The Complete Selling Solution for Sovereign Creators of the Impact Generation
We summarize the five core systems to monetize your craft, one bare bones solution, plus my favorite all-in-one platform for sovereign creators.
Personal note: Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone. This will be the last issue of this newsletter for 2023.
If you like what you are reading, hit the share button and forward the newsletter to someone you think would make a great person of impact.
Here’s what’s cooking for 2024:
Deep dive posts on becoming a person / business of impact including world building, attracting the right audience, developing offers, plus cool monetization strategies
Tech Fridays - A “how-to” post on completing one task in your selling solution. This could include audience or offer research, building an email list, writing compelling emails, developing a workshop to delight your audiences, and more.
Can’t wait to share. Now on to our regularly scheduled programming!
Introduction
This newsletter is more nuts-and-bolts than our previous editions where we shared the Impact Generation’s business building principles. In this issue, we will summarize the complete selling solution for sovereign creators.
What systems should you have in place in order to successfully monetize your craft?
Here is an outline of the post:
Part One - Ideas to Internalize Before You Market the Impact Generation (IG) Way
Why digital products and mentoring?
The anatomy of a digital sale (traditional vs. the IG way)
Part Two - The Complete Selling Solution (CSS) for sovereign creators of the Impact Generation
Offer system
Subscriber system
Customer Nurturing system
Mentoring system
Traffic system
Part Three - Two low-tech selling solutions that could be up and running by New Years
A bare bones solution
My favorite all-in-one platform that eliminates 80% of the tech stack for sovereign creators
Part One - Ideas to Internalize Before You Market the Impact Generation (IG) Way
We live in extraordinary times.
Any person with a decent smartphone now has the ability to push out professional grade images, audio and video. In addition, five social media companies provide access to a global audience numbering in the billions.
- A Manifesto for the Impact Generation
Why digital products and mentoring?
One of the unique opportunities as a sovereign creator is to consider yourself a multimedia publishing and mentoring brand. The graph below represents a product mix for this approach.
There are significant advantages to using this business model:
It provides different price points for people to engage with you and your content.
It is relatively easy to implement - Many products in the matrix above can be created over a long weekend. You can even build a high-ticket coaching program on-the-fly, as a beta version. People pay for access to you and the results you can provide even if the package is imperfect.
The economics work in your favor - Your profit margin is close to 100% on these products (vs. an Etsy store) and you can reach your income goals much faster if your product mix includes high-ticket offers.
A certain percentage of your customers will want more access to you, and a shorter timeframe to achieve their goals. Your high-ticket mentoring offer will meet those demands.
Anatomy of a digital sale (traditional vs. the IG way)
Traditional online marketing is obsessed with optimizing linear sales funnels in order to move someone from a prospect to a customer as quickly as possible.
The graph below represents a traditional marketing path to a digital sale.
Note the different decision points where marketers often choose the click over the customer’s best interest.
Traffic => Are you using coercion or manipulative language to attract visitors?
Landing Page (to collect an e-mail) => There is often no marketing relationship established before marketers request something valuable from their prospects: access to their inbox.
Sales page for the first offer => Only a small percentage take the offer. This could be as little as two out of every one hundred total visitors (2%).
Dante’s funnel from hell => This is a series of upsell and downsell pages that appear BEFORE you finish your purchase. You must say no to several consecutive sales pitches for higher or lower priced products.
Thank you and download page => This is where you finally get what you purchased.
E-Mail follow-up campaigns => There are at least two e-mail campaigns. 1) For those that did not purchase the first offer and 2) for those that have yet to purchase the subsequent products or a high-ticket product.
One thing we must clarify. This funnel works like gangbusters and is based on sheer numbers.
Even if marketers pay $200 to acquire a high-ticket customer, they get thousands of dollars in return for every client. If done ethically, there is nothing wrong with this approach.
Within the Impact Generation, however, we do things a little differently.
Impact Generation path to a digital sale
Within the Impact Generation, we want to practice people-based marketing. Here is the digital path to a sale. Notice that we are optimizing for lifetime customers.
Traffic is carefully cultivated ensuring that your message and offer attract the right audience.
Instead of an opt-in page, we like to send folks to our signature content. An example would be our anchor post for this newsletter, A Manifesto for the Impact Generation. Signature content is meant to draw the right people toward your brand. It communicates who you are, what you do, who you help and the unique approach that you bring to your craft.
From here, the transition to an engaged subscriber involves zero friction. People can opt-in at any time without hype, coercion, lead magnets, and all of the other “tricks” in a typical marketing bag.
With an engaged subscriber, traditional sales funnels and offers work well (without the hype or coercion of course). If you build a relationship with your subscribers, honor their agency, and commit to service and impact, every offer you make will feel natural with no pressure.
If you have a high-ticket program, a percentage of subscribers will be delighted to pay a premium to work with you in order to fast track their progress. However, no high-pressure sales tactics are required.
This is how you optimize for lifetime customers.
Part Two - The Complete Selling Solution (CSS) For Sovereign Creators of the Impact Generation
In Part Two, I want to break down the core elements of a selling system for sovereign creators.
Don’t be intimidated by all of the moving parts. Read this post several times to understand the main ideas. We want to prepare you for long-term growth, and not just a few random sales.
Core Element #1 - Offer System
Your offer system is the economic engine of your online business. It consists of two parts:
Deep dive research process on your audiences, competition, and competitors’ products. This research forms the foundation for your marketing messages, the products you develop, and the offers you create.
Ability to create various products and offers that resonate with your audiences.
Research is your secret weapon
Research is not sexy. However, within the Impact Generation, we think of it as mining for gold. Here is a simple breakdown of our process:
Quick keyword research to understand customer intentions and to understand the most popular content based on Google searches.
Amazon book reviews to summarize domains of information and to uncover gaps in the market.
Forums and groups to uncover the language, product gaps, and emotional drivers of our audiences.
Empathy map to get inside our prospect’s mind for a day.
Direct inquiry - Having personal conversations that don’t scale to understand the needs of our audiences.
Creating Products and Offers
The second part of an offer system is the ability to craft products and offers that resonate with your audiences.
The hurdles are mostly organizational and technical.
For example, creating digital products, workshops and even coaching programs comes down to organizing your content into bite-sized formats others can consume.
The technical part involves recording quality sound and video, recording your screen, and configuring your course on a training platform of choice.
In terms of offers, we should emphasize that they are different from your products. You might have a video training product on baking the perfect loaf of sourdough bread. You could bundle that product into an offer and vary the price, your delivery mechanism, or the deliverables (like checklists, spreadsheets, audio version, or one-on-one help).
Core Element #2 - Subscriber System
If I could share only one idea from the entire Impact Generation training this would be it:
Your highest priority as a sovereign creator is to develop a list of engaged subscribers.
I cannot stress how important this is.
Your list is the most valuable asset of your business. Without it, you only have a hobby.
It enables you to avoid the toxic marketing culture that is today’s social media. Social media is great for one thing. To move a portion of your followers onto a medium that you control, like an e-mail list.
You remove the risk of losing your audiences if your social media accounts get cancelled.
You have DIRECT access to your subscribers. There is no algorithm to get in the way.
Creating a list of subscribers requires minimal configuration using an autoresponder. The key is to attract the right audiences, with the right message and offers. Here again, your research process is what will provide the necessary insights to complete this task correctly.
Core Element #3 - Customer Nurturing System -
After you have cultivated a list of engaged subscribers, the next logical step is for them to become a customer. Of course, some folks will go straight from an audience member to a customer. However, the majority will not.
In the customer nurturing stage, there are only two rules: 1) maintain regular contact with your peeps and 2) don’t be boring. An email newsletter (like this Substack) fulfills those requirements.
But you can also send additional informal e-mails. Here we use the approach by a master copywriter and email marketer Ben Settle. Ben’s advice for sending out killer emails is summarized here: make sure every e-mail entertains, educates, and elevates.
There is no secret formula here. Share your expertise with your subscribers, in interesting, creative and informative ways, make offers that resonate and inspire, and make a commitment to serve and impact.
These are the keys to sales.
Core Element #4- Mentoring System
The back-end of your digital economy is your high-ticket coaching and mentoring programs. This is where you can do your most personal work with your followers. It is also where your expertise is highly valued by a portion of your subscriber base.
I high-ticket coaching or mentoring program is the next logical step above a live workshop. You will often find that if you offer these programs, especially in a grop setting over several weeks, that a certain percentage of your subscribers will happily take the plunge with you.
Traditional High-Ticket Sales
There is an entire industry setup to help you generate high-ticket clients. This usually involves training a sales team on the best way to close someone who is on the fence. After all, a high-ticket product is a big investment.
However, when you market the IG way, all the coercive and manipulative language goes away. There is no pressure, ever. The way you have engineered your world (and content) draws the right people in and convinces them that you are the right person to help them reach their goals.
Think of how different that is from traditional marketing which leaves you feeling anxious or guilty.
There is a natural progression from reading an anchor post, to consuming more of your content, to purchasing your low-ticket products, then mid-ticket and continuing up the customer ascension ladder.
Core Element #5 - Traffic System
There are entire courses, trainings, and masterminds dedicated to explaining how easy it is to generate traffic to your website or offer.
Baloney.
You can try the organic traffic route; however, it may be six months and 25 articles later before you get a squeak of traffic. If you go with paid traffic, it may take a lot of time, energy, and money to dial in a campaign REGARDLESS of which platform you use. And even if you hire out, there is no guarantee of successful campaigns.
So for this element, I want to return to first principles, which will work across different contexts and platforms.
Our Signature Content Strategy
I have spoken about our signature content strategy in our manifesto and teased out some parts of it in this post. The idea is that you create one anchor post, and 7-10 deep dive posts that communicate your expertise, the audiences you serve, your signature solution, and the impact you wish to make.
You can see an example of a signature content strategy by analyzing the first four posts of this newsletter. That is where we share our vision and business building principles, the audiences we serve, and how we wish to make an impact in our world.
These in-depth posts will form the foundation of your organic content strategy. Each one can be converted into 100s of derivative content pieces (quotes, images, shorter blog posts, podcast topics, and social media posts) to drive more organic traffic to your signature content.
The Power of One Traffic Source
Finally, here is the secret to paid traffic. You have to pick one traffic source and master it.
That’s it.
Mastery requires going through a big learning curve, failed campaigns, and losing money. Few entrepreneurs have the patience to iterate until they have created a successful campaign. It’s much easier to try the next guru with another broken promise.
Once you can generate visitors to your digital assets via paid traffic, and convert them into subscribers, then customers, you have unlocked the secret to the Internet. But you have to put in the time and reps to gain this knowledge.
If I could have a do over for my online marketing journey, it would have been to master a traffic source as quickly as possible.
Within the Impact Generation we are now experimenting with two types of ads: sponsored posts via FB Messenger, and YouTube ads directly to a webinar. I will share as many insights as I can in future newsletters once we have data we can analyze.
Part Three - Two Low-Tech Selling Solutions that Could be Up and Running by New Years
A bare bones solution
What follows is a bare bones selling solution that could be up and running by New Years with minimal tech headaches.
I am talking about Samcart, which is an e-commerce platform built specifically for digital entrepreneurs.
Here are its main components
Course platform to create and host unlimited courses with unlimited students.
Website / Sales page - Samcart’s unique solution to e-commerce is a combination one page website and sales page for your offer.
Checkout page with multiple payment options (Google Pay, Apple Pay, Stripe).
Multiple features to increase sales: order bumps, one-click upsells, split payments or subscription payment options.
Our Money is on Workshops
Within the Impact Generation, the first product we recommend that you develop is a live micro workshop via Zoom (see Product Matrix above). It is relatively easy to configure, and can be very lucrative depending on your expertise and what you offer.
I have seen one-hour workshops sell for $19, $27, even $47. Longer workshops, say 2-4 hours can start at $97 and go up from there ($495 even) depending on the skillset you are teaching.
In future newsletters, I will break down the process for creating a workshop so you can begin experimenting with this monetization strategy. However, if you are eager and want to have something ready by New Years, then you can take a look at our blog post: A Checklist for Creating High-ROI Workshops.
My Favorite All-in-one Platform that Eliminates 80% of a Typical Tech Stack for Sovereign Creators
Now I want to introduce you to a platform that I absolutely love. It’s called Substack and it is the platform upon which we are building a major part of the Impact Generation brand.
One of the biggest reasons we like it is because of its simplicity.
Our signature content strategy is built for a platform like Substack with its focus on newsletters.
It is blazingly simple to market - “Check out my newsletter!”
The business model can be easily replicated no matter the context or culture. There is no cost to Substack until you start monetizing. Also, you are not limited by technical ability or access to fancy software.
Here is what Substack provides for sovereign creators:
Home Page
Substack provides a simple home page that displays the posts in your newsletter in chronological order with a few menu items that you can edit.
Here’s a sample from one of my favorite authors on Substack, Samantha Dion Baker.
The portal is clean, simple, with no clutter or bells and whistles. So many entrepreneurs waste time on non income-earning activities like creating logos and building out complicated websites or funnels.
You Build a List of Subscribers
When someone reads your newsletter, there are many places where they can become regular subscribers.
As we mentioned already, building a list of engaged subscribers should be a top priority for sovereign creators. The quality of that group of people will determine the quality of your business.
Broadcast Capabilities
Substack is not a full blown autoresponder that allows you to tag, automate, and send out a series of e-mails.
Its only capability is a broadcast message that you can send at any time. Most newsletters are weekly editions so one message can include the newsletter, and another message could be more informal.
Community Building
Substack has a newsfeed that feels like the early days of social media. Right now, it’s a great place for creatives, experts, and writers to interact for the pure joy of their crafts. There is genuine interaction and marketers have not yet spoiled the experience (although give them some time).
Substack also has private chat capabilities to allow for dynamic interaction among your subscribers.
Monetization
Substack has multiple opportunities for monetizing your craft.
Newsletter subscriptions - Easy to setup and begin earning an income from your expertise.
Podcasts - You now have the ability to create a paid podcast service on Substack.
Organic newsletter growth via Substack’s community.
You can also promote offers outside of Substack (courses, coaching or mentoring).
Caveman Simple Marketing
To market a Substack newsletter could not be more caveman (or woman) simple.
The message is, “Hey, just launched my newletter on Substack. Go here to read it.”
There are no complicated funnels to build. No tracking. Everyone goes to the same place because you want everyone to engage with your anchor post. If folks resonate with your vibe and what you want to accomplish they will subscribe.
Substack meets many of the basic requirements for sovereign creators to monetize their craft and make an impact. It does not have all of the functionality of an email program or a website builder. But for technical simplicity and launching your business, it just might be what Doctor G. ordered. :)
Conclusion
We’ve covered a lot of ground. I would encourage you to read this newsletter through a few times until you’ve cemented the concepts in your mind.
The five core elements of our complete selling solution are meant to position you for long-term success. They give you the tools to help you grow in your craft as well as build audiences, products, offers, subscribers, and eventually customers.
I’ll cover all of these topics in greater detail in upcoming newsletters.
Here’s to your success!
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