June 2018 Archives

Episode 9: The Backwards Way To Make Sure Your Stuff Sells 100% Of The Time

Let’s talk about why so many people build courses and programs that don’t sell. It’s because people have their priorities completely backwards when they are building their offers. I’ll teach you the way I do it!

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Full Transcript:

Hey everyone, this is Julie. Today, I want to talk about the importance of funnels in your online business. A lot of you probably already know that I work with Russell Brunson over at Click Funnels, so I am constantly and forever inundated with funnels. Building funnels, launching funnels, teaching funnels, you name it. I do it. Prior to working with him, I also built and launched funnels for lots of different types of businesses. I use them in my own business and as well for clients. So funnels are absolutely the number one thing you need to focus on when you are trying to sell your products and services online. And no matter what kind of business you’re in, whether you’re a course creator, coach, even a service provider, you need some kind of funnel.

I get a lot of people asking me, how do you know when it’s time to build a funnel? How do you know what funnel to build? How do you know if it’s gonna work? How do you know when it’s not working? What isn’t working? Right? And there’s lots of people who get super, super bogged down in all the details.

One of the things that I can say, I want to just kind of walk through a little bit of my process when I’m getting ready to launch something new and how the funnel actually dictates the entire thing.

So what typically happens in an online business, if someone has an idea for a product or service, right? I’m going to do a coaching program, I’m going to create this course, I’m going to offer this service, right? We think in terms of what the actual offer first, and then from there we then usually build the offer and then after we build it, then we think, okay, now what sort of funnel should I use to sell it? And the reality is that when you become as in obsessed with funnels and the working of funnels, as I have become, everything actually goes backwards.

You definitely do have the idea first. I mean most people are going to. Very few people are going to have the idea for a funnel before they have the idea for a product or a service. So you’re going to have the idea for something. Right? And just the other day I had an idea for a new course. So you have that idea what it takes extraordinary amounts of self-control, but it’s absolutely necessary to do. If you want to make sure that that core offer whatever sells is as soon as you have that idea and you write that down of kind of what you wanna do, you stick it in its rightful place as the assistant to the funnel, not the boss of the funnel, because once you have it immediately, your next question should be what should be the vehicle with which I sell this? So I can give you a bunch of examples.

So when I had the idea for the Digital Gangsta, which is my big course, the next thing is how am I actually going to create demand for this product? Right? And so I built a webinar funnel. That was the funnel I knew it was going to sell that offer. I have another course that I’m getting ready to launch with Cathy Olsen and it’s called Funnel Gorgeous. And as soon as we had the idea for the course, the next question is what kind of funnel are we going to use for this? Before we think of price, before we think of fulfillment, before we build the course, we think about what kind of funnel will work for this. Same thing with Create Your Laptop Life. What is the offer and then what funnel will work for this? One of the things that’s so amazing is that when you do it this way, building the marketing funnel and the messaging for the offer is so much easier.

So Funnel Gorgeous is this course that Cathy and I are launching on August 6th and we had the idea for the offer, but then we took. We did exactly this process where we take the idea, kind of outlined out what would be inside the course and then we put it on the back burner and we began building the funnel.

And the first step of building a funnel is to really write your message, right? So your message is usually either in words or in video. I typically go to words first because that’s what I do, but some people like to do video first, but either way, you come up with a sales message. As I wrote the sales message, the sales page for Funnel Gorgeous, the offer changed. Why? Because without actually having to write a sales page for something that’s in existence, I was writing a sales page for something that doesn’t yet exist.

So there were no boundaries. There were no problems. There were no like, oh, I can’t say this because it doesn’t do that. I can’t say this because it doesn’t do that. Okay. So I wrote the sales message, the copy for it, and then I gave it over to Cathy and Cathy started designing it. She’s a designer, so she wanted to, you know, we had her do the actual sales page.

Once we had the sales page, now we knew what we were building now it was like, oh, that’s what the course is going to be. Because we didn’t have the constraints of the offer driving the machine. We were using the funnel to be the boss. So if you think about this in the product world, it would be like, let’s say you were designing a new lipstick or something, right? And instead of focusing on the lipstick itself, you went and designed the actual bottle, right?

Was it going to be the twist lipstick? Was it going to be the one where you pull out the little brush and it’s kinda like that tacky wet lipstick, right? What kind of container are you going to build for it? And then once you have the container, what’s the messaging on it? What’s the name of it? What’s the brand of it? I’m sitting here looking at my Revlon Ultra matte color lipstick, right. As soon as you have the container and you can see the messaging of it now you can kind of understand, oh, this looks like it should be right. This looks like it should be a $10 lipstick or oh, there should be a $25 lipstick, or oh, this should be a $3 lipstick. You can start to see the value. You can start to see how it appears in the market when you focus on building the funnel, the message, the vehicle, right?

And so with Funnel Gorgeous, once we had built, we, we’d written the copy, which again, no, no boundaries, no problems. And we did the design. Now we’re like, oh, okay, now we can see kind of what the price point will be and now we know what we’re making.

And so for your online business…this is where I’m gonna give two different opinions, right? For people who are course creators or coaches or consultants, when you have an idea for a program or an offer or a course, go ahead, write it down, get it out of your system, and then immediately your next job is to write out the sales message for that offer because once you’ve written that out and I would argue written it out and designed it, you will see, you will have materialized what you’re selling and now you can go build the offer to actually fulfill that because to be quite honest, there’s a lot of offers that people create and they’re not gonna sell in the market.

They’re not sexy enough, they’re not irresistible enough, and then you’re banging your head against the wall trying to create a sales message that makes this course or program look good and it doesn’t. And that’s because you did it backwards. Okay? So for course creators and coaches, that would be my recommendation is, and I know some of you are like, well I’m going to do a Webinar, I don’t need a sales page. I would say the very act of writing out a sales page, doing the copy, doing the design of a sales page will immediately clarify what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and it is an amazing asset to have no matter what you’re selling. So that’s just my two cents.

If you’re a service provider, the good news is that service providers don’t actually create the services, right? They fulfill the services so that you are kind of at an advantage because you don’t have to actually get bogged down and distracted with, well, should I do worksheets that do audio? Should I use zoom? You know, people get all distracted that like how to actually build something. So as a service provider this is awesome because you just can have the idea and then again you can write the sales page, the services page to get people excited about that idea. One of the things that I really often recommend with service providers is that you sell an intensive first before you actually sell super, you know, lots of packages. For those of you don’t know what that is. If you go to my course proposalsecrets.co, you will learn all about that. It would take way too long. But the idea is that for a service provider, you’re kind of at an advantage because you’re not having to build the course or the product first so you can really focus on that sales message. Which is super important.

All right, so what do you do if you already have a course or a program and it’s not selling and believe it or not, this happens all the time. It’s really hard. It’s like the difference between renovating a house or building one from scratch, right? If you already have a course or a program and for whatever reason, it’s not selling. And I have a few people in my group who do this, they, you know, they tried, they, the name doesn’t quite fit or you know, there’s just like something that’s kind of off about it. What I recommend you do is this very exercise where you go back to the drawing board and you ask yourself, okay, with this current program course, whatever, who is it serving in? What is the result? Right? And once you have the WHO and the result, right?

I help moms be more organized. I help real estate agents flip houses, I help online business owners make a million dollars, whatever the WHO. And the result is, I want you to put that course aside and I want you to write a sales message, write a sales page, design it, get it so that you are like, if I had to get that person, the WHO that result, whatever the result is, how, how would I sell that to them and write it out. And then what you do is once that’s written out, you look at that sales page and if you think to yourself, okay, what I’m saying in that sales page isn’t fulfilled in this product, then you need to go back to the drawing board and build a new product or take pieces that are working in add pieces that in that weren’t there before, But honestly writing a sales page and a sales message and building your funnel before building a course will save you so much time and headache.

So as you’re building your online business, if funnels, sales, messages, copy, and those things are not at the front and center of what you’re learning, they need to become front and center. There are so many ways. One of the ways you can start to learn about funnels is to enroll in my program, The Digital Gangsta. You can go to thedigitalgangsta.com to see more about that. You will learn everything there is to know about building that vehicle, that sales message before you launch something. And the beautiful part about it is that when you do it this way, you never build something that doesn’t sell because you’re always focused so much on the sales message. Alright guys, have a great day.

If you’re ready to create growth scale your online business, you can go to createyourlaptoplife.com/podcast and get a free plan on how you can get started today.

Episode 8: The Line Of Personal Responsibility In Producing New Products

In this episode, I talk about what stops us from producing new products – imposter syndrome and our need for a 100% guarantee that we can promise a certain result. Where is the line of personal responsibility?

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Full Transcript:

Hey guys, hope you’re doing awesome today. This podcast episode. It’s not as clear in my head as some of my other ones, but I want to talk about the making of an expert. I gotta be honest with you. It is very hard sometimes to figure out where the line is between I’m responsible for my customers, my students, my client success versus a not my mess, not my problem. If you are in the online business life, if you’re a service provider, you’re going to run into this line because you’re going to wonder, okay, how much responsibility do I take for the success of this ad campaign for the success of this funnel, for the success of this website versus what are the things that are out of my control that I can do the best I can, and then that, then I can’t, you know? Then I have to let it go. If you’re a coach or consultant or a course creator, you’re going to run into the same problem just a little different. You’re going to think, okay, I am creating a coaching program or a course for this and this is the result I want, and what happens if those students, customers, clients, don’t get that result right away?

How much of it is your responsibility as the instructor or the coach versus how much of it is their responsibility? And even in the e-commerce space, you may have the same thing with a product understanding where the line is between the result that your product promises versus their responsibility. I mean, obviously you, you think about something like a car, right? Well, it’s the product manufacturers job to make the best car they can make the safest car they can make, right? To be accurate about the specs of the car. This is how big the gas tank is, this is how fast you can go and how fast the brakes respond and all that kind of stuff. But is the manufacturer responsible? When a 16-year-old punk takes the car out, you know, half in the bag and crashes it into a telephone pole, he dies and the safety mechanisms, you know, didn’t protect his life.

And I realize that’s a very, very dramatic example. But understanding the line of where your responsibility starts and ends and where your customer, client, student’s responsibility starts and ends is super important. Most of you guys know that I’m a coach, that I teach people how to build online businesses. That, uh, my goal is to get as many people into the two comma club as millionaires as possible. And a lot of times when you’re dealing with humans, they don’t do exactly what you tell them to do or they don’t hear what you say exactly. And I lose a lot of sleep over this. So I want to encourage you guys, because some of you may not be starting your business. You may not be launching your programs or courses because you feel like there’s something you have to acquire first as an expert so that you can feel 100 percent sure that you’re going to get the result that you promise so that you can alleviate this fear and not worry about pissing people off.

Am I right? Some of you are going to call it imposter syndrome, right? Like I can’t teach that yet. I can’t coach. I can’t launch that course because I can’t promise x, y, and Z. and the reality is that if you’re, if you know where that line is between what is your responsibility and what is your student, client or customer’s responsibility, you’ll be better able to make an accurate decision and an accurate perspective on whether or not you’re ready to launch something new. So what are the things that I do to try to find that line? So I’m going to give you a couple of examples in my business so that hopefully it will help.

The first one I want to do, and it is in the service based industry. So if you’re a copywriter, funnels ads, web designer, anything like that where you’re actually working with clients and producing a tangible asset. This example is for you.

One of the things that really scared me when I got started was that I didn’t. If I didn’t have crazy results yet, like I hadn’t made somebody a million dollars, I still was in business, still working with clients. So what did I do to create a good line? The first thing is that I set expectations. And in the last episode, I talked about how important expectations are. So as a service provider, it’s important for you to understand your industry, your industry’s benchmarks, so that you can set the expectation for the client as well, completely, totally will help you. So setting expectations. So for example, let’s say you’re building a funnel and they are expecting to make a million dollars on that funnel and you’re going to charge them 10 grand. Well, if you make a million dollars, 10 grand is a bargain, but what if in the first launch you only make 10 grand?

You have to ask them, are you willing to spend 10 grand to build this funnel knowing that you may not make all that money back on that first launch, but that you have a tangible, sellable asset vehicle that you can continue to use for years to come so that once that first launch is over with and we optimize and we get better and better and better, all that money on the back end will be profit. See immediately shifting expectations so that they understand that you’re not promising a million dollars. When you build that funnel, this is a very, very simple way for you to set that line of responsibility that you will build the best funnel you can build based on the offer that they have, but that you’re only a piece of the pie. So that’s how I would do it in the service based industry.

If you’re a true beginner, sometimes you can’t sell results. What you have to do is sell time first and that’s okay. It’s just understanding where you are in the market. Right? Okay. I don’t have million dollar results, I don’t have six-figure results, but I know that I’ve got these skills that I’ve been developing that I’ve been investing in and I can sell you back your time. So even though I can’t promise this funnel’s going to make a million dollars, I can promise you that I will save you the 60 or 70 hours of time it would have taken to build that funnel and I’m going to charge you a reasonable rate. Okay? There’s where you can easily create a line of responsibility so that you’re not so stressed out about producing something you’re not sure about yet. So the next thing is in a course creator or coaching model, right?

Where you’re offering tangible results in either a digital format or one on one. This one is really hard for me sometimes because I have people who come and they have great offers and they’re charismatic and they hit it out of the park and they just take what I’ve given them and they succeed and then I have other people who really struggle and at the end of the day as a coach, a consultant or a course creator, if you know that number one, the content and the training that you put out is sound that you’ve invested in your own training, that you know that it works, that you’ve seen at work in yourself or in other people. That’s the first thing.

Secondly, if you can set expectations for your students and your clients so that they understand, okay, you know, this isn’t meant to be a get rich quick, right? So this is where it’s really important that your marketing materials are congruent with what’s actually being sold, right? That’s really important in a lot of people do not do that honestly, and that’s part of the problem.

So those are the two biggest things that will help delineate the line in the sand. But at the end of the day, as a course creator, as a coaches, as a consultant, as in the words of Garrett White, I am a leader, not a savior, and you cannot position yourself as going to save your clients, save your students, save your customer because you are only a part of the equation. And so I think that if you can find that line and that you know that you’re really 100 percent proud of the work that you do, proud of the assets that you create. At that point, if you’re doing everything in your power and you’ve set those expectations and you have that integrity, the rest is on them and as hard as it is when you’re getting started and you just want that assurance that you’re going to be able to produce that result, or that course is going to be a home run. We can’t. We don’t have a crystal ball. Right?

Entrepreneurship is a risk. And so that’s kind of how I’ve come to terms with trying to figure out at what point I can teach something based on my own results. At what point I delineate between where my expertise ends and where my students and clients personal responsibility begins. So whether you’re in a service-based industry of course greet or a coach or consultant, strive to be in integrity, that will save you so many problems, honesty, integrity, consistency on the sales message as well as the result, not trying to use, you know, shady tricks and then always aiming very, very much so to set realistic expectations so that your customers and your clients are happy. And I’ll leave you with this little story. I was reading a book, it’s called Seducing Strangers and it’s how to get people to buy, whenever you’re selling.

And the guy was saying that he was, he was, had to do a jingle, like a commercial for a Taco joint. It was a really bad taco joint. He went in and the Tacos were greasy and everything fell apart and he was just like, oh my gosh, I’m going to create this commercial. And people are gonna come in once they’re going to be so disappointed and then they’re going to leave. They’re not going to buy again, and so he was taking personal responsibility for the fact that he didn’t want to create an advertisement that set the expectations so much higher than the actual delivery that it would actually cost them sales. So what he did was he actually created a jingle that matched the expectations. So the jingle was something about how like yummy tacos are greasy and yummy tacos fall in your lap, and he created this funny little jingle that kind of set the expectation that hey, when you go to this taco joint like you’re going to have a greasy taco that falls all over your lap.

But that’s the point. Right? And so when he set the expectation and he aimed to be in integrity and he aimed to do the best job that he could, what ended up happening is the customers came in and because that was their expectation, they were happy and they came back. And so let that be an encouragement to you that you don’t have to be the best in the world to get started today. That you don’t have to have a crystal ball. You can get started and if you aim for integrity and you aim for realistic expectations, you can make lots of students and clients and customers happy. And when there are some that aren’t happy, you can learn where that line of personal responsibility is. You guys have an awesome day. I appreciate you all. Talk soon. If you’re ready to create growth scale your online business, you can go to createyourlaptoplife.com/podcast and get a free plan on how you can get started today.

Coaching Create Your Laptop Life Podcast Jun 26, 2018

Episode 7: Are You Doing a Good Job? [Setting Expectations]

In this episode, I talk about the unbelievable importance of creating realistic expectations to make sure you stay motivated and succeed in your business.

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Full Transcript:

Hey everyone, this is Julie Hope you’re doing awesome today. I wanted to talk to you about expectations and how important they are in creating momentum in your business. I have a private message here from someone who had an expectation that their webinar that they were using to sell their offer was going to convert right away on the first shot, and for those of you who are new to the online business life, you may not quite understand all the ins and outs of sales funnels and webinars, but I see this happen all the time. Whether you’re a beginner or whether you’re advanced, you have an expectation of how your product or service is going to sell in the market. Oftentimes that expectation comes from various sources. One of the biggest sources of expectation creation comes from other marketers, comes from other people in the space, from competitors. Now, remember, when you’re on Instagram, when you were on Facebook, you’re looking at other people’s ads, other people’s sales pages, other people’s offers, and unless you intimately know them and their business, you don’t really truly know what’s happening behind the scenes.

For those of you who do funnel hacking, this is another problem where you’re going through somebody else’s funnel to try to reverse engineer it and figure out how it’s working. Unless they’re actually showing you their profit and loss statements every month, it’s very hard to know if that is generating revenue and if it is, what are the profits on that revenue. So we, even though we know this logically, emotionally, what happens is expectations get created. Every time we see a competitor or we see an ad or we see something on instagram that kind of shows off how something is supposed to be working.

So this guy, he messaged me and he wanted to thank me because he had gone to funnel hacking live back in March and came and sat around my table. There was like a roundtable discussion and he almost didn’t come to my table, he said because he didn’t really know me that well.

He just didn’t really think that I was the right guru for him. But traveling to all the tables and seeing that my table had a crowd around it. He also thought, okay, you know what, Russell Brunson has invested in Julie. So maybe I should listen to her too, which I guess is another podcast for another day about giving people a chance. And having kind of a, like an open heart for learning. Anyway, he came to my table. His webinar was converting at one percent. He had an expert expectation that this webinar sucked, right? He was in fact, he, he told me on the message that he was going to give up on this webinar. So one of the valuable things about, about expectations is when you set them correctly, they’re sometimes the difference between quitting versus continuing to go on forward. And so when he came to me and he said, his Webinar is converting at one percent, I said, well, that’s a great start.

I immediately switched his expectation from, no, you don’t suck. No, don’t quit. No, don’t give up too. Actually, no one percent is a good start. And if you’re new in the online business space, your expectations, if they’re being created by Gurus, by Instagram, by Facebook, as you’re going to have a completely whacked out expectation of what is good when you’re starting, when you hit 10,000, when you hit 100,000 when you hit a million. And so I said, no, that’s really good. And I gave him a few tips to help boost it. And so his message was, thank you. I was ready to quit. I thought it wasn’t working. You gave me some tips. I decided to finally listen to you. And then I went and I did my webinar again and this time it converted at eight percent and I’m so grateful. So I thought that was a really important message to share with you all because had he let his expectation rule and not gotten some outside perspective, he would have given up on it.

And I can give you a story. I’m gonna tell you a story now about how my expectations really screwed me up. And, it all starts back in 2016. I was launching the first version of Create Your Laptop Life. And I applied to be a part of Russell Brunson’s inner circle. And for whatever reason, at the time I knew that I needed a mentor. I knew that I needed someone to speak into my life and into my business and to help create expectations that were correct. Because you never know how hard to push yourself or how hard to let off the gas when you’re just kind of in your own bubble and the online business life is totally a bubble. It’s you and your laptop and whatever you’re allowing into your feed. So I applied for the inner circle, but at the time I was still very, very scared to bet on myself and that was ultimately the problem that I had was like his inner circle at the time was $25,000.

It’s now double that, but at the time I was like, oh my gosh, that’s a lot of money. How am I going to make that money back if I invest in this? Like I knew he was amazing. I knew his inner circle was amazing, but I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to turn out the goods. I was all ready to sign on the dotted line and I called up. I was on the. I was on the phone with the salesperson’s name, name’s Derek, really nice guy and I gave him my credit card. My credit card declined. He’s like, oh, that’s normal. This is a really big payment, just call your bank, and so I called my bank and I said, I’m trying to process a $25,000 payment, can you help? And they’re like, no, we’re not going to let you do that. So the banks kind of shot me down and that I had only just this very, very tiny little fragile piece of confidence and it got shot and so I bailed and I decided not to join the inner circle at that moment.

So hold that thought because what happened was as my business grew, as my funnels started to work, I had a wrong expectation and this wrong expectation number one caused me to shut down a program. Number two, cause me all kinds of hassle and problem in my business. So I had a membership. It was selling at $97 a month and I had, I think in one month I had about 100 people sign up and I wasn’t sure my expectation said, oh that’s good. Right? So My expectation was 100 people in one month was good, but then what would happen is the next month I would lose about 10 or 20 people in the membership. So out of 100 people who signed up 10 to 20 percent, we’re not renewing the next month. My expectation was that I was failing. That was terrible. Now had I been in the inner circle, because I know this because I did join the inner circle several months later, had I been able to reach out to Russell, reach out to other people who had more realistic expectations.

They would have told me that that churn rate on a membership is outrageously successful and to keep going. But because I had an expectation that it wasn’t working, that I was losing 10 to 20 percent of my members, I shut down the program and wrote it off as a failure. And I had all kinds of issues when I did that. People that were already in the program and how to get them onto a different type of program. It was a mess. Like it was probably one of my biggest mistakes to date, I shut the funnel off, I stopped the ads all because I had an unrealistic expectation and I didn’t have the mentors speaking into my life saying, no, you’re doing great. Keep going.

And so that’s. I know that sounds, you know, when people say, Oh, you need accountability, you need mentorship in the online business life. And it sounds so just cheesy, it sounds like, well, okay, come on, I need skills, I need hardcore skills, I need hardcore tactics, I need hardcore strategy and that’s all true, but you also, expectations will either make you successful or it will crush you. And so even this guy telling me, thank you so much for speaking to my webinar that was converting at one percent to my failure as to not having someone speaking into me about how successful I was actually being. I was very, it was very. It was a successful funnel, successful program. Everything. So that’s kind of my word for the day is like expectations and, and how are you creating those expectations?

Because I think that there are several ways to create expectations and number one is to obviously study. So if you’re doing sales funnels, if you’re doing online marketing, you need to study what the market, what is a benchmark for your market, what is the benchmark for ads, for Webinars, for funnels, for you know, conversions. You need to study those benchmarks so you understand them.

Secondly, you need to join a community, a community of other people that are doing it so that you can sort of start to gauge how it’s working for other people. So create your laptop life that membership community has a thousand members who are doing their online businesses, both the course creators, coaches, service providers. You can start to get more realistic expectations and you would ever get just reading somebody’s blog post or you know, looking at a Facebook ad. And then the third way is to get a mentor and to have a mentor that you can actually communicate with, whether it’s through a Q&A session, whether it’s through voxer access, whether it’s through one on one, whatever way you can. So that you can say, is this, is this realistic, is this normal?

You know, one of my dear, dear friends, she started her business and she hit like $20,000 a month in like the first two months of her business, you could tell that her expectation was that she wasn’t really doing very well because she was comparing herself to people who were making a million two, $3,000,000 a month. And I wanted to shake her. I said, no, you don’t understand like I have all these people starting these businesses similar to yours and they’re making, it’s a 5k or 10k, maybe in three to six months and you hit 20 k and two months. Again, expectation, you see it in dieting, you see it when people go on a diet, if they don’t lose weight, if they don’t get that momentum, that expectation can crush them. So that’s my advice to you is to make sure that you have really good ways to set expectations and to get whatever expectations you already have course corrected by a mentor, by a community and by studying the benchmark. So I hope that helps. I hope you guys have an amazing day and I’ll talk to you again soon.

If you’re ready to create growth scale your online business, you can go to createyourlaptoplife.com/podcast and get a free plan on how you can get started today.

Digital Marketing Funnel Building Jun 26, 2018

How to Get Started Copywriting for Digital Marketing and Sales Funnels

Copywriting is the single most important skill you can learn if you’re looking to get into digital marketing and sales funnel creation.

Time and time again I’ve seen “ugly” and poorly-designed landing pages convert because the copy is just so good.

Copywriting can also be one of the most intimidating things to learn, but it doesn’t have to be!

In this episode, I share my top tips for getting started as a copywriter for digital marketing and sales funnels.

Be sure to comment below or over on Facebook if you have questions about getting started as a copywriter.

Subscribe to Facebook and YouTube to get instant updates when new episodes are posted!

Video Transcript:

Hey, Julie here, today I want to talk about copywriting 101. If you’re looking to get into digital

marketing or funnels, you know that copy is the single most important skill that you can learn and it’s also sometimes one of the most intimidating.

My recommendation is if you want to get started with copy that you first look up a bunch of long-form sales letters in all different kinds of industries. So pick some from real estate, from making money online, from health and from various topics and once you get those sales letters, your job is to rewrite the sales letter. So put it in something simple like a Google Doc.

Copy all the text and then your job is to rewrite the sales letter. But do it for something completely random. Maybe change it to selling pens or selling shoes. Think of something really really random and kind of difficult to sell and rewrite the entire sales letter using the same form structure and words and try to sell your object.

Secondly, when you’re starting out with copywriting, you don’t have to start from scratch. I recommend that you start to gather a bunch of swipe files. So you look up things like in your junk mail when the mail comes. Grab the headlines. Grab the things that catch your eye and catch your attention. The same thing goes for ads on Facebook or sales letters other funnels that you’re in.

Anytime you see something that you like go ahead and create a resource pile because I find that when I’m writing sales copy, I often go back to the same emails the same subject lines and just tweak them.

And here’s a cool little tip: if you’re writing in the let’s just say you’re selling a real estate course. Sometimes I deliberately look for sales letters in a completely different industry because I

find that there’s some fun connections.

So let’s say I go and look up one of my sales letters in the health niche and it’s like how to lose 20 pounds in 30 days. I take that headline, I take out the parts about it that our health-related and I try to rewrite it for real estate. And this can create some fun play-on-words and help you think about ways to say things that you might not have said in the first place.

The next thing is when it comes time to actually describe your product there are three things you want to focus on. Most amateur copywriters focus on one or two but there are actually three.

You want to describe the features. So whatever it is you’re selling, is it what is it? Is it a book? Is it a course? Is it a program? so outline what those actual things are. The deliverables that they receive when they buy. that’s step one.
The second step is to talk about the benefits. What are the ultimate results and goals of whatever it is they’re buying? What are they going to get out of it? What is the payoff? Make sure you describe that.
Most people stop at features versus benefits but there’s actually a third step. And the third step is meaning. And that is writing about why those benefits matter. So if you’re talking about doing a real estate course the features might be eight modules workbooks some video lessons. Maybe a call the benefits might be that they can get their real estate business up in 30 days or less. It might mean they can get more leads. They can close their first deal… Those are the benefits. The results. But why is that meaningful to a real estate agent? Maybe it’s meaningful because they want to take a family vacation or because they want to help put their kid through college.

So describing features, benefits, and meaning make your copy that much more powerful.

Finally, don’t forget the two most important things in copy which are scarcity in urgency. So whether it’s a limitation of time a limitation of quantity or a limitation on price, you want to try to hit at least one if not all three of those different types of urgency and scarcity. People need a reason to act so give them one. So whether it’s the price goes up, the bonuses expire, enrollment goes away or there’s only 10 or 15 people allowed, try to find the urgency and scarcity and make it believable.

I know the best conversations happen after the camera stops rolling, so if you have a question about getting started as a copywriter leave a comment below and for more videos like this you can go to Juliechenell.com.

Business Strategy Create Your Laptop Life Podcast Jun 20, 2018

Episode 6: Two Things Nobody Tells You About Building a Business

In this episode, I dive into the “shiny” factor of business, and why it’s so harmful to entrepreneurs just getting started when ALL they see is the highlight reel, and not the real story. So many of us feel the emotional rollercoaster of highs and lows in business, and I give you a few pieces of advice on how to hold on during the ride.

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Full Transcript:

Hey, what’s up guys, this is Julie and today I want to talk about this stuff. Nobody talks about when you begin your laptop life. So you know, I don’t know about you, but if you go onto Facebook and you scroll on your news feed for like five minutes, you’re going to see ads for all kinds of business opportunities and they’re all going to be flowery. There’s usually pictures of Paris involved, maybe the beach, maybe Pina Coladas. At least some really good makeup. Everything looks so shiny and new, especially like if you’re in the coaching and consulting space. It seems like everybody is making millions of dollars and you were the only one who has not yet cracked the code on the laptop life. And it’s such bullshit. Now, this is not to say that you don’t want to put your best foot forward or you don’t want to.

When you get out there and you start doing your own advertising for your own business, that you don’t want to give people the best stuff you’ve got because of course, you do. But uh, the majority of people who are advertising the laptop life are only showing you half of the Pie. They’re not showing you all the other stuff. And I feel like, you know, on the one hand, I want to encourage all of you listening that the laptop life is absolutely 1000 percent the only kind of life that I will ever live. On the other hand, I feel like if I don’t as an expert or a guru or whatever is set the expectation for what it actually is like you will think you are crazy and you will think that it’s not working for you when it absolutely is an, all of us just have the same issues.

We just, some of us just hide it better than others. So for, first of all, I want to tell you that when I started my laptop life, it took my kids probably nine months to even figure out what the hell I was doing. I had gone from a stay at home mom to work at home mom. And as you can imagine, nobody liked it. And the amount of guilt that I felt as a mother was extensive because they would say to me, Oh, you’re just always on your screen now. Oh, you just, you don’t have time to do fun things was with us anymore. I mean, and I had like younger kids and older kids and it was like nine months of saying the consistent message, which is I now work here at my office. In fact, at the time that I started, it wasn’t even an office.

It was like a spot in the dining room, so they just couldn’t understand. And so if you feel like you’re really, your family is really struggling to, to get this through their heads, especially your kids, like nine months was how long it took before they finally started to get it. Then the husband, and this is like an ongoing thing. Like I, I see a lot of entrepreneurs with really supportive spouses, but it is very difficult if your spouse is not an entrepreneur, they don’t know what it feels like truly to have the buck stop with you. And so when you’re in a, in a traditional job, right, you can leave, you can clock out, you can go home. And even if you’re in the kind of position where people may call you after hours, the whole ship doesn’t go down. If you don’t answer your email, right?

There is, there’s buffers in place. When you start a laptop life, business, and online business, it is very hard to convince your spouse or maybe it’s your parents if you’re like, you know, hanging out with them on the holidays or whatever to convince them that you are literally the end of the road. The buck stops with you. That, yeah, pulling out your cell phone on Christmas morning is probably not a great idea. Or you know, you need to step away from the table at dinnertime because you know there are some financial emergency in your business. It’s very hard to convince the people that love you around you. Why you, why you have to answer these calls or why you have to answer this email. And of course, there are ways to like put, put things in place, right? You can hire VA’s, you can hire customer support team, you can put email autoresponders on, on the weekends, like there’s all kinds of things you can do, but when you’re just starting, when you’re really like bootstrapping, getting to your first, you know, 10 to 100 k, there’s not a lot of room in the budget and the buck just stops with you and in, in those really, really young businesses, there’s not a lot of standard operating procedures in place. And so if you feel like there’s something wrong with you or wrong with your business that your family or your spouse doesn’t quite understand why you have to take these calls.

Like that’s normal. I, I still, it’s still even with customer support team and standard operating procedures in place, there are times when I have to just answer the call. That is the cost of being an entrepreneur. I mean the beautiful benefit of it is that I can, yes, I can decide when I’m going to work and when I’m not, but it is a baby. You know, it’s a baby business and you can’t just not get up in the middle of the night and feed that baby. And so if your family is really struggling to understand that the best thing you can do is create as much opportunity in your life to make them a priority, knowing, build it into the expectation that there will be times when you’re on vacation or when you’re at the family table and you have to step away and as long as you build in an expectation and you leverage the times when it’s not stressful and make them a priority, they will adjust and they will adapt.

The next thing that nobody talks about in building a laptop life is the mind game that you’re going to play with yourself. And there’s a meme that goes around on Facebook and it’s like, I love being an entrepreneur. I hate being an entrepreneur. I’m amazing at this. I’m ready to quit. The highs and lows when you start a business are extreme like it. You may start to wonder if you have bipolar. I know I did. I was like, how can anyone freaking day I can go from like, I love my life too. I want to kill myself in like an hour’s time. And this is like across the board. So my advice to you as you, as you’re building your business is to remember this conversation that I’m having with you right now and to not make any decisions about your business that are longterm decisions when you’re either in an extreme high or an extreme low.

So what happens for me is like the eggs. When I’m in the extreme lows, I usually just repeat to myself again and again. Okay, today I feel like crap today. I want to burn my business to the ground. Today I think that all my offers suck. Today I think that I’m just the most boring human on planet earth. And I in that moment I remind myself that this is a low. This is all you have to say. This is a low. I’m not going to feel this way forever. This is a low. I’m not going to feel this way forever. I guarantee you you’ll come out of it. And if you make a decision to like kill a product or change your business name or like run off into the sunset and do something completely different, you’re going to regret it because of this is a low and you’re not gonna feel this way forever.

Now the same thing is just as dangerous in a high right in a super high when you’re just like, you think you can take over the world and you agree to launch a new course or you agree to take on a new project or you decide that you’re going to whatever, build a brand new, whatever. You’re going to probably come to regret that because you were in a super, super high. And so maybe it was just like enthusiasm sorta took over. And so when you’re in a, when you’re in that high, it’s much harder to not make decisions because you’re in high, right? So you think you can do anything. So in those highs, what I do is if I have ideas or I have stuff that I, that I get so excited about, I write it down and I tell myself this is a high, when the high ends, these ideas will still be here.

Okay. So it’s like this way I am not writing them off because I’ve had some great ideas in my highs. Right. And you might too, but I am writing them down so that when the high ends I can go back to them and I can be like, all right, well that, that, that was sounded like a good idea at the time, but like let’s maybe refocused this or maybe it’ll, it’ll stand the test of time because the really good ideas they will persist even when the high goes away. So that’s the second thing. Just remember that it, that you will feel an extreme high and extreme low sometimes within the same hour of the day and you have not contracted bipolar disorder. This is just the entrepreneurial life. And so these two things like my family spouse, adapting to it and then my own mind adapting to it was these things like they sound fluffy.

It’s like when we start a business or growing a business, we just want to know about like the tactics and the finances and all kinds of stuff and that’s all fine and well, and we can dive into that. But these two things here, your family response and your own mindset, like if you don’t set those expectations correctly from the get-go, man, the minute you hit like an actual hiccup, like a financial hiccup or a customer sport hiccup, you’re not going to be equipped to deal with it. So I just remember the more consistent and repetitive you can be with your family and with yourself, the faster you will acclimate to this kind of lifestyle and you will know, that the highs are amazing, that the lows suck so bad. But that the middle of the road, it starts to get easier and easier as time goes on. So, thank you guys for listening. Please, please, if you enjoy this podcast, share it with people. Leave a review, subscribe, and I will talk to you again soon.