One of the biggest obstacles for many marketers is just to get started.
But the truth is, that the more you wait, the more you will hesitate and second-guess everything you do.
In this episode of our Mastermind Series, we are discussing the importance of taking a leap and getting your membership going even without an extensive email list.
We are also talking about how to create engaging pre-launch challenges that convert.
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3 Big Take Aways
- Why you should not wait with your launch until you have an extensive email list
- How to get your challenge participants excited and inspired
- How to build momentum for your challenge
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Melissa: All right, so we're gonna hop over to Diana
Diana: I have two really brief questions if that's okay. The first one is , You've inspired me to create something like you're creating right here.
I love the idea of a regular meeting space. Part of my membership which is not officially up and running yet, but I really want to create community and that's a big, big piece of it. So first thing is I have a very small list. Should I just dive in there and to see, and maybe I get one or two people or should I wait until my list is a little longer?
So that's my first question. my second question is, is really quick. I am starting a challenge for the first time to lead into the membership. What day of the week is best to start for five day challenge.
Melissa: Good questions. So any blue, blue hands. So if you hit permit participants, Kathy
Kathy: Hello. So I want to address the list question because this was a thing that was stopping me for a really long time and. I am launching next week. And I'm doing . Like a, workshop series a week long workshop series. I'm starting on Monday the 28th and then leading into a founding member launch.
And I kept putting this off for a really long time because my list was really, really small. And a lot of times marketers, when they talk about really small list, they're like this person launched to a list of 300 and look how much. And then I'm just like, bro, my list is 70 people. Like
I like put out my invite, like doors are open. Registration is open to my list of 70 people. And I like posted it on some social media places. And I already have almost 40 signups for just for the free event. And a lot of those are people that I've like, people that have found me organically from like other people sharing the offer.
And so like, I'm, I'm about to double my list this week just from launching. So my thought is just do it. And especially since you're building with a challenge anyway. And so if you come to that from a place of service of like, I'm going to get to help my people do something. And then if they want to keep working with me, there's an opportunity for that.
But if nothing else, I get to give value and even that's going to grow your list.
Diana: Right.
Kathy: So that's . My take.
Diana: I love it.
Melissa: Congratulations. Yeah. Great
Paul: Let's go to Para. So my, thought for you is absolutely the same. I didn't.. Mine wasn't a free challenge. I just launched I 30 day launch for mine.
Start to finish, had zero on my list, started with nothing, started with a idea that I needed to pivot. And I, I had taught in person classes for the last 10 years and then went, oh, so this kind of came out of nowhere. I didn't know what I was doing. So I just built a quick little website made a free ebook and got a few emails, but literally nothing.
I had nothing and I just went live. I went live like a lot of lives. Within 30 days and then just launched it for four days and got 18 members. It's not like a making a whole bunch of money, but it was kind of like I did it.
Right. And now I'm like, Oh, I missing so many things. I was like, what did I, it kind of, I'm kind of glad that, you know, scary enough as it is that I did just do it because I think I would have held off. I might have second guessed because now I'm doing that now. I'm like, oh, I was supposed to launch this month and now I'm worried.
Well, maybe I should wait. And then I'm like, no, no, no, no going to happen. I think that with your list and you have probably more than I do it anyways, so you really need to just go for it because it it's. The more you wait, the more you hesitate.
Diana: Hmm. Oh yes. It's so true.
Paul: Thank you.
Diana: Thank you.
Melissa: Awesome. And then doctor
Kyrin: So mine was on the second question. I think you said what time to start? I would say perhaps not to start on a weekend. Right? Right. So that's probably, I'm not sure if there's any limit in the thing, but I think that's
Diana: yeah, no, you're right.
Kyrin: To sit from Monday to Tuesday. It depends on how long
Diana: yep. Very good. Thank you.
Melissa: Excellent.
Paul: Anything you wanna contribute?
Melissa: love what everyone has to say. I mean, The biggest thing is just, just getting started. It's always that initial with this community, which we just so love it. I mean, it was just something that kind of organically happened and it's grown and it's growing.
And so it's just, it's getting it out there, getting the word. And when people hear about, I mean, just naturally we have, we always have new people that are hopping in because they hear about it. They hear it from others and the word spreads, but it, the word can't get out unless she gets started. So even if you put it out there and you start with just like a handful of people, just nurture that group love on that group.
And then they'll start to tell their friends and you can build that community so
Diana: perfect. I needed to hear so thank you.
Paul: And all of us, put it in perspective because when we're in the real world and we're not social distancing, if we had a room of 10 people that we had an opportunity to talk to.
A lot of us would be really, really excited. Like we would be really excited that we had 10 people there and we could give and serve. And when we get online, we think like, oh, we need that to be a hundred people, instantly a thousand people instantly.
I don't have time for 10 people and it's the same time people. Right. And when we were at digital marketer event two years ago in San Diego traffic and conversion we met Trent Shelton. And he said to us, cause he has like over 2 million people. I follow him on, Instagram and we were talking to him . And we were asking him about audience size and things like that.
And he said, you know, the one thing that I always remind people, everybody wants the 5 million, but unless you're willing to talk to the five ever going to get there. And that really stuck with me. Cause like you have to be willing to talk to the five people. Yeah. We all want to just, yeah, go over to the, the millions.
Right. We all want to go to this big by entity number. And I recently, we just did a marketing mastermind a two day event the other day. And I used the analogy that came out of my head. I was like, it's like bus stops. You're just going along and you're picking up different people to put on your bus.
The bus doesn't start today with a full bus. It has to go and pick people up along the way.
Diana: I would just love five. That would be great. Fantastic. So lesson of the day, I'm just going to do it.
Doreen: yeah. And Dina, you're holding accountable by to when, when you see your impact on those five, your energy is just going to, you know, having, having a positive input impact on one lifts you for two for more, right?
Diana: Yeah, yeah. No good point.
Paul: Yeah. And I think to Tazeem has her hand up and then I'm going to also want to also address, cause we just came off of a challenge. We've done several challenges this year and also coach people through challenges. And like, I'll give you at least our thoughts on the time at the time, you know, the timing.
Tazeem: I may not want to answer that question since the guru was going to answer it. But yeah, my thoughts, My thoughts it would be, you know, doing it Monday to Friday, if you're going to do a five day, but I've what I've learned in the last couple of months from different people, including Paul and Melissa is you really want to see things.
Paul: So you want to get them excited the week before. So like doing like pre-work have them join the group, like maybe on the Friday before have them introduce themselves. So that they're are, you're creating energy in the group, the group that you're doing, maybe give them like one or two action steps that they can do before they get into that morning.
On time that you're going to give them that's going to be really great content. And I think the other lesson I've learned in my own journey is don't make those lessons so complicated, make it simple, make those lessons like under 10 or 15 minutes to do, because otherwise you'll just lose people by day three.
You'll just, you'll lose people anyway. Yeah. If you make it really easy and invite them to share it so that other people feed off of, oh, she posted it. That's a really great content. Maybe I need to post mine. So you want to inspire others to get excited by what you know, like going to the buffet. But the first person has to start as in Paul's words.
Right? So when one person will post to the lens by others to post through adjust, get them excited by the Thursday other Friday, or even the Sunday before, but just get them on board even before.
Diana: Okay. Love it. Yep. That's great. I actually, I learned a great point about sort of that nurture before it starts.
It's like a day before or two days before where you're, you're in and you're just kind of getting to know the space and this is one step you can do. And yeah. Great advice. I'm going to definitely try that out.
Paul: We call it the pre party.
Diana: Yes, that works too, but it's kind of a retreat kind of a, yeah. So anyway,
Paul: we always look at the challenger or any type of thing as a vehicle. And you have to look at that, that challenge has great interests for your core offer, like what you're bringing people into. So you'd also have to make sure that in your challenge itself, you're handling objections and you're handling limiting beliefs as you serve and give the content that you're giving.
So just make sure otherwise people won't convert because you're basically a lot of people go into a challenge and they give so much that it's like giving a free meal and then people have no desire to purchase anything afterwards. Cause they have like a two months worth of stuff to work on because it all the good that you did during it.
Now I always also look at a pre pre-launch. So you have your challenge, which is the prelaunch to your main core offer. I look at it like, think about like a metal detector and the closer you get to it, the more frequency the beeps start happening. Okay. So the further you away, your frequency and what you're giving and what you're doing is a little bit less, but as you get closer and closer, you build up momentum and the desire and the interest is to get people into the challenge itself. So about a month before, start a conversation. Now you could be closer to that now. So do this in the future, start a conversation up about whatever the challenge is about. So for instance, we had our ads challenge that we did last month.
So I started a month before to talk about. Ads in my social media posts, I created the conversation ahead of time before I even talked about the challenge. Okay. And then about 10 days out is when you start leaning in and that's like, you know what, we, you guys, we've been talking about ads all month.
You know, I'm just curious. I, somebody said the other day, like, would you like me to put together a challenge or something or put together something that's really sick? Yeah. So that's not an, that's not really accidental. So it's something that's by design. Cause we create the conversation and then everybody's interested because they already said they're interested.
And then you lead them in, Hey, you know what? I put this together really quick. I whipped this together, got us, you know, a little opt-in page. We're going to do this challenge. I'm really excited. Cause everybody's been talking about it this past month. It's like, yeah. Cause I created the conversation to purposely talk about it.
So we do, as you build the momentum and create the desire, very (inaudible), you create the desire for people to be in the challenge. And then when you're doing the challenge, you have to create the desire for people to want your thing. Okay. People mess that up. They make it two separate events. It actually, , your offer is here and right before it, the prelaunch is lining up and setting up your offer.
You have to keep that in mind, it is setting up your offer and then everything you do before that is setting up your vehicle, your challenge, your video sales letters, whatever your mechanism, whenever your vehicle. Okay. So if you could start 10 days out and start the conversations at a minimum and go like Facebook lives.
Now we do what's called around the world. So we take the same message. We go to email with it. We go into our groups with it. We go into our pages with it. We'd go on our personal profile would go on IG. We take the same message that same day. And we go around the entire ecosystem what we call it going around the world.
Diana: Okay.
Paul: That way that everybody, no matter what channel has the same message, because they're all not consuming every single channel. Right. But have one lead them into signing up for the challenge, but you have to create desire. You have to create it. So that's very, very important. But I would do, if you're doing five day, definitely started on you know, you know, the habits of your people, which is very important.
If they're weekenders, then that's great. Yeah. But if they're business people, normally Monday through Friday is a great time, but then what you want to do, it's like what we did with ads challenge. We don't wait until Friday to open up cart. Cause you have the paper checked out by Friday. They're there with their families.
They're there doing other things. They're distracted. They're a barbecues. They're getting their vacations in like whatever, like people leaving work early. So we opened cart. We seed and bring the opportunity and open up the card on Thursday. And then we closed it on Tuesday. It was what we did. Cause we don't like long open cause we've done the whole two week open cards don't do.
Just because you did really well for a couple days, if not mean you're going to keep doing well, what happens? You just drag it out and then you get what's called launch fatigue where people just tune you out. They just, they just tune you out because you have to give a reason every single day while you're contacting them.
And they just don't, they don't like that. Oh, hopefully there's little quick tips.
Diana: Yeah. Amazing. Thank you. Thank you.
You're welcome.