m awful at selling.” or “I don’t think I’m good enough.” These kind of thoughts are going to hinder you more than it will benefit you. You need to think of rejections as lessons; which part of the sales pitch did I mess up? Did I not offer enough value before talking about my fees? Did I focus too little 136

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on the benefits of my services? You’ll be surprised at how often you can spot the mistakes and inconsistencies in your communication this way. Just like how Facebook and Google marketing works, you will need to tweak your pitch to find out which works best. At the same time, pitch A may work for John but it won’t work for George. So you’ll have to learn from your rejections and understand how to make it work for different people. Without rejections, you won’t have golden opportunities to analyse and tweak a pitch that sells well. Get feedback from existing clients or mentors A great way to understand rejections better would be to ask your existing clients about their experience so far and ask them about the initial stages of the working relationship. You can match their answers with your rejections and find out a common pattern to help you with tweaking your sales pitch.

You can also seek help from mentors or coaches (like us) who have plenty of experience in dealing with sales in your niche. Often times, these people have faced rejections similar to yours, so they’ll be able to help you with your problems and find a solution to it. Notice that we did not include feedback from friends and family - why? 137

Getting responses from your family and friends is not wrong, but we want feedback from people who will actually invest their time and money into us as well as people who have plenty of experience - just like mentors. Feedback from people who are not willing to invest in your business is useless because:

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It’s free to them. Since they are not spending money, everything sounds good to them. Nothing will happen to them since they are not in the business, so opinions are definitely biased.

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It’s not valuable to them. They are not spending money, so they don’t have anything to lose. Feedback from clients who have something to lose is going to be more valuable and more effective.

Understand why you’re selling your services or products This links back to the advice of selling a solution, but it’s slightly different; you have to understand the motives of you selling your solution. Cover up the main motives: Is it to make your clients’ life easier? Is it to improve an aspect your clients’ life? Then, cover the secondary motives: Are you hoping to get more leads for your clients? Do you want to help your clients lift 2x more than what they are lifting right now? Understanding why you’re selling your services allows you to uncover the pain points and issues of your clients. This knowledge helps you to map out your solutions and your client’s problems - simple, right? What if you don’t understand what you’re selling? Then you’re going to sell the wrong product to the wrong crowd. You’re going to sell luxury products at flea markets; sure, you’ll get a few sales here and there but you’re wasting a lot of potential business growth by not having a proper understanding of what you’re selling. So, if you get rejected, are you selling to the right audience? Understand that selling in service businesses is mostly about helping and providing value. We’ve covered value a lot above, so we’ll focus more on the helping area here. In a service business, potential clients want to know that they are getting some sort of help. Therefore, your intent should be focused on trying to help your potential clients. You know this already, but this tip is just to drill home the point of providing value to 138

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your clients. The best salespeople are great talkers and even better listeners

It’s cool to think of sales as saying magic words that close the sale, but a part that is arguably more important that talking is actually listening. People want to the point of attention, they want someone to listen to them - that’s what you should give them. Listening makes your potential clients feel that you are paying attention. When you pay attention, you achieve two things:

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You build your listener’s trust in you You gain the knowledge to ask better questions

People meet salespeople who talk non-stop, what happens when they meet someone like who actually listens and pays attention to what they’re talking? They’ll be pleasantly surprised - you actually care about them! It doesn’t take much to figure out that; More trust + More attention = More sales By listening, you’ll also be able to ask better questions to gain more information about your potential client. Questions are a powerful way to extract information as well as influencing someone, more so if you are an expert at using open-ended and 139

close-ended questions. Next time that you have a meeting, try this out: Talk less, listen more, and ask questions based off the information that you got from your potential client. You’d be amazed how well it works.

Crafting an effective sales flow The flow for landing pages and digital offers that we’ve discussed previously is derived from traditional sales flows. You’ll read a lot of books and guides on sales flow, but the basic principles behind every one is the same. Of course, you’re free to choose a flow that you’re comfortable or tweak this one to your liking. Establish rapport

Rapport is one of the more important components in your sales flow. Why? Rapport is all about connecting with your potential client in a way that can build trust and affinity in your business. Building rapport is often portrayed as smiling everytime and keeping a bubbly atmosphere around the meeting; that’s correct but you don’t have to follow it exactly. All you need to do is to be friendly and not sales-oriented, it’s that easy. 140

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In addition to conveying warmth and friendliness, build rapport by finding something in common with the potential client, and discussing it briefly. Examples are: someone you both know, a common organization to which you both belong, a common interest like music or sports, or parenthood. Avoid talking about controversial topics like religion and politics. Continue building rapport throughout the sales conversation by listening actively to what the other person is saying and responding appropriately. Instead of focusing on telling your prospect all about you and your services, make the conversation about tending to your potential clientâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s needs. Another strategy for building rapport is to encourage the potential client to do most of the talking. You should be trying to do only 20% of the talking. Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s something magical (and counterintuitive) about encouraging the other person to do most of the talking. If you notice that your prospect is talking a lot, you are doing something right! You are building a sense of trust and rapport with your potential client. Uncover the potential clientâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s situation/ problem/needs

Before you start talking about the services you offer, ask open-ended questions to uncover exactly what your prospect needs. These questions encourage long answers, and give you lots of insights about your 141

prospect. Here are some examples:

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“How would you describe the situation you are facing?” “What is the hardest part of that situation?” “If you could make things different, how would you prefer them to be?”

“If you were able to make those changes, what else would change for the better?”

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“What kinds of solutions have you already tried?”

Focus, and as you listen, make mental notes about what’s most important to this person. Then, when it’s time for you to offer a solution, you will know exactly how to present your offer to this potential client because you will know exactly what the problem is and how to frame your solution to meet the unique needs of this person. Propose a solution and describe the benefits Up until now, you have mostly listened and asked questions. Once you are clear about your potential client’s situation, problem, and needs, you can offer your solutions. Show how your solution can address the client’s situation. Keep referring to what you know about the client’s needs and focus on the benefits of what you offer. Watch for over-promising and under-delivering as you describe your solution. Promise what you can actually deliver, and deliver more than you promise. Preparing to offer a solution includes being ready to respond to an objection. If you find yourself feeling defensive, notice it and set your feelings aside. Replace any defensiveness with curiosity and don’t be insecure about it. This will allow you to show respect for the client’s perspective, and will continue to build rapport as you uncover what’s really behind the objective and address it calmly. Treat the objection like a “gift” because it actually is a benefit to you. Use your questioning skills. “Will you tell me more about your concern?” can lead to you addressing the client’s concern and turning the conversation around. Discuss the next steps It is a natural progression to describe what you offer and then discuss what needs to happen next. Here are some examples:

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The client needs to talk to the other decision-makers.

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You prepare a written proposal that describes the details of your proposed solution.

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You research more possible solutions and make another appointment.

You want to present the next steps in such a way that the potential client will say “yes” to something. For example, it is clear the client is ready to buy from you, then ask: “Are you ready to finalize the details?” If it’s clear the client is not ready to buy from you, move the client forward through the sales process by giving them an option to which he/she is compelled to say “yes,” such as “May I call you next Wednesday at 1 pm or Thursday at 5 pm to follow-up on our conversation?” Ask for client’s buy-in to move forward If you offered the potential client a next step to which they are compelled to say “yes,” then getting the buy-in is easy. Your sales conversation is nearly over. To get a buy-in, ask a closed-ended question that either implies a “yes” response or allows for a yes-or-no response. Here are examples:

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So, are you looking forward to improving your lead generation or digital ads?

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Are you looking to advertise on Google or Facebook?

Closing low-end and high-end offers

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You’ll encounter these two types of offers in your business; both of them use the same principles as a sales flow but with several minor differences, Closing low-end offers Closing low-end offers rely on three things:

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It has to be valuable It has to be quick and simple It has to be a logical part of your sales funnel

A valuable low-end offer Your offer has to guarantee a good ROI for your clients. Let’s say that you’ve introduced a $79 1-week yoga offer; your client has to see some sort of return from that program be it increased flexibility or an increase in general health. Of course, expecting results from one week of training is not going to work but what we mean is that low-end offer has to have a value that is equivalent or more than what your clients are spending. The offer also has to function well on your side. Giving out free trials sounds great, but you have to make sure that your business can sustain your offers without losing too much money and time. It has to be quick and simple Everyone wants something that is fast and easy; your offers do not have to be very complicated to close the sales. The easier and faster your clients can see results, the higher the chances of you closing a high-end offer with the client. This means that your low-end offer does not have to be a 3-month program or a super long and complicated course to set up custom landing pages. Keep it simple; make your low-end offers last for a week at most if possible, cut off as many steps as possible, and make it easy for your clients to achieve a target. There’s a reason why people recommend goal setting all the time; the effect of achieving a small goal can be addicting and will make the individual crave for more of the same thing. An easy way to do this is by literally taking a piece out of your high-end offer and turn that into a low-end offer. We’ve covered this in-depth in our irresistible offers guide, check that out on our blog. It has to be a logical part of your sales funnel

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There’s not much to be said about this expect that your low-end offer has to act as a springboard for other high-value offers in your business. It also has to act as some sort of introductory offer or “appetiser” to your business model.

Understanding objections and how to overcome them Objections are anything that stops a customer from buying from you. In this section, we’ll be focusing specifically on why a customer does not buy from you. Remember, though, overcoming objections is NOT arguing with your potential customer and trying to correct every single of their points. In fact, once you are in a position where you have to go into an argument and counter-argument situation, you have already pretty much lost the sale. Overcome sales objections before they are raised The best way to overcome objections is to literally avoid them from coming up. It sounds simple but it can be really difficult if you just starting out; once again, learning how to deal with objections is simply a matter of practice and handling rejections well.

Common sales objections The obvious starting point is to think through what the objections will be by brainstorming. Common objections to any sale would be:

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Price/Value/Cost – The price is too high against the perceived value;

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what happens if they spend all this money and don’t get value? They can buy something else with this, why spend it on your solution? Time/Logistics – How is it delivered? Does it fit around their planning? Will the results appear in x period of time?

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Credibility/Trust – Can they trust your business? Is the offer really that good? Do they have access to testimonials from your previous clients? Price is the famous one but is surprisingly one of the easiest to overcome. In fact, most objections come down to risk. Do not underestimate the fear of looking foolish, that is a big risk also for the decision maker. Overcoming the objections As we said earlier, the best way to overcome objections is to avoid them outright. However, here are some tips for you if you want to wrangle your way out of objections.

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Price objections. Ask open-ended questions to get information on why they think it’s too expensive. Questions like “Could you tell me why do you feel that the price is not an option for you” when spoken with the right tone can help you get back on track.

You can also ask ROI-based questions such as “If I can get 10 more clients for you in the next 90 days, what would that mean for your business in terms of profits?”; these kinds of questions can help your potential clients see the value in your services.

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Time objections. You may have leads who say that they don’t have enough time or that they don’t think their time is worth the efforts.

A good way to overcome this objection is to, once again, demonstrate the value of your offers. You can do this verbally or visually, but you’ll have to convince your leads that spending time working with you is going to generate a positive ROI for them.

You can ask questions like “What would it mean to your business if we could double your revenue while cutting down the time spent by a quarter?” Of course, you’ll have to make sure that you can actually deliver on your promises.

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Trust objections. This usually happens when you are a new player in the niche; no one knows about you, so naturally, they are going to have some doubts about your business.

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To overcome this, you’re going to need to have an amazing introductory offer or a solid portfolio of your previous clients. If you don’t have a portfolio, you can also include some of your previous day-job work or something similar.

Testimonials work great by the way and they work even better if you have someone reputable who speaks fondly of you.

Should you discount or lower your price points? Once you get into discounting and competing on price you are playing a losing game. Your prices can be flexible and be something that you can control, but it should not be your unique selling proposition; you don’t want to be regarded as the “cheap” provider of your niche. Remember, successful service businesses compete on value, not pricing. You can do discounts but not for generating sales. Customers who have been with you for a long-time are good candidates to give discounts to, but leads who just knew about you a week ago? Ditch the discounts. The moment that you offer discounts to new clients is when you’ll get an influx of clients who pay you less than what you’re worth. You’re basically losing money by offering discounts in early stages. Lower the risks and doubts of your potential clients As risk is a huge issue in objections, it is good to have “introductory” or “sample” products where you can demonstrate your value and reliability. That is why low-end offers are all short term packages that are easy to agree to. Your customers take on a short period with you, like a 1-week program, then that leads to longer term projects when they get value from your services Remove financial risks with a guarantee. Guarantees can also remove some of the risks for the customer; you can offer money-back guarantees or refunds if your customers are not happy wit your services. The credibility and reputation of your business is important here; you’ll learn that as you grow, you’re going to be able to command more trust from new clients but it’s going to take some time and effort to achieve that.

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Closing That covers the sales part of running a business. Of course, this guide does not cover everything under the roof about sales, but youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll have a good grasp on it at the end of this post. As always, you can contact us if you need help with your business. You can also head over to our blog to read up on more articles like this.

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Think Tank Member Magazine edition 1 November 2017