Pain Points: What You Must Know About Your Potential Clients

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How well do you know your potential clients?
Chances are you’ve developed at least a simple client avatar. You know their business, their age, their income, and education levels. You know where they live and how many kids they have and what their biggest dreams are.
But do you really know what drives them?
We’re not talking about just what they want (we all want more money and free time) but more importantly, you need to know what their biggest pain points are. Figure this out, and you’ll not only be able to better create programs to help them, but your sales copy will dramatically improve as well.

What are Pain Points?

Think about it—if you’re uncomfortable with technology, and once in a DIY mood you destroyed your website during a simple update, then website management becomes a huge pain point for you. Now imagine you find a VA who not only works with WordPress but who calmly shares examples of how they’ve rescued client websites after such disasters.
They’ve clearly addressed your biggest pain point, and you’re sold!
The same is true for your potential clients. Show them you can help them avoid those pain points—or better yet, eliminate them completely—and you’ll forge an instant bond.

How to Identify Pain Points

Now you may already have a good idea of what causes your clients pain, but if not, you have plenty of ways to find out.

  • Talk to them. What do they most often ask or complain about?
  • Listen in on forums, on social media, and other places your audience hangs out. What are they struggling with?
  • Reader surveys. These can be a rich source of information in any market. Pay special attention to the words and phrases your readers use to describe their troubles.
  • Keep an eye on your competition. What pain points are they addressing?

Once you’ve uncovered your ideal client’s biggest pain points, you’ll have a powerful tool that you can use not only in your sales copy, but to also help define your programs and service offerings. If you can help your clients overcome the most painful issues they face—whether it’s a lack of self-confidence or a fear of public speaking—you’ll instantly become a more valuable resource in your niche.
And when you incorporate those same pain points in your sales copy, your conversions will dramatically increase as well.

Copywriting 101: Features vs. Benefits in Sales Copy (And How to Know the Difference)

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If there’s one thing that confuses and frustrates new (and even seasoned) copywriters when writing sales copy it’s the not-always-obvious features and benefits. (Are you thinking “I’m not a copywriter, so why should I care?” Trust me, if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re probably a copywriter.)

For example, say you’re a coach and you want to share all the great things about your new coaching program, so you say things like:

  • 6-week self-study course
  • Includes workbooks and live training
  • Members’ only discounts

While these are all good points, they’re pretty bland. That’s because they’re features, not benefits. They tell us about the program but not why we should buy it.
Benefits, on the other hand, tell us the “so what” of features.
“6-week self-study course.” So what? Why should your reader care?

  • Because they’re busy and need to work on their own schedule, not yours.
  • Because they’ve already studied shorter, less comprehensive courses and need more in-depth information.
  • Because they prefer to learn on their own, not in a group.

“Includes workbooks and live training.” So what? What are the benefits of workbooks and live training?

  • Your student can put what they learn into action with workbooks.
  • They can get their specific questions answered during live training.
  • They can work through complex issues with the help of the group.

As you can see, benefits go much further than simple attributes, such as length and format. They show your prospective client not only what’s in the program, but why the product is exactly right for them, at this specific moment in their life and career.

Use Features and Benefits to Compliment Each Other

Features and benefits work together in sales copy as two halves of a statement, like this:
“6-week self-study course so you can learn at your own pace when it’s convenient for you.”
In fact, this powerful feature/benefit combo is often the basis for the bullet points you see in sales copy, and the format of them makes them easy to write, too.

How to Write the Feature/Benefit Combo

Simply list all the features of your product, then for each one, ask yourself “Why?” Why should the reader care? But don’t stop there. Dig deeper to uncover “the why behind the why” and you’ll soon be crafting truly irresistible sales pages that convert far better than you expect. In the above example, the why behind the why might be, “so you don’t have to spend family time on webinars that have been scheduled to benefit someone else.”
Now not only is your prospective client working at their own pace but they’re also freeing up time to spend with her family. That’s a great benefit they won’t find with most courses.

It’s easy to list all the features of your product or coaching program, but far more difficult to uncover the benefits that will drive sales. When you truly understand the difference though, it will become easier, and your sales will reflect the change in your copy.

Common Mistakes That Send Affiliate Partners Running

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Affiliate Partners are a huge asset for any coach or product seller. They’re the ones who are out there singing your praises, spreading the word about your services, and helping you reach a larger audience than you could on your own. Not only that, but they generously lend their good name and reputation to your business, so it makes sense that you want to treat them as well as possible.
But there are some mistakes that product sellers make over and over again that will frustrate and even turn your potential affiliates away. Here’s how to fix them.

No Promotional Calendar

Busy entrepreneurs are obsessive planners. They know they need to produce content, mail their lists, create products, speak at events, and all the other marketing tasks that go with owning a business. They very likely maintain a calendar that helps them stay focused and on track. If you want them to promote you, it’s a good idea to publish your own promotional calendar so they know what’s coming up.
This doesn’t have to be anything fancy, and it doesn’t have to stretch for weeks or months ahead, but it should give them a bit of notice about upcoming launches so they can work your products into their schedule.

Launching Without Them

Got a big product launch coming up? Excellent! But don’t even think about launching without your affiliates on board. Your lists most likely have some overlap, and promoting to your list before you allow affiliates to mail will result in lost sales for them—and angry affiliates who won’t be anxious to promote you again.

Stealing Their Sales

This should go without saying, but if you’re considering creating your own affiliate link for your products, stop. Mailing your list or posting on Facebook with your own affiliate link will—in most systems—result in your promotions overriding those of your affiliates. In short, you’ll be stealing their sales, and no affiliate partner will want to promote you after that.
If you need a tracking link, there are far better ways to go about it than to create an affiliate link in your own system.

Slow Pay

No excuse is ever good enough for failing to pay your affiliates on time. If you promise to pay monthly, then you must make that a priority. It’s never okay to “borrow” from your affiliate payments to cover an unexpected bill or take advantage of an opportunity. To do so is bad form, bad karma, and will give you a reputation for unreliability.

Your affiliate partners are some of your most precious assets. Treat them as such, and they will return the favor with increased sales, more leads, and plenty of social love.

3 Proven Ways to Market Your Business (Marketing Made Easy)

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The world is filled with great ideas and broke business owners with fabulous products but no sales.
The fact is, ideas are not what drives most businesses success. Marketing does. So before you quit your day job to branch out on your own, it pays to have a solid marketing plan in place. Start with these 5 ideas to get your creative juices flowing.

Free Webinars

For information product sellers, coaches, and service providers, one of the best sources of new clients is in free training webinars. No matter what your niche, the promise of in-depth training at no cost is enough to entice potential clients to part with an email address (which you’ll be able to market to later) and an hour of their time.
Not only that, but webinars are a fantastic way for those potential customers to get to know you better. And the better they know you, the more likely they are to buy.

Content Marketing

Not comfortable hosting a webinar? Hit the keyboard and start sharing your thoughts and ideas via your blog, ebooks, guest articles, and other written content. For internet marketers, this gives readers a taste of what they can expect from your product. If you sell physical products, it provides the perfect opportunity to share useful tips and other important information with your buyers.
Of course, there’s another important benefit to content marketing, too: search engine optimization. Google and other search engines index the words on your website and use the information to present search results to their users. Content marketing is a tool you can use to make the most of these results and to bring more potential buyers to your website.

Paid Advertising

Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google, and plenty of other sites all offer paid placement, and with today’s powerful analytics tools, it’s easy to create ads and drive traffic inexpensively. Consider starting with Facebook, since the cost is low and it’s easy to target your ads to your ideal client. Once you’ve perfected your funnel, you can branch out into more costly ads with a larger reach, such as Google AdWords or another ad network.

Don’t limit yourself to these three marketing methods though. There are dozens of others you can try, including affiliate programs, automated funnels, direct mail campaigns, and even television advertising. The key is to keep testing and tweaking to make the most of every marketing effort so that your business continues to grow.

Quick and Easy Tweaks to Automate Your Sales Funnel

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Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you. Please read our disclosure for more info.

When it comes to leveraging your time, automation is the sharpest tool in your toolbox. It allows you to get more done in less time, and to smoothly move people through your sales funnel.

For many small business owners, though, that’s one area that’s often overlooked is your website.

Use Your Blog to Build Your Mailing List

Like any smart business owner, you likely have opt-in forms on your website. They’re in the sidebar or maybe the footer, and you might have a pop-up to capture attention as visitors are about to leave. (If you aren’t using pop-ups, you should be! Here’s my favorite WordPress plugin for pop-ups.)

But do you have a solid call to action at the end of your blog posts? When a new reader is finished consuming your posts, are they primed to learn more? Give them the opportunity by offering an opt-in at the end of each post.

Even better, make it a logical next step by creating a related offer for each post. Called a content upgrade, these offers typically consist of a simple checklist or worksheet and capture attention by providing even more information about a topic they’re already interested in. You can even customize the forms on each blog post with tags so you can target them further in your sales funnel.

Keep Them Reading With Related Links

How often do you revisit old blog posts to link to newer content? This is an important maintenance job that will help provide visitors with the information they’re looking for by linking related posts together.

Not only is this strategy good for keeping visitors on your site, but Google approves as well. Posts that link to each other encourage search engine bots to crawl your site more thoroughly and help boost the rankings of your most relevant posts.

[Hint: This is a perfect job for your VA.]

Make the Best of Your Download Pages

Whether you’re giving away a free report or paid product, your download pages can pull double-duty by offering visitors a “what’s next” option. For free download pages, a related, low-cost product is best. It gives readers the chance to learn more about you with a small investment.

For paid products, consider offering a complementary product instead. If you’re protecting your download pages with a membership script, you can even offer upsells based on what they already own, making the choice even easier for them.

And if you’re using a double-opt-in mailing list, make use of that confirmation page, too! That’s the perfect place for a quick upsell or an invitation to join you in your Facebook group or weekly Periscope.

Here’s a good rule of thumb to follow on your website: Whenever a reader lands on a page, she should be offered the next logical step. When you write your blog posts or create your download pages, keep that in mind, and your sales funnel will practically fill itself.

3 Unusual Places to Find Affiliate Partners

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No matter how proudly you embrace the “solopreneur” title, there comes a time when you absolutely must reach out for help. And for savvy business owners, that help often comes in the form of affiliate partners.

Also called JV partners, affiliates act as your own private sales army, spreading the word about your products and services to a whole new audience—theirs. Not only do you reach people who might otherwise never encounter you, but you also benefit mightily from your affiliate’s existing relationships. By promoting you, an affiliate is endorsing you to their audience. They’re saying, “I know this seller; I trust them, and you should, too.”

But even with all those many benefits, coaches and product sellers sometimes struggle to find great partners. Sure, lots of people will register for your affiliate program, but the Pareto Principle is alive and well when it comes to affiliates: 20% of your partners will do 80% of the work. That means your goal is to recruit higher-performing partners.

The only question is, where do you find these great partners?

Pick Your Virtual Assistant’s Brain

Chances are good that your VA works for other business owners in similar niches. If you’re a business coach, they very likely work with several other coaches and they’re in a position to know…

  • Where their clients are in the business development cycle (ideally you want established partners, not newbies)
  • Their audience demographics (so they’ll know if they’re a good fit or not)
  • Their willingness to promote (some people simply don’t do affiliate partnership, so it’s a waste of time to approach them)

Look to Your Best Clients

Especially if you’re a business coach, your clients might just be your biggest fans—and they’re in a position to recommend you to friends, family, social connections, and elsewhere.

Be sure your clients all know that you offer a referral/affiliate program, how to sign up, and what the benefits are.

Your Competitors

It’s true—your competitors might just be your biggest affiliates if you give them a chance.

In some circles (such as business and relationship coaching) clients tend to “graduate” from one coach and move to another. This is normal and to be expected. And when you’re on good terms with your competitors, the coach their ex-clients move to might just be you.

Don’t be afraid to look in unusual places for your next affiliate partner. You really never know who can connect you with potential clients and partners. Think about all your relationships—from your team to your social circles to your competitors and colleagues—and consider all of their relationships and how far that might stretch. Then pick up the phone or draft an email and start leveraging your contacts!

10 Steps to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking (SEO)

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Search engine optimization (SEO) is a great addition to any online marketing effort. Proper implementation can lead to amazing results, with a higher search engine ranking leading to an increase in traffic (website visitors) and sales.

The opportune place to be when someone is looking for the types of products, services, or information you offer is at the top of their search results. This is what SEO is all about.

Let’s look at the factors that affect on-page and off-page SEO and how these can impact your search engine ranking.

On-Page SEO

  1. Add a title tag. You will need this on every page of your website, as this will show the search engines and your visitors what the page is about. It should be 70 words or less and include the keyword or key phrase that you want to rank for.
  2. Write a meta description. This is not always needed and is often ignored by the search engines. However, you can use it to explain in more detail what the webpage is about. Include the keyword or phrase within this description too.
  3. Create sub-headings. These make your content easier to read, plus helps improve your search engine ranking. You can use them to add additional keywords and key phrases into your content. This shows the search engines that you believe them to be important to your content.
  4. Build internal links. This technique can be powerful and may be strong enough to rank individual pages without any external (off-page) SEO. Just put a link in your smaller articles to a longer, more authoritative piece of content. This helps the longer content to rank higher.
  5. Use image name and ALT tags. Give each image on your website a name that includes your chosen keyword. When indexing the page, the search engines may rank these images when people search for that particular keyword.
  6. Avoid over-optimizing. When creating content for your website, it’s important not to over-optimize the content. This means that it will benefit you to sparingly use the main keyword while including related keywords and phrases. You may be able to rank highly for these other keywords as well.
  7. Make your website mobile-friendly. These days, most searches and social media traffic will come from mobile devices (click here to see how many). So, it’s important that your website works properly on mobile. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, this will impact your user experience, and therefore your ranking signals, negatively.

Off-Page SEO

  1. You must build trust. Trust has become an important ranking factor. It shows the search engines that what you say is accurate and that visitors can trust your content. To develop trust, build high-quality backlinks from other trusted sources, and ensure that your content is high quality and accurate.
  2. Build backlinks. Most SEO experts gain backlinks by building relationships with other websites. It’s crucial to avoid spamming your links or building them too quickly. This could result in your website becoming de-indexed, which is essentially being banned from the search engines. Check out this article from Position Digital for more on how to build backlinks.
  3. Get social signals. According to some SEO experts, getting likes and shares from social media may have an impact on your search engine ranking. So, it makes sense to create the most valuable content you can and share it with your own social media accounts, where others can like and share it too.

Now that you know what on-page and off-page factors affect your SEO efforts, you can make any necessary changes to your website, leading to a boost in rankings and sales.

Just remember that SEO takes time to work. It won’t happen overnight and may take many months for you to see the fruits of your labor. However, this effort will be worth it once you’re continuously getting targeted traffic from the search engines, with the sales that come with it!

3 Proven Strategies for Small Business Owners to Increase Cash Flow

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Is your small business struggling to make enough profit to pay the bills? Low cash flow and living paycheck to paycheck can be quite frustrating. Perhaps you started a small business so you could pursue your dream while earning money at the same time. If so, then you know that it isn’t always easy to get a small business to bring in the profits you’d like.

However, if you’re willing to work hard and have a good plan, there’s no limit to how far you can take your small business. Luckily, there are many ways to increase your current cash flow and free you from the threat of financial disaster.

Consider these strategies to increase your cash flow:

  1. Collect feedback. Many small business owners forget the importance of soliciting feedback from their clients. There are several effective ways to find out what your clients think about your products and services.
    • Ask the client to fill out a quick survey or questionnaire to rate various aspects of your business. These surveys can provide an excellent glimpse into your client’s point of view. There are many different websites that enable you to create simple surveys. Look online to find one that meets your needs.
    • Follow up with your clients with a phone-call or email asking for comments about your products or services. Inquire about which aspects they are satisfied with and which need some work.
    • Talk to your clients in person and ask them how they feel about their experiences with your business.
    • Remember, word of mouth is one of the best ways to advertise your business. If you have a bunch of satisfied customers, they’ll tell their friends and family about their positive experience and you’ll get more business.
  2. Get rid of products that don’t sell. It’s likely that you offer your customers a wide variety of products, but only a few of these products bring you maximum profit.
    • Sometimes a large inventory can work against your business. Customers often avoid buying altogether when they’re overwhelmed with options.
    • Instead of offering more products that likely won’t be sold, trash the unattractive products and offer more items or services related to your best-sellers. This is an excellent way to boost sales while reducing upkeep and inventory costs.
  3. Pursue unique marketing strategies. If your business is experiencing a steep drop in sales, there must be a reason. It could be that your marketing techniques are simply not as effective as you thought. Consider alternative marketing techniques.
    • Think about marketing your business online. It’s becoming easier with each passing day and more people are prone to search the internet for better deals. Businesses that have online order options are often much more successful. It’s a perfect way to increase cash flow.
    • Get the word out. Take advantage of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to promote your business. Check out our Social Media services to see how we can help with this part!
    • Radio advertisements, commercials, billboards, and flyers all increase the visibility of your business. Sometimes, direct marketing is just as effective.

By using these strategies you can boost sales and increase the revenue of your business. Once these strategies have been implemented, there will be no need to worry about how you’re going to pay the next bill. You’ll finally have the money to live the life that you’ve dreamed of.

It just requires determination, persistence, creativity, and an open mind to make your business successful. Test different strategies and stick to the ones that work best for you. Your efforts will be worth it once you see those increased profits.

Have you used these, or any other, strategies to increase your small business’ cash flow? How did it go?

Let us know on Facebook or Twitter.

How to Learn Online Marketing at Home

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To become successful with online marketing, one must develop the necessary skills and knowledge to produce the best results.

This will take hard work and patience, but the good news is that you do not need to attend a college or university to get these skills.

In this guide, you’ll discover some methods you can use to learn online marketing at home. In fact, you could become an expert yourself!

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM is a major part of online marketing and is split into two defined areas: search engine optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC):

  1. With SEO, you’ll learn how to optimize a website so that it ranks higher in the search engines’ organic results, therefore helping to drive targeted traffic to your website (learn more about searching engine ranking here).
    • An important item to understand about SEO is that this is a discipline that changes continuously. Because of this aspect, you’ll want to monitor the major players in SEO to keep up with search engine algorithm changes, so you can adjust your own methods accordingly.
    • There are many SEO courses online, including one that we’re working on here, at Steady Radiance Design. Research these courses, pick one, and get started!
  2. PPC, or Pay-Per-Click marketing, will enable you to send traffic to websites with targeted advertisements.
    • Google Ads is still one of the most popular PPC networks, which will show your ads on Google properties and websites that have the AdSense code included.
    • You can learn PPC easily online and relatively quickly. There are numerous courses you can take, including ones that will allow you to gain a Google Certification for PPC ads.
    • Once you’ve gained this accreditation, create some PPV (Pay Per View) campaigns of your own to gain the necessary experience you’ll need to get your own clients.

Social Media Marketing

It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without social media. Millions of people visit social media websites each day, which is why learning how to market on these platforms is so important.

Social media marketing has many advantages, such as:

  • Marketing your website for free by engaging your social media audience.
  • Buying effective advertising campaigns for as little as $5/day.
  • A highly targeted audience that you want to show your ads to.

Luckily, there are online courses available on these platforms themselves that will help teach you how to market to the millions of users that use these platforms daily. From paid campaigns to getting your content to go viral, if you want to learn about something, there will be a course available that can help.

Email Marketing

Despite what you may have heard, email marketing is still one of the best ways to market online.

The first step is to build an email list. Offer something valuable, such as a free report or discount coupon, that is related to your products or services in exchange for their email address. In this way, you can build a list of people that opted in to receive your emails.

To run a successful email marketing campaign, it’s important to understand your audience and what they want. Once you understand what they want, you can craft an offer that will be attractive to them and then make your offer in an email to your list.

In order to build your email list and send emails to them, you’ll need to use an autoresponder. There are many autoresponder platforms on the web, and many of them are free to get started.

With an autoresponder, you can also track your ads and their effectiveness.

To learn more about email marketing and how to effectively use an autoresponder:

  • Pick one and start using it. All the major autoresponder platforms have numerous guides and articles about how to use them to run successful marketing campaigns.
  • You can also find videos on YouTube that teach how to run email marketing campaigns with your chosen autoresponder.
  • Or you can do an online search for a course that teaches you the information you need.

Do Your Research and Take Action

You can research online marketing tips at home and find out what techniques are working for others.

You can then take these ideas and use them yourself. Many techniques you learn may not be successful, but you will soon learn what works best for you and what does not.

You’ll learn your own way of working and which area of online marketing you prefer to focus on. Not everyone can be an expert at everything, which is why many successful online marketers have a team of experts who each specialize in their own area.

You can become one of these experts yourself and do your own online marketing for your own company or offer your services to others. You could make a nice extra income this way!

Do you have more questions or need some addition guidance for how to improve your online marketing game?

Let us know on Facebook or Twitter.

Instagram Account Lock – Why it Happens and What to Do

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(Updated February 18, 2022)

In recent weeks, Instagram has cracked down on users who have violated their Community Guidelines. As a part of this process, Instagram casts a wide net around certain areas, so many users who have not actually violated anything are also getting an Instagram Account Lock notification. Here’s how to know if you have actually violated Instagram’s Community Guidelines and what to do if your account has been locked.

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