Salome Schilalck

Salome Schillack:

Welcome to episode number 119 of The Shine Show. Today's episode is called How Your Online Course Will Change the World. And I think you'll find that today's episode is a little bit different. Enjoy.

Giving up your time and freedom to make money is so 2009. Hi, I'm your host, Salome Schillack, and I help online course creators launch, grow, and scale their businesses with Facebook and Instagram ads so that they can make more money and have an even bigger impact in the world. If you're ready to be inspired to dream bigger, launch sooner, and grow your online business faster, then tune in because you are ready to shine, and this is The Shine Show.

The purpose of this episode is to help you see that we online course creators are the leaders in social change in the world. That when we create our online courses and we can sell these courses to anyone anywhere in the world, that we then become able to take full control of our destiny by generating our own money in ways that support our lives. And also in ways that empowers us to put our money into places and into causes that matter and that lives up to the values we hold dear and the future that we want to see in the world.

Today's episode is not about Facebook ads. Today's episode is not about launch strategies. Today's episode is about freedom. But before we can talk about freedom and before we can unpack how having a successful online course business allows us to create freedom for ourselves and our family and our community and society as a whole, we need to backtrack a little bit. We need a little bit of a history lesson. We need to go back and see why is it that we are in this position where we crave freedom so much?

When I think back on the days when I was still in full-time employment and I hated every second of it, when I think about that day that I dropped my kids off at daycare and I couldn't go in and do the Mother's Day morning tea because all of the other mummies were there, but I had to catch a plane to go to a country town because someone somewhere had a spreadsheet that said on these days, I need to be in a country town. Before we can understand how our online courses helps us create freedom, we need to understand how we got to this place where we lack freedom. And so there's a bit of a history lesson here.

And before I dive into this history lesson, this lesson on what got us here and how we can change so that we can get there, I want to give full credit to somebody who started out as my student and now I have become her student. Her name is Daniela. And you can find Daniela at danielagrconsulting.ca. She has a course called The Work' 101. And what I loved so very much about going through this is if you're a history junkie like me, she's a bit of a history junkie too and she teaches the history of how we got where we're at in a very interesting way that kind of completely changed how I look at the social issues that we have today because now I understand where they come from and I have a far better context to put this in.

So I'm going to do my best to give you a little bit of a condensed version of the history of how we got where we're at right now. And this is important for you if you are craving more freedom in your life, if you are craving more money, if you are building an online courses business because somewhere along the line, you had enough of being an employee. You had enough of sitting in a cubicle. You had enough of a dude with a spreadsheet who tells you where you have to be and when you have to be there, or maybe you've already traded that dude with the spreadsheet for some coaching clients and now they are turning into dudes with spreadsheets. Maybe you've already traded your job for a coaching or a consulting business and now your clients have just turned into many bosses. So if you're craving freedom from that and you're paying attention to all the social things happening in the world right now, then I want to invite you to come on a bit of a history journey with me.

So let's start by looking at the history of how people made money, because let's face it, that's why we're here, right? But to where we're going, it's important that we know how we got here. And there were three main concepts that we need to look at to know how we got where we are today and to help us understand where we're going from here. I share these three concepts so that you can see how they have shaped the lack of freedom that brought us all here and the lack of financial empowerment, which is the exact thing that we as entrepreneurs crave so much right now. We are here because we want to make a bigger impact in the world, and we are here because we want to create more freedom. And that freedom shows up for us in terms of being in control of our own time, how we spend our time, but also being in control of our own ability to earn money.

The three history lessons, the three concepts that I'm going to talk about is capitalism, colonialism, and supremacy. Whoa, I bet those are three words you never thought you would hear on this podcast. You thought you were coming here for Facebook ads. No, this is Social Studies 101. So let's begin by looking at the history of capitalism. Capitalism is the way that money is run in most Western societies at the moment. Particularly, the US is probably... I think when I researched this, it says the US is the sixth most capitalist country. I don't know what that means, but Australia would be capitalist with a side dish of socialism. A country like Norway where all of their childcare, all of their healthcare, all of the education is paid for by the state is more leaning towards more socialism.

So what is capitalism? Capitalism, the underlying principle of capitalism was created in favor of the people, because what it aims to do is to put the power of creating money into the hands of the people more than the hands of the government. So in capitalism, private people own and control businesses and prices for the things that they buy and sell are set by the people, who are the market, based on supply and demand. The goal of capitalism is profit. One of the things that is beautiful about capitalism is it is designed to keep the money out of the hands of the government and in the hands of the people. The government is not meant to interfere with this free market.

Once somebody's in a perfect capitalist world creates a business fairly easily because they discovered the need for something, then that person can hire or purchase labor and people sell their labor in exchange for wages. So if you've ever had a job, that is exactly what you were doing. You were selling your labor in exchange for wages. One of the positive things of capitalism is that it is supposed to be a free market which is meant to promote entrepreneurship. And it's kind of the concept that the American Dream is built on. And I use the term American Dream loosely because even as a South African Australian, I'm familiar with the American Dream. I live in Australia because I wanted the American Dream, which is freedom to make money, right? So that's kind of the idea behind capitalism.

The problem with capitalism that we have at the moment is that, i.e., governments do interfere, the rich gets richer and the poor gets poorer. And the richer the rich gets, the more they can control the ruling bodies. If you think about the media and you think about who owns a lot of the media channels both in America and in Australia comes back to Rupert Murdoch. So Rupert Murdoch is a rich man who owns the media. The media tells us what to think and believe. And so wherever Rupert Murdoch puts his money, that is where the conversations of the day goes.

That's a very simplified version of where capitalism fails. The rich gets richer and the poor gets poorer to the point where the top 1% of the world owns 48% of the wealth. The next 9% own 39%. And the bottom 50% has to share less than 1%. We do not live in a world where there is a lack of resources. We do not live in a world where there is a lack of money. We live in a world where there is a lack of distribution of money.

And capitalism whilst it looked good on paper is horribly filing us all. The barriers to entry into markets, into bigger markets, gets harder and harder and harder as the rich build systems to protect their wealth and keep the labor force down. That is literally playing out in front of our very eyes. If you've been paying attention to any of the things that have been said about Amazon in the last few years, in the last few months, that is literally that playing out in front of our eyes.

The other part where capitalism fails us is that because it is a race for resources, it leads to extreme harm of the environment. When governments and the media can be bought and natural resources can be traded, kind of opens the door for a lot of bad stuff. So that is your history lesson on capitalism. Your lesson on what it is and how it contributes to some of the sticky situations we're dealing with in society today.

So from what you know about capitalism now, I wonder if you can see that if you have craved freedom, if you have craved giving your boss the finger, if you have craved having more power and more control over your time and having more power or control over your ability to create income, that it is a capitalism that you have butted your head against. But also in saying that, it is also capitalism that creates this free marketplace that we work and operate in. So we just have to know how we got here so that we can know why we're frustrated with what we have at the moment and then make decisions to take the power back.

Second ism that plays into all of these things is colonialism. And one of my favorite things that Daniela teaches that I've learned from her is how to live in a colonialist society, but become decolonized in our thinking and in our behavior. And I'm only literally starting to discover this and starting to learn this from her, but I love how it has just changed my entire perspective on all the social issues, racism, classism, everything. I'm just seeing how it all started with a bunch of white dudes that got in their boats, traveled around the world, stuck their flags in other people's lands and started oppressing people. And that is in a nutshell, colonialism.

Colonialism is when one society or one group of people dominate another group of people and where their sole purpose is to exploit the native people or the native resources in order to gain financial power or social power. Now, we can look at history lessons and say, like I make a joke about the white dudes who got in their boats and traveled everywhere. Yes, that is the start of a lot of it, but colonialism and the suppression of people from one group over another is as old as time. Think about the Vikings, think about Attila the Hun, think about... You can go back in history and find examples of one group of people invading another one's land and taking possession of what they own for as long as history.

We are today, still living and dealing with the consequences of this domination. And the destruction that it has caused, as a society, we are becoming more aware of the need and the urgency for change now. As a child, I grew up in a country that [inaudible 00:17:38] growing up in South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s at the height of apartheid, my eyes have never been as open to the destruction that comes as a result of colonialism.

And while I lived there, when you're entrenched in all of the nitty-gritty day-to-day issues that it creates, you don't always have the right perspective, but I feel like the fact that I've not lived there for so long, I can now look at the country that is my home, that I grew up in, South Africa, and I can look at Australia, which is another colonialist society where horrible things have been done to the native people here and still continues to be done today, and I can look as an outsider at a country like America and Canada and the UK and I can see so clearly how it all started with some dude who got in a boat and stuck his flag in a land and called it his own. And today we have to deal with the falling out of that.

And we see how people are starting to stand up against it. We see it in the Black Lives Matter movement and in gender equality and in all of the movements that are working towards creating a less binary society, a less black and white society, a less male, female society. We see it where LGBTQIA people are now speaking up for their rights. And we as allies can stand with them and say, well, hang on. We didn't even know that these things are happening, but now we can stand up and we can say, this is not right. It is not normal to be white, straight, and male. What if normal is all the colors and things that are in between?

And so the reason I share this with you is because I want you to see that unless we start to learn the history of how we got where we're at today, we end up just feeling frustrated and disempowered. But as online course creators, we get to do something about that. We get to change that. We get to affect change in the world once we can see it for what it is, call it by the name that we call it, and then start living a different way and showing our students and showing our communities and showing our societies a different way, which we are incredibly lucky that we get to do that because we're on the forefront of the change as online course creators.

And that brings me to my last little history lesson or thing that I need to explain, provide context around so that we can understand how we got where we're at today. And that last thing is supremacy. Supremacy is the belief that one thing or one group of people is superior over another and therefore deserve to dominate the other. Now, I want to tell you that if that word is triggering for you because it's only ever being used in your social circles in the context of describing really bad people who did really bad things and you are triggered by the word because you do not associate with those really, really bad people, I want to tell you that that is quite normal. And that is okay.

But I also want to invite you to resist the urge to reject the word and throw the baby out with the bath water. I want to encourage you to resist the urge to reject the word and the concept as a whole, because it is actually in our rejecting of this word and it is in our denying the existence of supremacy inside us and inside the society that we move in that this horrible thing holds its power. And that we actually end up upholding the power of the systems of supremacy unless we can call this by [inaudible 00:22:33], see it for what it is and not steer away from it, not look away when we hear the word because it triggers us and it reminds us of really bad people doing really bad things. Because there are still today normal people turning a blind eye, a lot of normal people turning a blind eye to really bad things. And unless we can embrace this word, we cannot start seeing it for what it is.

So keep an open mind and embrace this word because it's important that we, as online course creators, understand how what we're doing in the world will break down the structures of supremacy. And when we start breaking down these structures of supremacy, that is when we can start to create real freedom. And when I say real freedom, I mean the freedom you're craving, the time freedom, the financial freedom, but I'm also talking about freedom for other people, freedom for people who have been suppressed under the supremacist societies, society in the systems of supremacy. Because I know it sounds cliche, but it is so true. It's cliche because it's true. If one of us isn't free, then none of us are free.

And if you've ever worried about being judged online or being intimidated online or being bullied, go and see what non-binary people have to go through. Go and see what black people have to go through. Educate yourself on all the things that other people have that infringe on their freedom that we might take for granted. Because that craving you have for freedom, financial freedom and time freedom, if we can create it for ourselves and we can create freedom for other people, then we will impact significantly in this world. We will create a significant impact.

Supremacy. Back to supremacy. Three types of supremacy you need to know about. White supremacy is the belief that white is more superior to anything else. That is prevalent in society everywhere. That needs to change. Male supremacy is the second one. It is the belief that men are superior to women, or even just that there are such a thing as male and female, and it is a dichotomy that everything else existing side of that dichotomy. And the third form of supremacy is human supremacy. And that comes to play in how we believe that we as humans dominate the earth and we can do with it what we want. And as a result of human supremacy, we are dealing with climate change, which is slowly killing us.

Okay, that is the end of my history lesson, my social studies lesson. I know you didn't come here for that. I know. And that's a bit heavy too. You need to know that where we're at in 2021 and where we are moving towards as a society, a global society, as the Western world, as humans who wants to lead the way of freedom, it's very important that we understand these things and that we know that we are the leaders in this change. Entrepreneurship will become the true key to financial freedom, emotional freedom, freedom from systems of oppression. It'll give you cubicle freedom that you're craving. And when you get out from the suppression of the labor force, you will be able to create more time freedom for yourself, and you take away the cap on your earning potential.

That is what happens when you truly embrace your role as an entrepreneur and as an online course creator in this world, because selling our knowledge is a resource every single one of us possess and it only takes a handful of skills that we need to learn so that we can create brand new economies that frees us from being laborers. And it also allows us to create new workforces that does not exploit workers, that pays people well, that allows our team and our workers to thrive and to have more freedom too. That freedom is not just for the entrepreneur. It is the entrepreneur who is going to change the way that the world works.

The market value of the online courses industry was valued in 2020 according to an article I found on Forbes as $250 billion in 2020. The projections are that by 2025, this industry will be around $350 billion. And another research article I found suggested that by 2027, it will surpass $1 trillion. So here's the bottom line. If you care about social change and about becoming a successful online course creator, then the fastest way to make the biggest impact in the world is to package up your knowledge, start selling it online. If other people's freedom matters to you, know that when you teach the thing that you know, the change that you've created in your life, the skill that you have, and you openly live your values and create student communities where you can demonstrate those values, the impact you have goes beyond just the skill you teach. It starts to create real social change.

If you want to take full control of your financial future and the financial future of your children and leave a legacy for your children, hand down generational wealth which creates power, then the fastest way to get there is to create an online course and sell your knowledge. We the online course creators, we are the leaders. We are the forerunners. This is only just beginning. This is the start. You are a pioneer. We get to make this up the way that we want to see it change our societies. The time to get started with your online course is now. The time to start building audiences and start selling courses to them and start creating communities where we create change is now.

And so I want to invite you, my friend and my mentor, Amy Porterfield, will be opening enrollment to her signature course, Digital Course Academy. Amy changed my life. Amy has taught me to build freedom for myself and my family, and I am learning how to create that for my community and for society. But if you want to take the first steps to learning how to package your knowledge up and start selling that as a digital course so that you can start creating the financial freedom for yourself, the time freedom for yourself, the impact freedom for your community, and the social freedom for people as a whole, then I want to invite you to check out Digital Course Academy. And you can go to https://shineandsucceed.com/dca if you want to sign up for Amy's 30-day bootcamp that's going to help you get started.

If you have any questions about today's episode, or if you want to share anything with me, I want to invite you to send me a DM on Instagram. I would love to hear your thoughts, and I would love to hear what you're doing to use your online courses to create social change and impact. Have a wonderful week. And I'll see you again next week. Bye.

Thank you so much for listening. If you had fun, please come back next week. And remember to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing.

Salome Schillack:

Hello, and welcome to episode number 118 of The Shine Show. Today, we're going to talk about your worthiness of earning more money, and I have brought my coach and my friend Belinda Rosenblum on to talk to you about your thoughts around money. Belinda is a CPI and a money strategist, and she founded Own Your Money and created a signature Cashflow CEO program. The purpose of these courses is to empower female entrepreneurs to feel worthy, in action, and safe with money and cashflow, so they can enjoy the freedom they started their business for in the first place, and pay themselves consistently.

Sounds like a good idea to me. Once these women are the same ambitious, loving, successful women behind the scenes, as they appear to be on the outside world, then their impact can be fully realized. She is also the author of Self-Worth to Net-Worth: 12 Keys to Creating Wealth Inside and Out, and became a self-made millionaire at 33. Let's jump in to my interview with Belinda.

Giving up your time and freedom to make money is so 2009. Hi, I'm your host, Salome Schillack, and I help online course creators launch grow and scale their businesses with Facebook and Instagram ads so that they can make more money and have an even bigger impact in the world. If you're ready to be inspired to dream bigger, launch sooner, and grow your online business faster, then tune in because you are ready to shine, and this is The Shine Show.

Belinda, welcome to the shine show. I'm so happy you're here today.

Belinda Rosenblum:

Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. It's exciting that we're making this happen now. 

Salome Schillack:

Yes. Well, you and I have been on a journey the last six months in helping me clean up my money mess. I don't think it was a giant mess, but still, just having your brain inside my numbers and helping me look at my numbers a little bit differently, have been incredibly helpful. So, thank you. I'm so excited to have you come and share some of your wisdom with The Shine Show listeners.

Belinda Rosenblum:

Well, thank you so much for having me. It's so interesting. I feel like there's always room for improvement, right? It's not about feeling bad about where you are. It's about recognizing that you're so committed to getting to that next level and getting to that next level faster, right?

Salome Schillack:

Yes.

Belinda Rosenblum:

So, you appreciate the idea of investing to help you get there. [crosstalk 00:02:50].

Salome Schillack:

Yeah. I always think it's like an onion that you peel, because you learn the same lessons essentially over and over and it just goes to another level, right?

Belinda Rosenblum:

Absolutely. Absolutely, and hopefully you don't cry each time you ...

Salome Schillack:

Yeah, maybe I should find a better-

Belinda Rosenblum:

[crosstalk 00:03:08].

Salome Schillack:

A better metaphor than onion.

Belinda Rosenblum:

Because I got it. Sometimes I use that metaphor around our beliefs. We think that, oh, I tackled that limiting belief. I'm past that, but it's like peeling an onion. As you keep going to that next level, it's like you feel somewhere off and then you're like, oh geez, now I have this belief. It happens a lot to entrepreneurs because they'll be like, oh, I'm good. I can get to $5,000 a month or $100,000 business even.

Then it's like, whoa. Then they peel that away, and then the next level is like, but am I okay getting ... Or first I guess it's, can I sustain this? And then it's, am I okay? Can I contain being the $150,000, $200,000 business owner? Everything you're saying is right on track, and I think a lot of people can probably relate that they value coaching to help them reach that next level, particularly as it relates to understanding the money side of your business enough to do projections right into really, not just live in the moment hoping for a strong next month or next quarter, but really being intentional about it.

And aligning, I call it getting clarity with your money, where you're aligning your emotions, your tactics and your strategy. Usually, people have one or two, but it's when the three come together, boom, that's when your business really takes off, so I love how you've done that.

Salome Schillack:

Absolutely. I agree with you. I think one of the places where getting a coach or getting someone to coach you is really helpful for me is, I mean, you know me now a little bit. My brain runs at 700,000 kilometers per hour. That's a lot of miles per hour for my American friends.

Belinda Rosenblum:

It does.

Salome Schillack:

It runs really fast and I drive myself nuts with all of the conversations in my own head. So, sometimes you just need someone to sit down with you and go, just stop, chill, and put it down on a spreadsheet. And then you put it down on a spreadsheet, and suddenly the voices in your head can calm down, because it is now there and you can look at it and you can see how it works and you can see that it is working, and then you can make informed decisions from there. But the thing that I love the most about your work is the little bit in your bio that says you help female entrepreneurs to feel worthy around money. Tell me more about why is it so hard for female entrepreneurs to feel worthy around money?

Belinda Rosenblum:

Well, I think that it's an amazing question. It's only recently, I've been doing this now for 14 years, that I've been running our business called Own Your Money. I was in personal finance for about 12 years. Now, the last two and a half, it's really been focusing on small business owners. One of the things that I keep seeing come up again and again is the lack of worthiness, and then seeing how that then translates to become, people call it the imposter syndrome or money mindset blocks, right?

It's all of that. But at the core, it's that we aren't feeling worthy of our success, and even super ambitious driven, amazing women. Part of what I am really here to do is to have people feel that confident on the inside, like behind the scenes, as they make, like they are on the Instagram videos, and on the Instagram frame. I think that a lot of what happens is that we struggle with a lot of shame around our money.

I've been really studying a lot around Brene Brown and she has some ... The Gifts of Imperfection is an incredible book if you haven't read it yet, for those listening. It's how she sources shame, is that shame really has two messages. One is you're never good enough and the other one is, who do you think you are? I feel like those are the record player, not to date myself too much, but they're what so many entrepreneurs keep telling themselves. Then the way she defined shame is, as the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.

I think what happens is that we keep trying to do more and hustle harder. There's a lot of hustle culture that's still out there. Fortunately, there's people on the other side, like you and I, who are like, wait a second, hustling harder is not actually going to get you to the solution that you're looking for. But there's so much of that out there, that it ends up feeling like, gosh, if people see me struggle, if they see what's really happening behind the scenes, that I have to put an effort to achieve the success that I have, then I won't really be worthy.

And then we are like trying to fill this bucket that has a whole limit. It's never allowing ourselves to fill up, and it's because we, at the core, aren't feeling worthy and we're looking for that externally. So, we're looking for that validation from outside of ourselves. As we can start to recognize, wait a second, the only way that I'm ever going to feel worthy is if I can own my own worthiness, then everything becomes easier.

I talk about worthiness in the conversation of just even looking at your numbers of getting smart with money. I talk about it in the conversation of pricing, which we'll talk more about today, because this idea of owning your worthiness gets hard to do when we feel like, gosh, I just have to strive for the next thing. I can't feel worthy enough until I'm making more money, until I feel more skilled in something, until I have a bigger following, until I have $100,000 launch, until I have $1 million business so I can be more productive.

But all that does is it just puts us on the speed train to burn out. I think that, that's what so many potentially successful entrepreneurs may be feeling, like if you're listening to this now, you can be nodding your head like, yeah. It's like, we're just trying to work harder and harder and people please to be able to then feel worthy. But really, what I want you to start to realize is that, it's when you can own your shame even. I actually just wrote an article recently for a magazine called [inaudible 00:09:59], and the title of it was called Healing Money Shame and Stepping Into Your Worthiness.

Because it's, once you can own your story and you can even own your shame, like own the things that have been where you haven't felt like enough up to this point, and you can say, wait a second, if I own it, it's kind of like Gremlins, if you remember that movie, it's like, when the gremlins come into sunlight, they die. I think what happens is that when we can bring those shame gremlins into the light and not have them mean something about who we are and to take us down several notches on our self-esteem, when we can instead recognize it and love ourselves through that, then we can really step into our power.

Then we can really own our worthiness. It's only then, because otherwise, we just keep pushing and keep trying. I'm sorry to say, but I'm also kind of happy to say, the day will never come when that external validation will ever plug up that bucket for you, will ever really be like, okay, you're done. Because just think, whenever you get like some big, yes, you reached that $10,000 launch or the $50,000, the $100,000 launch, your Facebook ads actually take off, or let me just add a reel on Instagram got like 13,000 views.

It's like, we're happy for a moment and then it disappears, until we can re we can actually own our story and fully self accept who we are, and we can get to the point, and I see this all the time with pricing, when we need to recognize that our worthiness is separate and distinct from what we charge, from how our business is doing, from our numbers. But it can be so hard, particularly when we're a personal brand. Literally, our name is often on the outside of the business. When I started, it was my name LLC.

For a lot of people, that's how they have it. So, it certainly adds to the complication, but it also makes it even more important for you to be able to find your own worthiness, independent of how your business is doing, how much you're charging. Then it's only then, once we can win this war, so to speak, from the inside, then once we're solid and we're feeling whole, then the person that we're bringing to the world can create so much more of an impact, but not until we step into that worthiness ourselves.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah. I love that. The word that you used that jumps out at me, that Brene Brown is so good at using as well is belong. We are so afraid that we're not going to belong, we're not going to be worthy of belonging. I'm a firm believer that you attract what you already believe in your head. I think what I've seen happen so much is we believe that we don't deserve to belong in with ... Let's say we don't deserve to belong with students who have paid us what we believe is more money than what we're worthy of getting paid.

But the flip side of that coin is, on some level, there also has to be a belief that I do belong with the people who do not have money to pay me or the people who are not going to pay me, and I think it's kind of in that cycle that I see people underpricing, undercharging, giving away for free, over discounting, and continuously put themselves in a space where the only student you can attract is a broke student who's going to ask for a refund and not participate in your course and tell you that your course is too expensive. So, you kind of set yourself up to fail from the beginning. I think that's linked to that belonging ...

Belinda Rosenblum:

Piece of it. Yeah. Well, it's on the deserving front, which is closely tied to the belonging thing. I've had lots of challenges with belonging myself, and I think that, that's why when I started tapping into this, I felt like that it was, by understanding shame, it was finally being able to articulate a lot of the challenges that I had, had. Not realizing, not being able to it until then. I think that so much of her work is about vulnerability and about shame grows in secrecy and has us feel so alone. I think what happens is that we try and portray a person that we're not sometimes though.

The reality though, is that the law of attraction is working all the time. So, when you're attracting the people who are trying to back out or don't have the money, then that is very much related to who you feel like you deserve to have in your program. That when you claim the results, when you claim the value, when you claim the price that you're charging, then you'll start to be able to attract the right people who will be willing to pay that.

I will share a story. When I started this business a while ago, I was in the world of personal finance for the first 12 years. I literally had a TV show, a book, a radio show. I was like on the news, on the day of the federal bailout here in the US. I talk a lot about this, but when I started way back, 2007 now, I was marketing to broke people because I was like, well, who needs more money? Who needs to save more? And it was people who didn't have money. When I reread some of like my flyers, I was like, who would ever want to raise their hand for this program?

It's funny. Then I kind of woke up, and I was like, wait a second. I need to own the fact that the people that have this challenge around not saving enough and not really understanding their money, aren't just people who don't have money and aren't making money, but it's also people who are making $100,000 and they're not feeling like they're taking anything home. Then when I started to shift it from trying to market to people who were unemployed or not making money, that was just sort of who I was attracting. It's a really good reflection. Like if you want to know what's your perception of what you deserve, start to look at your clientele, start to look at who you're attracting.

If you're attracting a lot of people who want refunds or who are defaulting or who are looking for a different extended payment plan from what you have, it's often a reflection of your own money story. Of who you feel like you deserve to have in your program. Once you start to shift that and you get more clear about, this is my program, and this is who will excel in it, and owning that the value of what you're creating is so good that people will want to pay for it.

I think that it's like, we discounted in our own heads first, and then we say it because we're having trouble sitting in alignment with the price that you're charging. I just did a workshop, by the time this airs, called Confidently Raise Your Prices. A part of that is that you can't just charge what some coach tells you to charge until you can own the value of what you're doing and can clearly align the results that you can create for a certain group of people, that you have a strong promise and clear results of your program.

If you're not there yet, don't charge a high ticket price. I think that our internet marketing space sometimes does a bit of a disservice for people because it just says like, charge high ticket. Well, before you're charged high ticket, make sure you can get results, and be super clear on that for yourself, for your clients, so that you can, very specifically and clearly, point to the results that your program can create. If you're not there yet, then offer for a lower price and get those testimonials, get that success to prove it to yourself and to prove it to the people that you're going to want to have in your program.

That's why, oftentimes, when we all do a beta, we'll do it at half price. And then, we're, not because I don't believe in the results that we're going to get, it's just, I know I'm going to be going through a few growing pains while I hash out the content, while I do it live instead of recorded, like there's just things that are going to be a little bit more in process. We have our cashflow CEO program, that's our signature program, and when we started, it was called Smart Six Figure Finances. I did it live and it had five modules, and then it turned into six modules during the program.

So, I was like, I think there's a six. I don't know what it is. I was full disclosure with the people that were taking it, but they got a savings in exchange for giving me a ton of feedback. Then the feedback that they gave me helped me really take that program to the next level. I think that it's all about getting to that point of where you are so comfortable with your price, that it's like pass the salt, pass the pepper, here's what I charge.

Then you don't feel like you have to discount, like you're so aligned with that price that you're charging that you can say, this is the price and not flinch. If you're in a webinar, your voice doesn't have to change six octaves up. You're like, this is what I charge. We've all done that. I've listened to some past stuff of mine, and I'm like, oh my gosh, I totally do it. I do think that it helps to practice. It does help for you to like, even write it down on a piece of paper and post it next to your desk.

It's almost like, when you're on a call with somebody who's interested in what you have, you have a pricing sheet and you align the problem that they have with the solution that you're offering, and then you're like, okay, for that solution, it's going to be this program of mine, and this is what I charge. You end your voice on down, not an up. With a period, not a question mark.

Salome Schillack:

Yes.

Belinda Rosenblum:

I think that all of those are good little exercises for you to be like, yes. I would love it, honestly, if you like write down your prices or type them up and post them up, and put a picture on IG and tag the two of us and. Show us that you're getting clear on your prices, and so clear that you're literally able to post them up. 

Salome Schillack:

Oh, I love that. So, if you're listening to this, put up a picture on Instagram with a sticky note or a little, you don't have to show it publicly, but show us the sticky note, show us the note, and tag myself and Belinda, and let us know that you are writing your prices on a piece of paper. I love that, because if you have a pricing sheet, but you can almost pretend it's someone else's pricing sheet, if that helps, I want to say. If it helps to say, well, right now I'm wearing the sales person's hat in my business, but on another day, I wear the CEO hat, and the CEO gave me this pricing sheet, and the sales person is told just to stick to the pricing sheet.

You can split your personality if you need to. If that means that you tell yourself, the boss said, the price is the price, and you're the boss, but now you're also reading off of a price sheet. If that helps, by all means, do that. I think you touched on something where you said we need to own and take responsibility for the people that we attract, and that's an indication of the money mindset stuff that we need to deal with.

But there's a side to that where I see sometimes my students struggle because they own too much of, somebody requested a refund, and now they make that mean I charge too much. Or here's one that I got this week. I sold my course to 10 people, five of them aren't coming to the live sessions. I'm just holding my breath until they ask for a refund. I literally had this conversation with the student this week, the expectation that people are going to want their money back.

I felt that way. When I started, I certainly can associate with that absolute crippling fear, and I can say, once you've had enough refund requests, you get to a point where you don't even have to see it anymore. You just have someone take care of it and refund it and you don't care about it. But when you're just starting out and you, or yourself, still unsure of the problem that you solve, there's a real balance between letting negative feedback from students impact your worth, your worthiness, your image of your own worth, and having that play out in terms of reducing prices or changing prices.

Do you see that happening a lot, especially for new entrepreneurs, especially for people who are selling their courses for the first, second, third time, and they're still working out their marketing message, and they're still working out their offers, and so they're not always getting the best results? What's your message to them when there is still a part of the external validation that needs to happen? How do you balance the external validation and the internal worthiness when you're still trying to figure out like, what is a good price for what I'm offering, and can I solve this problem for this student?

Belinda Rosenblum:

Yeah. Okay. There's a lot of good questions in there. Let me just start at the top from what you talked about. I think that the piece of an expectation of, will they want their money back? You have to really catch yourself when you find that, that's your expectation. My expectation is actually the other way. We've been running Cashflow CEO now for two and a half years, we haven't had a refund request. I think that ... I go into it thinking, we're not going to have a refund request. We're going to deliver, we're going to show up, we're going to give people so much value that they're not going to want to get a refund, because then they're going to lose access to the course. Why would anybody ever want that?

I think that it's about recognizing that the law of attraction is always at work. Either you're attracting the positive side or you're attracting the negative side. So, if you have a negative expectation, then that's likely what you will be attracting back. I really want people to be able to catch themselves when they have that and say, okay, wait a second, what's the fear? What's the limiting belief that's driving that expectation? And how can I actually source that and address that, kind of bring that gremlin into the light?

If I have an expectation of, that they'll want their money back, then take a step back, and say, okay, what makes you think that? What are you actually afraid of? Are you thinking that because they haven't come to a live call? We have people that just do the replays. They come into it knowing that they just make time because they're in a different time zone or they're not going to be able to make it, but then, maybe they're in the Facebook group or maybe they don't ever talk with me on a live coaching call, and they still execute, they still do the work.

For people to catch themselves and to say, wait a second, how do I shift my expectation, and how do I make sure that I'm creating enough value? If you're not sure, then charge a little bit less, particularly when people are doing one-to-one work. I'm like, don't just jump out of the gate and charge $1,000 a month for people because you're going to feel too much pressure, and maybe you can't deliver at $1,000 a month yet. But I remember, when I started out like 14 years ago, I helped some people for free, my moms, my close friends. They were all my first clients to get my success, to have me develop a process and a framework.

Then I charged 275 a month, and then I charged 350 a month, and then I just kept bumping it up. Charge to people at the current price, get comfortable charging that price, raise it. The next two people don't know what you just charged the previous people. If you need to, do that, but it's so important that you always feel aligned with your price, because if you're giving a price because you saw somebody else can get away with that price, well, you don't know the results that that other person can create, and the value is always determined in the eye of the people paying you.

I was just thinking about this the other day, that one of my friends has like a tumor in her brain. It's really crazy. We don't think it's anything, but we're going to know soon. It just reminded me, like, if you find out that a brain surgeon is $10,000 an hour to give you a consultation, but you don't have any brain problem, it's not worth $10,000 to you. But if you know, and you do have a tumor in your brain, and you're like, this is the world renowned person, if they look at my scans and they'll be able to tell me exactly what I need to do and who's the right person to do the surgery on me, that could be the best $10,000 you spent in your entire life.

It's understanding that we need to make sure that we're getting the right people who have the problem that we want to solve. Recognizing that you want to be specific enough so that the right people can say, yes, this is worth it to me. That's the expectation piece. Then I think that the next piece was not letting the negativity from students or things that happen impact your own worth. You touched on that.

Then I think that's a piece of not taking things too personally in your business. I know it's easy to say, and it's like a muscle that you have to build so that you recognize again, as part of that separating yourself from the service that you're delivering, but to recognize that some people will never be happy. You try not to attract them, but there are some of them out there. But to recognize that the best that you can do is be committed to helping your students achieve the outcome that they are paying you to achieve, that they are investing in you to achieve.

I will say that about, so every two years or so, we make a major shift in the business. Two years ago, I shifted to business finance, for instance, and then, about every two or three years, I come out with a new program. We're coming out with Cashflow CEO 2.0 this fall. That's normal to keep evolving. The key part that I've really come to step into recently is, it doesn't make what you're currently doing bad or wrong. If you can recognize that you are serving now, you are achieving results, and there will always be the next level of evolution, and that's why I do think that coaching is so helpful because oftentimes coaches like you or I can see what other people can't see about themselves.

So, we can help them see, okay, this is the little 10% or 20% that you can't see yourself that then opens up the 80% of the growth that you maybe have been missing out on. Yeah, so I think that it's really giving yourself space to be successful in the moment and be grateful for where you are, and to see that there's an evolution that's coming for you in a really good way. That there's always room to keep growing. That I think is the second piece. Then the third one that you touched on was, is there still some external validation that needs to happen as they're figuring this out?

That's why I think it's so important to be collecting the results of your students. We'll have like just stuff on the counters, like thank you notes from our students. I have a little file here of all the notes I've received over the years, or on my phone, I have an album of the wins. I'll screenshot wins from our students. Constantly be collecting the wins, and it serves two major purposes. One is that it's actually reminding your students that you have been the catalyst or the facilitator of the success that they've been having.

Then it aligns them with the value that they have gotten from your program or from your membership. Second, it helps you to remember that, yes, you are in fact creating results. There is something that's coming out of this. I think sometimes we're just so busy in the doing and the coaching that we don't step back and take the time. I actually, I hired one of our students to do some interior design stuff in our house, and I was just chatting with her, and I was like, "Well, how has your business changed since you took Cashflow CEO in October?" And she was like, "Well, at the time, I was maybe ran like 2,500." And she's like, "And last month, I had a $10,000 a month."

I was like, how are you not shouting that from the rooftops? Then I'm like, thinking to myself, how did I not ask that question right until now? That's why now we've instituted Wednesday wins. We're constantly having asking our students, so after Cashflow CEO, there's a Cashflow CEO Academy, so we're in a membership with people on an ongoing basis, and so we're encouraging them, we're doing quarterly reviews so that they take the time to reflect back on how they did in the quarter, and then to start to plan the next quarter or the back half of the year we recently did.

Then it also reminds you, okay, great, these are the results that I'm creating. Then you can use those stories. We know Stu McLaren, and he calls it the circle of awesomeness. It's like, as you help people, and as they achieve results, then you can tell their stories, and then provide social proof for the next people who are like, oh good. It's not just that you've achieved results for yourself. It's that you've also can prove to me that you achieve results for your students again and again, and again, and to keep telling those stories, to keep showing people what's possible for them.

I actually think, it's a little spoiler, but I think the people look at courses and look for reasons why they're not a good fit for your course. Even if they have the exact problem that your course solves, I think that their default, so our brains are programmed to keep us alive, and so it assumes that whatever you've been doing up to this point has kept you safe and alive, so just keep doing that. Don't change anything. Then, when people look at a potential course, like let's say you have an amazing course, and you do have an amazing course, I've seen it, and then they ... There's a part of them that's like, oh, this could be really good for me.

But you have to know going into it, that there is a visceral part of them that is looking for a reason why it's not a good fit. Some of those objections are just coming from fear. If you go into it and you're like, okay, I don't have to let their fears affect my confidence with my price and with the value that my course or program is going to be delivering. Instead, it's about showing them, how can they be confident in the results that you can achieve? How can they trust you, but also trust themselves to do the work?

I think that's often it. It's not that people don't think that we, as the creators, can create the results, with some instance that they don't trust themselves, but it's getting them so excited for the outcome that they can get from your program or membership and recognizing the flip side, which is the cost that they will continue to suffer if they keep making the mistakes that they're making and if they keep staying in the problem. One of the things that we're covering in that pricing workshop is like, okay, what would be the effect of you raising your prices now?

Then what would be the effect if you wait six months to raise your prices? Because I want people to feel the pain of the money that they're leaving on the table by not actually charging what they need to charge, and not finding the space of confidence in themselves to appropriately charge for what they are delivering.

Salome Schillack:

I love that. I love that. I have, every single time I've increased the prices in the agency, I have wished I'd done it sooner.

Belinda Rosenblum:

Yeah. I don't think anyone ever says, oh, I'm so glad I waited to raise my prices. I don't think I've ever heard [crosstalk 00:36:14].

Salome Schillack:

Yeah. I'm so glad I held on to that belief that I couldn't raise my prices. No, every ... I will tell you, every single time, and I'm speaking about the agency because with A-Lister and the launch lounge, I kind of feel like we're still in its infancy. I haven't raised the prices much on either of those programs. But with the agency, I can speak from experience where I have gone from working for free, as a freelancer of Facebook ads manager, to then charging 700, like I think it started with $500 a month, and then $750 a month, which I remember feeling anxious about charging that, and then going to $1,500.

I remember specifically quoting that $1,500 to someone and almost feeling apologetic for how much it was, and then they say yes, and you go, what? Yes. And you sign them up. And then everyone else after that comes on the new price, and you don't feel apologetic anymore because now you're getting it.

Belinda Rosenblum:

You got over it.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah. And then from 1,500, I remember when I put it up to two and a half, and I remember the first person I had that conversation with who signed up at that price, the mind blown moment I had when she said yes, and I was like, holy cow, this is real. This is going up. And then it went up, and then I put it to three and a half, and I was like, great, here we go, and the same thing. There's price increase paralysis something. Something happens when you increase your price, and that first time that you have to say that new price, I think that's what you're saying, like practicing it in the mirror, owning it.

That fear by piece of your brain is programmed. It is conditioned to jump in front of you, kicking and screaming, and go, no, stay safe, stay safe, and you've got to built that muscle to go, no, I'm still going to confidently quote my new price, put it up, own it, and do it sooner rather than later.

Belinda Rosenblum:

Absolutely, and I think that's such a great story. I think that part of it is that, as you were raising your price, you knew that you were getting results, right? If there was a time when you stopped getting results, we would have stopped raising your prices. We would have said, wait a second, hold on. Let's make sure that you can still achieve results and then you can keep going, then you can charge that. Because if you have, again, if you have doubt, you will project that onto them. I think that, when you're on a sales call, they're on problem island, they want to go to solution island and you want to take them on a direct trip to solution island.

But oftentimes, we stop at objection island. It's never good. It's like a deserted stranded island. There's nothing good that happens on objection island. Sometimes praising is more of an art than a science. I think that, that's part of it. I find that it's often, when it comes to our one-to-one rates, that this stuff applies more, or an agency model versus a program. Sometimes it's about recognizing, what do I want this program to be? Do I want this program to be ... It was ironic. We're charging $37 for a pricing workshop on Confidently Raising Your Prices. Somebody wrote me a comment like, this is kind of ironic. Like, are you charging enough for this? Someone was like, I would pay  $1,000 for this.

I was like, well, this is intentional. I want people to be able to experience the wind with me. I want people to understand that pricing is one element of increasing the profit and understanding the money side of your business. I'm intentionally pricing it as a low ticket offer. I could create a longer program and I could make it $500. I think pricing is a really important topic, and I'm glad we're talking about it today. When you're pricing, it's also about recognizing where this item, where this program fits into your product suite, where it fits into the offerings that you have.

Do you want this to be a high ticket? I remember, I took a Brendon Burchard conference like eons ago, like 12 years ago or something, it was on sponsorships. He said this really great thing that has stuck with me now, 12 years later. He was like, well, don't look at what you can do right now for a sponsor. Think about, when they're paying you $3,000 or $5,000, then what would you be able to do? So that you stop and you think about, instead of just looking at comparing to my price to zero, because anything will feel expensive to zero, compare it to the cost of them not fixing their problem, compare it to price position against the results that you're going to help them achieve.

Consider it, in terms of not zero, because if you compare anything to zero, it's going to seem expensive. Expensive is all relative. I think that the more that you can own that price, can really say, yes, what I'm delivering is worth that and more, and this is how this offering fits in with the rest of my offerings, like it all starts to click together, and that's why that whole-

Salome Schillack:

I love that.

Belinda Rosenblum:

Yeah, that whole like worthiness and owning your price thing all fits as well.

Salome Schillack:

I love that because so much, I think so much of what happens when we raise our prices is, now you're getting paid more so you can hire someone to help you. And all of a sudden, you're better taken care of, and so you are better able to deliver. I've never thought of it from when that person pays you that money, how will it allow you to take care of them better? I've always retrospectively looked at it and gone, oh yeah, every time I've raised my prices, I have been able to hire more help, but you are so right. It goes forward as well. And you go to say, if I get this price, how will that allow me to take even better care of this student or client? I love that. That's really good.

Belinda Rosenblum:

It's even like when I got this price, right?

Salome Schillack:

Yeah.

Belinda Rosenblum:

What becomes possible? What becomes possible for me?

Salome Schillack:

Yeah, exactly.

Belinda Rosenblum:

What becomes possible for them? And to recognize that you are not serving anybody by burning yourself out. You're not really doing anybody a service by undercharging and over-delivering.

Salome Schillack:

Absolutely.

Belinda Rosenblum:

Just think of, independent of everything else going on in your business, think about, and sometimes it's helpful to not think about ourselves, but think about maybe a coach that you would be hiring. Would you rather hire a coach that is well taken care of, that has a supportive team, that is giving herself the self care, is sleeping at night, isn't working 70 hours, or would you rather have the coach that's charging a little bit less, but is totally burned out and not taking care of herself? That's not the person that you want to be hiring. How can you start to be the person that you would want to hire?

I think that we live the be do have model backwards oftentimes. We think, okay, once I have this, then I can ... Yeah, once I have the money, then I'll be able to do the things I want to do, then I'll be the person that I want to be. But I've always thought about it reversed. Literally, I have a book called Self-Worth to Net Worth. I published in 2012. I talked about this back then, that it's actually reversed. It's, who do you need to be, to be able to do the things you want to do to have what you want to have in your life? And to really flip that so that you start stepping in now to be that person.

Sometimes it's a transition. I totally get that, that you can't just necessarily stop everything that you're doing. However, I would challenge you a little bit to say, okay, when the ... Pareto's principle is alive and well, as Parkinson's law, and I'll tell you what both of those are. Parkinson's law essentially says that the work expands to fit the time that we allow it. When we give ourselves 50, 60, 70, 80 hours a week to work, and we're just kind of working 24/7. It's like we give up the 9:00 to 5:00 to work 24/7. We're not really helping ourselves.

But that, if you say instead, Pareto's principle basically says, the 20% of what we do creates 80% of our results. And 80% of what we do only creates 20% of our results. The challenge that I want to give you is, let's say next week, instead of working five days or more, you're only working one day. If you only have one day to work, which is essentially the 20%, and the 80% is the stuff you're not doing, how do you do the most important things? Just choose. If I only had one day, what would I do?

You would do what I call the RGAs, the revenue generating activities, right? The high payoff things that will create the results that you really want. Sure, maybe you can't scroll as much on the Facebooks or the Instagrams, or whatever, but you're going to make those sales calls, do the outreach, book those JVs, plan your launch. You're going to make a productive time. I do believe that we want to do less, better. I am a firm believer in that. That we, to circle back to the whole worthiness and shame conversation, that it's so easy to get caught up in the hustle. I am a recovering overachiever myself. I totally get this. I have lived it.

Salome Schillack:

Where's the club?

Belinda Rosenblum:

I know. Totally. It's so interesting how we train ourselves oftentimes at a young age, from a young age, based on our parents pushing us oftentimes. Or, us trying to please, like to win external validation again. So, if I get the A, then they'll love me more, then I'll feel like I belong. I actually, I mean, I've done a lot of work around this in the last 15 years or so. I asked my mom once, actually, I was like, why did you push us as much as you did? My family was totally the, you got an A minus, why wasn't it an A? Kind of family. And she was like, "Well, it was actually because ..." I was like, "I'm not sure, it was totally good. I still have it, and I have to really catch myself."

She was like, "It was from a total place of love because I felt like my parents didn't push me enough. They pushed my brother more because he was a boy. I was a girl. I didn't go to as good a college. He went to Harvard. He's a doctor, and he was pushed." And she was like, "So, I wanted you to have all of the opportunities so I pushed you." That was where her heart was, and the conclusions that I reached, because oftentimes we're drawing these conclusions around money and success when we're young, like five to eight or so, four to six even, sometimes that early. It's funny, because my kids are six and eight, and I'm so conscious of what they're seeing.

Salome Schillack:

You're messing them up, but in a whole way that you don't know yet. That's what I tell myself. I'm going to do things not to mess them up in a way that I think I don't want to make them up, but then when they're 30, they're going to tell me I messed them up in a way that I never even thought I was going to mess them up.

Belinda Rosenblum:

Couldn't even imagine. Yeah, totally. But it just gave me a different context. I was like, okay, so maybe I don't have to hustle to belong. Instead, I can decide, consciously now, how much I want to work and why, and to understand, what's that purpose for me in working? Will working more actually helped me serve and help me achieve my goals? I don't know. I think a lot of times it's like we start a business for freedom and we end up feeling more trapped than ever. That's why I help people with the money side of their business, because I don't want them to feel trapped in their business.

I want them to feel abundant. I want them to feel worthy. I want them to feel like they can be in action and they can be safe with money. But oftentimes, because there's so much uncertainty in it, and a lack of understanding, they don't feel smart, they feel like their money is controlling them instead of them being able to master their business money. I think that's all part of why I'm so passionate about this because I want them to ... I want you listening, I want you to be able to create the freedom that you want. I want you to be able to pay yourself. Oftentimes, we would never take this from a job.

Would you ever go to work for big company that was like, okay, we want you to work 70 hours, actually be available 24/7, and you know what? We're not going to pay you. And we do it as moms, but that's a whole different story, but it's ... We get other compensation for that contribution, but that we would never do that. So, I want you to take a step back and say, you do deserve to get paid from your business, but we need to be pricing appropriately and we need to really have a revenue plan that we reverse engineer and make sure that it is actually achieving the goals that you want.

Salome Schillack:

Yeah. I love that so much. I love that so much. On that incredible note, can you tell people where they can learn more about you and about your programs that you offer so that they can find you and they learn to live from that worthy space in terms of their money, please?

Belinda Rosenblum:

Awesome. I would be happy to. Thanks so much for asking, and I feel like, the beauty of podcast is that you can listen and you can certainly go and put up your rates and post the picture, tag you, tag me. I'm @ownyourmoney on Instagram. That's the one platform that I do try and be active on. And we post on stories and all the things. Get a lot of insight into our life and our family and the business that we run. That's part of it, but then it's about, okay, what are you going to do with this understanding? There's a difference between knowledge and knowing, and doing it. I just taught my daughter how to swim. Another thing, I was on the swim team in high school and college, and I was like, I really wanted to learn how to swim.

We started, and then it was, once she could actually jump in the pool, I could talk about swimming all day long, she could read books on swimming, but it's only when she's in the pool and actually moving her arms, moving her leg, that, that's when now she feels like mermaid. [crosstalk 00:51:59]. But that I want you to now take it to that next level. So, we have a few resources that I think can be great. The main one is what we call the Cashflow CEO Dashboard, which is really a way that in literally, just like 10 minutes a month, you can know and track the most important numbers in your business. I'll get you that at ownyourmoney.com/dashboard, and so we'll make sure we include that.

And then we just did that pricing workshop on Confidently Raising Your Prices, which could be a really great next step too. And we have our Cashflow CEO program, which will be coming soon to [crosstalk 00:52:36] internet near you.

Salome Schillack:

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for what you have sowed into my life, and thank you for what you've shared today. I know there's a lot of listeners who are now going to be looking in the mirror and owning their prices for sure.

Belinda Rosenblum:

I love it. Well, thank you so much for having me on. Know that we believe in you. We know that you are worthy exactly as you are right now. You belong in Salome's incredible community and in our Own Your Money community, and that your success is inevitable. We just need to get you on that path to believing it yourself.

Salome Schillack:

Absolutely. Thank you, Belinda.

Belinda Rosenblum:

Thank you.

Salome Schillack:

Thank you so much for listening. If you had fun, please come back next week, and remember to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing.

Salome Schillack:

Hello, and welcome to episode number 117 of The Shine Show. And today, I'm going to share with you Facebook ads and the iOS update. What is working, if anything, right now. Enjoy.

Giving up your time and freedom to make money is so 2009. Hi, I'm your host Salome Schillack, and I help online course creators launch, grow, and scale their businesses with Facebook and Instagram ads so that they can make more money and have an even bigger impact in the world. If you're ready to be inspired, to dream bigger, launch sooner, and grow your online business faster, then tune in because you are ready to shine, and this is The Shine Show.

Hello, my friends. You have not heard me talk about Facebook ads in a while. It has been awhile. Maybe you think, "Does she even still geek out on ads?" That is an emphatic yes. I totally still geek out on ads. I just also geek out on all the amazing things we can do with ads, like launch profitable online courses and build scalable online course businesses. So Facebook ads supports all of those things. And let's face it, nobody really wants Facebook ads. I mean, if we're serious. Maybe if you're on geek level, like I am, you like it. But we like what Facebook ads gives us. It gives us an easy tool to launch online courses. It gives us a tool to build profitable businesses, which in turn gives us a way to make an impact in the world. And it gives us a way to create more freedom in our lives because it brings money into our bank accounts.

So we love Facebook ads, but maybe not lately so much with all this iOS shenanigans, right. So it was around March this year that I did the episode on iOS. And I thought, "Holy cow, it's been a long time since I have spoken about iOS," and a lot's gone down since then. So I had my team of Facebook ad geek geniuses, ladies who are geniuses, Caroline and Hannah, put together a exhaustive list of things that are going on in iOS and in Facebook at the moment. And I'm going to talk you through this. And it is... you will hear the papers rustle as I turn my pages because these girls provided me with four pages of what's going on and what's happening. And I'm going to do my base to interpret that for you. So let's begin by what we're seeing overall. What's the big picture?

How has iOS... how's it rolling out right now? And what is the impact that it's making? So the biggest thing that is causing absolute mayhem and chaos right now is the lack of tracking. You remember, I told you that when iOS rolls out and people opt-out of being tracked online, our audiences and our tracking are going to become like Swiss cheese. Where the algorithm used to be able to see the actions people took because we had pixels on our pages and we were tracking them on our pages. Now the algorithm is blind. The pixels are blind. It's kind of almost like the pixels have been, what's the word, switched off, disabled. The pixels are completely blind. So the algorithm's having a really hard time optimizing because it is flying blind. It cannot see. Once that person clicked on your ad and it went to your landing page, it cannot see if that person actually gave you their email address or not.

And then it cannot feed that back to your ad account. And then your ad account can't learn. The algorithm can't learn. And so, it cannot optimize because this artificial intelligence is now blind. So that is our biggest challenge at the moment. One of the things that I think might happen at some point is people might opt back into tracking. And the reason I say that is, I was scrolling through Instagram last night, and I don't know what I said that Siri overheard or which website I went to. But suddenly, Instagram decided it has to show me every ad by every builder or home renovator in Brisbane. Because every second post I saw was a local renovator or builder. And I was like, "Dude, I'm neither building nor renovating." But somehow, Facebook decided this is what I need to see now. And I think that's what's going to happen.

We're not going to see less ads. We're not going to see fewer ads. We're just going to see irrelevant ads, which will make us go back and say, "Hey, please track me so that you can show me ads that are actually relevant to me. Show me all my favorite online marketers. Please, I want to see their ads. I have no interest in seeing who's building houses in Brisbane right now." So I think we're going to see people opting back in. I also believe that a lot of people were automatically opted out when this rolled out. In fact, I have never, ever been asked if I want to opt-in or out. And here we are in August. I have never had that request. Someone sent me a screenshot of what it looks like. And that's the only way I know what it looks like because I have never had it.

Now, I don't know if it hasn't been rolled out in Australia. We're certainly seeing the impact of it in ads in Australia. Or if I've just automatically been opted-out, I don't know. But I think people are going to start opting back in. I hope so. The challenge with this lack of tracking is that it is making ads that we run in short window periods, short time periods, really tricky to optimize. So, for example, a webinar where we only have a small window of opportunity to get our ad optimized and to get our ad out in front of our people doesn't have enough time to really get there. And during our recent The Launch Lounge launch, the ads for the webinar that we were running to cold traffic only really started hitting a stride two or three days before they were meant to be shut down.

So it took much longer for the ads to actually optimize and collect data. So that's a little bit of a challenge in short promotions like webinars. It also is a challenge with retargeting. So if you can imagine when somebody lands on your landing page, or they land on your sales page. They've been to your webinar, and now they've gone to your sales page. But they haven't yet purchased. We want to put ads in front of them that says, "Hey, here's another bonus. You're going to miss out if you don't take... grab this extra bonus or make sure you know that the doors are closing in 24 hours." We want to put those ads in front of the people who have shown intent to buy. And that is not happening right now because the algorithm is just blind. So that's where it's impacting a lot of people.

And then the biggest, biggest thing where we're absolutely pulling our hair out is evergreen funnels, evergreen webinars, and self-liquidating offers. And it seems to be like some people are just victims of it and some people are completely unaffected. And in most cases, the self-liquidating offers or the webinars, the evergreen webinars, evergreen funnels that were only barely scraping by. Like, if your return on ad spend was anywhere between... anywhere from two to three, those webinars are now just absolutely tanking. And if you have had a self-liquidating offer that was only just breaking even, then those are now costing money. Funny enough, some other ones are completely unaffected. We have no idea why some accounts are completely unaffected. But that's the name of the game.

I'm sure we're in this space where there's a lot of static. There's a lot of static, and it's not always easy to tune in and hear which parts are the... which way should we turn these dials to get the music back on? And which way should we turn the [inaudible 00:09:45]? You know when you had these old radios, and they had these knobs and kind of if you turn it, you go to the one radio station and if you turn it to the other side, you go to another radio station. Right now, there's just a lot of static, and we're pretty much turning knobs trying to find radio stations. And sometimes we find it quickly and sometimes it takes a while to find it. So that's how the lack of tracking is impacting online course creators' ads right now. We are also seeing, and this is the big catch 22 that I'm always raving about, is that the ad accounts with lower spend and where your ad account is fairly new and where your budget is fairly low, they're being hit the hardest.

And I hate that because I feel like you guys who are just starting out are already at a disadvantage because the organic algorithm is not working for you the way that it did work for some of the other people who started five, six, seven years ago. So you're already competing in an organic algorithm that is basically dead. And now you're being penalized in the paid algorithm as well for being new. So, my friends, that makes it even more important, even more important for you to start running ads early and start with engagement ads. Start stimulating the activity on your account. Start giving that whole Facebook system that works together with your Facebook page and your Instagram account and your ad account and your pixel and your conversions and everything, start giving it something. And if you only have $5 a day, that something should be engagement ads.

So that, at least when you're running engagement ads, you're getting in front of people, there's activity happening. Your pixel is getting some data. Your account is seeing clicks because the algorithm remembers all of that, and it learns from that. And the people with a lot of data on their accounts, they are going to continue to get the impression over you unless you start building that history inside your account. So account mojo matters now more than anything. Please, start running ads as soon as you can. And get those ads up. Get those engagement ads up. And then I think the most important thing here is run more top-of-funnel ads. And by top of funnel ads, we're talking about engagement ads and video views ads. Like those ads that is what I call, it's the Joey ad.

It's the, "How you doing," ad. It's the one that just introduces you in a nice, friendly way to your ideal customers, shows off what you've got. Make them associate with you. Make them feel something, but doesn't ask for anything. Okay. So that's kind of a nutshell. That is the nutshell. So let's think about what's new right now. So now, I've explained to you all the crappy bits. I've told you about all the things that are not working. Are you depressed yet? I hope not. My intention is not for this to leave you feeling depressed. My intention is for this to leave you feeling empowered to make good decisions here. And if you only make one decision today, and that is to start running engagement ads, then I have done my job. That's great. Okay. So let's think about what is new right now.

Okay. Facebook is working on a thing called conversion modeling. And I am not going to explain this in detail. But what I will say is they are taking all of the data from all of the accounts that run ads and kind of smushing them into models, into models of behavior. So now, for the first time, your competitor is actually doing you a favor. Your competitor, who's running ads, is doing you a favor because based on what Facebook learns from their account, they're going to apply that learning to your account too. So that's conversion modeling. And I believe that as Facebook moves into what they call conversion API, we are going to see more and more of this. Where the conversions are actually no longer being tracked by the pixel, but it gets tracked by a server that is linked to your verified domain. And all of that information goes into one giant big pool of information and becomes part of this giant big artificial intelligence that learns from all of our collective efforts.

I think that's where they're going with it. That's the first thing that is new. I hope that is a little snippet of interest for you. Everyone who geeks out on ads is going to love learning more about that. The second thing that is new. So for a while there, when you were setting up your aggregate events, Facebook would literally bring everything to a grinding halt on your ad account every time you made a change to those aggregate events. Now that was a problem if you were running a... if you're in a launch and you had your webinar ads up and running, but you haven't yet set up your sales ads. Now you want to go in and set up your sales ads, and you need to create your aggregate event for a sale. You go in, and you do it. And Facebook stops your webinar ads dead in its tracks and holds everything for 72 hours.

That was happening, and that is no longer happening. So that makes us really happy because that means we no longer have to ask our clients to give a sales pages almost a month before the launch so that we can make sure everything is set up. So that webinar ads, or video series ad, or launch ads don't get stopped in the middle of a launch. The third thing that's new. Here is an exciting thing. I like this one. Instagram Reels are now available as a placement type. Have you guys noticed how Facebook is pushing Reels? I just find it incredible how quickly they adjust to what most people want. It's so funny and it leaves me feeling really, really old because I am still a Instagram news feed girl. I'm still a grid girl. I don't even watch Stories.

And it makes me feel really, really old when I... When people started doing Reels, I was like, "This is ridiculous. You're all dancing and pointing at words." But it has taken off, and Facebook is loving it, and they are pushing it out. And apparently, the whole world loves it. And so, I'm very happy that they are now making Reels available as a placement type. So how creative can you get with your Reels ads? I don't know. Have a go, have a play at it. And let me know if you do a Reels ad that works really well. I'd love, love, love to see it. We still recommend and still choose to use, in most cases, automatic placement. Automatic placement is still the best way to go. It lets the algorithm decide where to place your creative, where to place your ad. And it will do the heavy lifting for you to get the best conversions in the best placement.

Especially if you are on a smaller budget, and by smaller budget, I mean less than 10K. So if unless you're... if you're spending 50, 60, 70, $80,000 a month in ads, then start playing around with Instagram Reels, break the placements out. But if you're still on a smaller budget, please stick to automatic placement and let the algorithm decide where to put it. Another new thing that's exciting is you can now update your customer lists without it resetting the learning on your campaigns using those audiences. So let's say you have a campaign running that is retargeting your email list, or you have a campaign... Let's think. You're building your list, right. You're building your email list. So your email list gets more people and more people on it every single day. And you want to keep that list updated maybe weekly because you want to retarget everyone on your email list for your paid challenge, right.

You can now update your list without the algorithms stopping and needing to learn first. So you would just go into that ad set, make the changes you need to make, and it keeps running. It's beautiful. It's very nice. So that's a little bit of a change. So I see how we can see that Facebook is really leaning towards becoming more and more intuitive. Okay. Now let's talk about what is working really well and what are we testing right now. As we look at the conversions becoming trickier and trickier and trickier, what I think we're going to see is ads that keep people on the platform working better and better. And by that, I mean your top-of-funnel ads, like your engagement ads and your video views ads, where people interact with you, where they can have a two-way interaction with you without leaving the platform.

We've heard little whispers of Facebook testing audio rooms. So think Clubhouse on Facebook, right. And you guys know that whenever anybody else does something really well like Clubhouse, it doesn't take Facebook more than five seconds to jump on that bandwagon. So if they are testing Clubhouse, and they might as well be testing podcasts, who knows what they're doing. But the way that they're also pushing video content on Instagram. The pushing of Reels right now. A pushing of anything that keeps people on the platform, I think, we're going to see more and more of that. And I think that the platform is going to work very hard to send people... to have a reduction in sending people off of the platform and to web pages. And I want you to think about that because that impacts your marketing in a way where you now need to think about things like Messenger marketing. That might come back.

I've never been a fan of Messenger marketing. I still am not. But we may end up using Messenger marketing in a different way, in a more native way and in a more... a less marketingy way, and that might make a comeback. I want you to think about lead ads. Lead ads are ads where you collect people's email addresses the same way you would with a conversion ad without sending them off of the platform. And lead ads used to be... we used to say don't use lead ads because what Facebook did was it automatically pulled in the email address that the person has registered with Facebook, which is usually... I mean, if I think about the email I have registered with Facebook is the email I had when I was like 25, almost 41. So I don't even know what email address that is.

I'm definitely not checking that inbox. So we recommended you don't use lead ads, but now they're making it so that you can enter your best email address. So I think lead ads are going to replace a lot of conversion ads. I think they're going to do a lot of work to keep people on the platform for our bigger content pieces. Think podcasts, think blog posts. All the things that usually lives on our website, where we want to send people to. I think Facebook is going to try to keep that stuff there. And I think more and more if you think about what's happening with Reels and how it's competing with YouTube because it's so much video going up. It's just incredible to see how Facebook is constantly molding and changing and changing and changing.

Kind of seems like Facebook, the platform Facebook, has become the granddad. And Instagram is like if you look away for five seconds and you look back to Instagram, it's a whole different platform. That's how I feel. Maybe it is just because I'm getting old. But I feel like they're missing with the Instagram that I love by putting all these Reels in front of me all the time. So think about and how you can natively use Facebook. So as these new things get rolled out, you all know that I am not someone who jumps on every new bandwagon when it comes out. But if you are using ads already. If you are succeeding at ads already, start to just look at your business. Look at the places where there's currently traffic in your business, where it's important for you to collect traffic. So your podcast pages, your blog pages, your webinar registration pages. Whatever your business model is, where you are sending traffic, ask yourself, "How can I keep in mind that Facebook wants everything on their platform and start to incorporate that in what I'm doing right now?"

I'll give you an example. We are running ads to my free five-day video training. It's a free training that teaches you how to get your first list-builder ad up. If you want to have a look at that, you can find it at shineandsucceed.com/getmyadup. What we're doing in that training that is working incredibly well is when we deliver this lead magnet, this is five-day training. So we give them access to our student portal. They go into Kajabi. They get a login in Kajabi, and then they can access their five days training in there. In every day's training, I have linked that training to an Instagram post that is on my Instagram, right. So I put the post up on Instagram. And then in the training, I have one lesson each day. And at the end of the lesson, I have a little bit of a motivation.

I cheer them on. I say, "Go you. You can do this." And there I say, "Okay, now that you've done this hard thing." So let's say the day that they're doing the technical stuff. They're verifying their domain. They're placing their pixel. They're doing all the hard stuff I say to them. "Remember, you can do hard things. Click on this link and come to this post on Instagram where everyone else is declaring that they can do hard things too." And then it takes them to my Instagram account. So now, when I'm using ads, I'm bringing people into my email list. But once they're in my email list and consuming my content, I'm sending them back to Instagram. And once they land on my thank you page, I tell them, "Hit reply to this email and tell me what you're looking forward to most about learning."

So now I'm getting a two-way conversation on my email. And when they answer that question, I then send them a podcast episode so that I'm creating all these little feedback loops between my lead magnet and my Instagram account, my Instagram account and my email list, and my podcast so that we can create more of an integrated environment like a hub, as opposed to just relying on people opening an email or following us on social media. So to summarize, okay. Are you guys okay? Are you still with me? Can you breathe? Can you breathe through this? We are going to get through this okay. This is going to change how we market. But you know what? It's going to make us stronger. It's going to make us better. It's going to challenge our creativity. And I would love for you to just stay in a place where you're asking yourself resourceful questions about this.

Just ask yourself, what can I do today? What is one small thing I can do today to win at ads? What is one small thing I can do today to learn how I'm going to navigate these iOS changes? What is one small thing I can do today to mitigate the risk to ensure that I'm still getting in front of my audience and I'm still making good offers to them? Because at the end of the day, that equation, audience plus offer equals money, is always true. And Facebook and Instagram ads is just one way to build your audience. It's my favorite way. I think it's the easiest way. But there are other ways too. And I think we should just look at how Facebook and Instagram ads work in tandem, in conjunction with, like a network with all the other things. My dear friends, you've got this. You have got this.

Let me know if this episode has been helpful for you. Send me a DM on Instagram or on Facebook or anywhere you find me online. Just poke me and tell me how this has been helpful for you. And also, tell me what your one thing is because I think we need to support each other, and we need to remind each other that this journey of building successful businesses, there's always going to be an iOS. Something's always going to be the next iOS. So let's put a smile on our face, enjoy the journey, have fun and keep learning. All right, I'll see you guys next week. Bye.

If you want to sign up for that free five-day training that's going to help you get your very first list-building ad up, you are welcome to go to shineandsucceed.com/getmyadup. Look over my shoulder as I help you get started and set up your very first list-building ad so that you can start building your lucrative email list, which gets you closer to making some sweet, sweet internet money.

Thank you so much for listening. If you had fun, please come back next week and remember to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing.

Salome Schillack:

Hello, and welcome to episode number 116 of The Shine Show. And today, we are going to talk about business lessons from RuPaul's Drag Race. And I do want to warn you. If you know me, you know that I'm not afraid to use some colorful language. But in this episode, if the kids are around, you might want to pop your headphones on because it pops up a few times in the episode. But this one is created for a little bit of fun and entertainment. So enjoy the episode.

Giving up your time and freedom to make money is so 2009. Hi, I'm your host Salome Schillack, and I help online course creators launch, grow, and scale their businesses with Facebook and Instagram ads so that they can make more money and have an even bigger impact in the world. If you're ready to be inspired to dream bigger, launch sooner, and grow your online business faster, then tune in because you are ready to shine, and this is The Shine Show.

Whoa. We made it through an absolutely epic Launch Lounge [inaudible 00:01:18] open season. We have welcomed a whole bunch of new students and some VIP students as well, who are... that is a new thing that I'm testing. So I want to say thank you. Thank you. Thank you for following along here on the show for the last few months and for hanging out with me and talking all things launching online courses. I am so incredibly passionate about this because I truly believe that the world is on the cusp of major, major change. And as women... as a 40-year-old woman who is also a mother of two. I have my own unique experience of the world right now. And my business was born out of rebellion against having to work full time while being a mother. It was born out of rebellion that my husband gets to go to work, and I have to stay home and feed people. And clean their nappies and do things that do not give me mental stimulation.

And it was born out of rebellion against the whole idea that my husband can go and earn money and I cannot. And I'm so freaking excited about I wonder what the world is going to look like in 20 years from now because of everything that COVID has brought about. Everything that the Black Lives Matter Movement is bringing about this shift in our collective consciousness, around diversity and around how awesome the world can be when it is different from what we were trained to believe is right. What we were conditioned to believe is the way that it should be. And it makes me very excited because I started this business thinking, "Wow, I love that I can show other women that they can stay at home and make money too." And that has evolved so far now that I don't even want to say that anymore because this is now so much more than just about women being able to be parents and earn money.

It is just about everyone. Everyone living a freer life. A life that is more created by design and by choice. And driven by our desires and our passions, and our creativity. And the one thing that allows us to do this is the internet. Where if you have an idea in your head and you can add value to someone else with that idea, then you have the ability to create money for yourself. And I share this with all of you here. It has very little to do with today's episode. But it is just kind of coming at the end of a launch, like what we've just done with the Launch Lounge. It's one of those defining moments that I want to share with you all because you're my listeners, and you show up for me every week, and you're on this journey with me and you're evolving, and growing with me.

And I love to talk about this stuff, and I don't talk about it enough. I want to talk about it more. Today's show is called Business Lessons From RuPaul's Drag Race. I have known about RuPaul and about RuPaul's Drag Race for yonkers of years. But I've never really watched it until my hairdresser told me how much she loves the show. And she said I'm going to love it. I have to start watching. And so I watched the latest season of the US RuPaul's Drag Race and just loved it. And my girl Rosé is now my new favorite Broadway star. My new favorite singer, dancer, actor... She's an actress, I suppose. And I felt she was so [inaudible 00:05:54]. She should have won. But then RuPaul's came down under when COVID was doing its thing in the US. And it was fairly safe over here.

I think they recorded in New Zealand. They were able to create this little bubble in New Zealand, where the judges were able to safely stay there and record. And the contestants were safe inside a little hotel bubble. And they recorded RuPaul's Drag Race Down Under. And now that it's down under, I'm like, I just want to meet one of those girls because I want them to dress me up, and do my makeup, and do my hair. I absolutely fell in love with it. So I am now working my way through every season of RuPaul's Drag Race. It is the most relaxing thing. It is the funnest thing. It is funny and entertaining. And if you're a musical theater, drama geek like me, you're going to love it. But then another thing happened. So I'm enjoying RuPaul's Drag Race a lot, right. But I'm, as you probably know by now, also a little bit of a online courses education geek, always learning something new.

And so when MasterClass... MasterClass is that online education platform that they get all these incredible superstars to teach small little masterclasses on whatever the thing is that their geniuses on. So they had a two-for-one special. And, so of course, I bought a year membership to MasterClass, and I'm working my way through every masterclass I can find. And I came across a masterclass by RuPaul. And I want to tell you that RuPaul's masterclass is one of the most incredible pieces of personal development that you can go and do. Because when you listen to him share his life story, and you listen to him share the ups and the downs. And how he made it through all of those and the life lessons that he's had to learn to get to a point where he loved himself so much.

And he healed himself and he loved himself so much that he was able to embrace this creativity, accept himself, and really live in an authentic way true to his creative desires without holding back on the creative expression of his desires and the journey that he's gone on to get to that point. Then you realize that there is something here that we... this is a journey we're all on. And I think this is a journey that you're on, especially if you have a creative business, especially if you have a business on the internet. Especially if your business relies on creating content, which is mean to both educate and entertain people. And so we can all take a moment to listen to RuPaul and learn from RuPaul. And understand that when you can go on a journey to really embrace your own creative powers and your own desire to express something creatively and love that and love yourself unconditionally, that the sky really is the limit.

But for today's episode, I have chosen five of my favorite RuPaul's sayings. And I'm just going to link that in a little bit of a way to business and to what we do. And my goal with this episode is just if I can go and get you to watch some RuPaul episodes and to think about how you can be more of a drag queen inside your own business. Just relax a little bit. Stress a little bit less. Embrace your creative side a little bit more. Show up and shine and use the stage and just be who you are. Then I have succeeded at this week's episode. So the first one, the first saying that RuPaul is famous for, one of it that I love is, "We're all born naked, and the rest is drag. We're all born naked, and the rest is drag."

And what he means by that is when we come into the world, we are all just who we are. And we are all humans. And we are all the same. And we're all made of the same stuff. And everything else that comes after that is a show. It's a performance. It is a costume. It's makeup. It's hair. And you can kick against it, or you can embrace it and be as colorful, as bright, as creative, as animated as you want to be. I think so often we want to fit a mold of what our mentors are doing or what someone before us has done in business. And I wonder what becomes possible when we give ourselves permission to just really show up as our boldest, most creative selves. And if, for you, that means letting your hair down and being more relaxed when you show up on a live video, then great.

If you're RuPaul's Drag Race, you might make your ass hang out. How are you letting your ass hang out in your business? I've recently kind of embraced this a little bit because what I do every time I have to record new videos for one of my online courses, either for A-Lister or for the Launch Lounge. I find myself recreating the same content over and over and over, but with different slides. Because if it goes in one course, it has to have this slide deck. And when it goes in another one, it has to have the other slide deck. And in an attempt to make my presentation as perfect as some of my mentors or people I've learned from, or what I think the industry standard should be.

I'm driving myself freaking nuts recording the same content over and over and every time updating it because the background picture has changed. I mean, it's ridiculous. So I am giving myself permission to let my ass hang out and to make my training videos less than perfect. Because at the end of the day, the student that I want to attract is not the one who's going to care about the perfect background. It's the one who's going to care about the content on there. So if we are all born naked, and the rest is drag, what in your business are the nakedness? The naked things. The things that are there because they're part of who you are, and they're never going to change. And it is the foundational, fundamental parts of your business that has to be there. And that everyone has to have there.

And which are the parts that are drag. Which of the parts that you've added on because someone you admire has that. Or you've added it on because you think you have to have it. Or you've added it on because you think there's no other way. And what if you let your imagination go? What if you just let your hair down and ask yourself, "If my business was a drag show and I could sing whatever I want. Dance however I want. Put on whatever costume I want. Do my hair however I want. Do my makeup however I want." And by that, I mean, if my business was a drag show and I could create leads however I want.

I can use social media however I want. I can sell my courses however I want. I can make upsells or down sells or make rules for how long people have access to things or when they get things or when they don't get things, however I like. If I had permission to do that, and that was my drag show, how I do that? So maybe just take a few moments and sit down and think. Make a list of the things that if you were going to create your business from scratch again, keeping the fundamentals in place. But then, knowing that everything else is just drag. How would you create it? So that's the first a little saying that caught my eye and that I meant, "Oh yeah, we can do this in business."

The second one is, "The only thing..." This is what RuPaul says. He says, "The only thing wrong with me is that I thought there was something wrong with me." I love that. That just speaks to my core. "The only thing wrong with me is that I thought there was something wrong with me." And the reason it speaks to my core so much is because in the journey that I've been on in the last... since 2015, when I started out as a coach. When I started doing coach training, looking back at it, I can clearly see a phase where it was so frustrating and heartbreaking and draining my bank account. And I kept feeling like there's something wrong with me that I can't figure it out. I kept feeling like I'm somehow broken.

And if I can only unbreak whatever this thing is that is holding me back from finally achieving success with an online business, then I'll be able to make progress. And to this day, I have a pet peeve with the term limiting beliefs. I can't stand the term limiting beliefs. And the reason is because when I felt so incredibly disempowered, and I felt like there was something wrong with me that I couldn't figure out how to create a profitable business, I was so susceptible to people who were telling me... who were confirming this message.

And the way that they confirm this, of course, in our business, in the personal development space, and in the online marketing space, is by telling you, "Yeah, it's just you have limiting beliefs that's standing in the way of you succeeding." And that in itself is the most incredibly disempowering thing because what can I do about it? That is an invisible gate that you're pretty much putting up in front of me, and I have no power over it. I do not believe... I think there's no such thing as limiting belief. I think there is absence of imagination.

I think there is absence of giving ourselves permission to dream. I think there's absence of giving ourselves permission to create however we want, whatever we want. I think there's absence of giving ourselves the ability to tap into our true desires. And I think there is an absence when you're starting out of examples of what is possible. When you're just starting out, you do not have exposure yet to people who are only two steps ahead of you.

You probably have a lot of exposure to people who are about a hundred steps ahead of you because you buy their online courses, and you buy their coaching packages, and you buy these things. And they are a hundred steps ahead of you, and it is normal to then feel that, "There must be something wrong with me that I can't figure out what this person has figured out." But when you've been in the game as long as I have, and you've seen everyone who is both two steps ahead of you, two steps behind you, five steps ahead of you, 500 steps ahead of you, 500 steps behind you. You start to realize that your brain never saw the evidence of the people who were only a few steps in front of you because it wasn't looking for it.

Your brain wasn't showing you. You weren't seeing the people who was demonstrating to you that there is a way and that you can do it because you were so busy looking towards the people who were a hundred steps ahead of you and also focusing on your own limiting beliefs, right. So I believe that when you start believing that you need to filter in more evidence of people who are two steps ahead of you, you start seeing what they have that's working. And the other thing that you start filtering in is a clear strategy. I mean, you just don't have a clear strategy when you're starting out, and that's not your fault.

It's kind of like saying, "Well, I'm not a neuroscience... I'm not a neurosurgeon because of my limiting beliefs. No, I'm not a neurosurgeon because I have not done the work to become a neurosurgeon. I do not have the strategies to execute successful neurosurgery." So please, if I can take something from RuPaul, this message that he says, "The only thing wrong with me is that I thought there was something wrong with me." Please, whatever you do, stop believing that there's something wrong with you. If this is you let go of the belief that there is such a thing as a limiting belief. There is no such thing as limiting belief. There's only lack of evidence. There's lack of imagination, permission to dream. Permission to create whatever you desire and a clear strategy. So there's nothing wrong with you.

The third thing that RuPaul says a lot that I really love is, and I love the way he says it too. He goes, "And don't fuck it up." I love it when he says that. I want to say it with him. So it's kind of tongue in cheek, right, because I mean, it's drag. Can you really fuck it up? Is there really a way that you can take this thing that is such ridiculous fun, and fuck it up? You can't. You cannot. And it is the same for our businesses. You cannot fuck it up in any way, shape or form, because it is a creative expression. Yeah, you can waste money.

Yeah, you can not connect the tech correctly and then not have people show up in your webinar. Yeah, you can run ads that completely tank. All of those things can happen. But oh, they're just normal things. They're just things that are going to happen to you anyway. I had someone recently sign up for the free Five-Day Video Training on how to set up your first ads for your list building. It's a freebie that we run that we can link too if you want to get access to that. It's called the Five-Day Video Training. Set up your first list building... Look over my shoulder as I set up my first list building ad we'll link to the Five-Day Video Training in the show notes for you.

Anyway, I had someone email me and say they followed our instructions precisely. And then, as soon as they hit publish on their ads, their ad account got shut down. And we have a responsibility to let everyone in this course know that it is a risk that their accounts can get shut down when they take our course. And I was like, "Excuse me. Hold up a second. There is always a risk that your ad account is going to get shut down." That is like saying you should let every car manufacturer know that people can get in car accidents before they buy a car. It's ridiculous. And also, having your ad account shut down, it's not a fuck up. It is something that happens to a lot people all the time, and you can survive it, and you can recover from it.

Many people do. Yes. It's inconvenient. Yes. It's annoying. Yes. It is something that's going to build your character that you didn't necessarily want to build your character with. Yes. Facebook is like a toddler. Yes. You're going to have to deal with their chat. It's just part of it. It does not mean that it has been fucked up. Okay. So you can do this. Don't think that anything that goes wrong in your business is ever a fuck up. It's not. Number four. Number four that I want to talk about is one of my favorite things. It's cruel. It's so cruel when he says this. It's so terrible, especially when it's one of your favorite people that he says this to. But when Ru says, "Sashay, away," I want to die." But here's the thing that I love so much about the show is the coaches, the mentors, the producers on RuPaul's Drag Race has done such a tremendous job of coaching the contestants for that moment.

Now I'm not going to say everyone handles it extremely elegantly, but most people. When Ru says, "Sashay, away." They look towards Ru. They look towards the judges, and they look towards their fellow contestants, and they say, "Thank you." Most of them say, "Thank you for this incredible opportunity." Most of them say thank you to the judges for their feedback. Most of them say thank you to the other contestants for being their competitors. But it's human nature for us to want to go, "No, I'm not ready to go. This was unfair. I did the best lip sync." That's human nature if we're three years old. Well, maybe if we're seven years old as well. My seven-year-old is still learning this. I want you to think about in your business. Where do you need to coach yourself a little bit more to sashay away with more grace and style and elegance and gratitude?

Where are you maybe focusing a little bit more on what you perceive to have lost or perceived to be losing instead of focusing on maybe guidance that it has given you? A platform that it has given you. Education that it has given you. Community that it has given you. Money that it has given you. Maybe somewhere in your business, there's a group that you've been a part of where it's time to sashay away. And you need to just say, "Thank you very much for what you have given me," and turn around and walk away with your head held high like the queen that you are. Think about that. Where in your business is a time to sashay away with elegance and style?

The fifth RuPaul saying that I love is what he says at the end of every episode. "Well, if you can't love yourself, then how in the hell are you going to love somebody else? Can I get an amen?" I love it when he says that. It is so true. "If you can't love yourself, then how in the hell are you going to love somebody else?" And you got to say it the way Ru says it as well. At the beginning of this year, I made a commitment to say "I am going to do some radical self-love this year." And for me, radical self-love this year means doctors visits. I just turned 40 last year and decided, "Okay, so I'm going to make a list of all the doctors that I need to go and see."

I got to go to the dentist, which I've been putting off. But I've been there now twice. I've been to a dermatologist. I have been to a podiatrist. I've been to my GP. I've been for some lady checkups. All the little things that I kind of went, "Well, okay. If I'm 40 now, what do I have to do now to age gracefully, to make the next 20 years strong and healthy and put myself in the best shape to be able to live my healthiest life for the next 40 or 60 years?" And I'm feeling the benefit of this in my business. I can feel the benefit of my brain just being fresh most of the time because I'm exercising regularly, and I'm doing my best to get a good night's sleep. And I'm trying not to work on weekends and all the things that we do to love ourselves. I'm leaning into boredom. I hate being bored. I have ADHD, so I hate being bored. But I realized that when I'm bored and I can identify whatever the thing is that I naturally then want to fill the time with.

That those things are usually not the best things. And it's usually me running away from something I should actually be doing, like maybe talking to my husband or hanging out with my kids or doing something that might not be exactly the first thing that I would have chosen to do. Not that hanging out with my kids and talking to my husband is not things I want to do. It's just easier to work. You know what I mean. You've been there. Okay. So my question to you is where in your business would your business and your life really benefit from more self-love?

In my life right now, it's like all the doctor's visits. But what is it for you? That is it. It's my five RuPaul sayings. I would love for you to see if you can find RuPaul's Masterclass. Sign up to MasterClass and go and take his class or go and watch some of the episodes of RuPaul. And just ask yourself, "How can I add a little bit more RuPaul's Drag Race into my business today?" That is all from me for this week. I will see you guys talk to you guys all again next week. I hope you have a lovely week, bye.

Thank you so much for listening. If you had fun, please come back next week and remember to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing.

Salome Schillack:

Hello, and welcome to episode number 115 of the Shine Show. Today's show is called, Five Lies You Were Told About Launching a Digital Course and What To Believe Instead. You know what time it is, yes you do. Enrollment to the Launch Lounge is currently open. If you're ready to take your online course launches or your membership launches from scrambling to scaling, then I want to invite you to come and join me inside the Launch Lounge. You can find out more by going to shineandsucceed.com/join. Giving up your time and freedom to make money is so 2009. Hi. I'm your host, Salome Schillack. I help online course creators launch, grow and scale their businesses with Facebook and Instagram ads so that they can make more money and have an even bigger impact in the world. If you're ready to be inspired, to dream bigger, launch sooner and grow your online business faster, then tune in because you are ready to shine and this is the Shine Show.

Today I want to talk about five lies that you were told about launching a digital course or membership and what to believe instead. I'm sharing this with you all today because it took me the longest, longest time to figure out this elusive mystery around launching profitable online courses. Now, if you know my story, you know that I started trying to launch back in 2015. At that stage, I had already racked up a whole bunch of debt trying to get a coaching business off the ground. I was slowly starting to really hate coaching and racking up debt and not figuring out how I'm going to make money and how I'm going to really be able to quit my job. At that stage, I was on maternity leave and just trying to figure this thing out. I took every single person who was selling an online course that promised me that they are going to teach me their signature system, their magic beans formula for selling an online course. I took a lot of them.

I still take a lot of courses because I love learning and I love learning other people's way of doing things. But what has benefited me most? I say this because when I started making money in my business, you go to remember I started, I launched the courses. I quit the courses. I'll tell you a little bit more about that. I quit the courses. I went back to my day job. Then I niched down as an ads manager. I actually became an ads manager because I saw that I can make money running ads for other people faster than I was able to make selling my own online course. I also didn't know what I was going to sell an online course about because I was a pharmaceutical sales rep and I wasn't going to create a course on being a pharmaceutical sales rep.

It wasn't until I started running ads for other people who were launching their courses that I started discovering that the magic of creating profitable online courses actually doesn't lie in anybody's signature course or signature system. The magic lies in a few basic principles. Everybody's signature course or signature method contains these basic principles or these basic principles underlie what they teach. But they don't actually teach it to you because it's easier to say, I'm going to give you the step by step, and sell something that gives you a step by step. But I truly believe that the magic, the understanding, the aha moment, and I see this in my students' eyes every time I teach this to them, the magic of learning how to profitably launch courses happens when you start seeing the bigger picture. When you start seeing these basic underlying principles, principles like what I always say, you just need an audience and an offer.

Now that sounds super simple. That's not a signature method. That's not a signature. I can't create a signature course around building an audience and making an offer because there's so many signature courses on how to use Instagram organic to build your audience. Then they leave the how to make offers part out. Or how to use webinars to make offers, but then they leave the how to build your audience part out. I became aware of the need for everyone who has taken thousands of courses and still hasn't been able to figure out how to launch profitably to really understand these principles. It wasn't until I understood these principles and I started launching my own courses again that I went, oh, hang on. This time I'm able to create a profitable launch because magically, while I was running ads for other people in their courses, I started understanding these basic principles. I go into depth in these principles.

If you were on the masterclass, that's been happening in the last couple of weeks. You would have heard me say this. You would have heard me teach this. I go into it in-depth inside the Launch Lounge. How does that relate to five lies you were told about launching digital courses and what I want you to believe instead? It relates in that as long as you hold onto these five lies, you're going to rely on somebody's signature method to get you there. But when you can let go of these five lies, then you open up your mind and you start seeing possibility where previously there was frustration. Let's jump into the five lies. Lie number one is you need a large audience before you can launch a course. This my friends is not true. You do not need a large audience. You need an audience. You need about a hundred of the right people.

Now I teach my students to build their email lists to a thousand before they create any big launches. The reason I do that is because the way that I teach Facebook ads is when you start running list building ads, you start making people offers when they join your email list from day one. You either invite them to a monthly workshop and charge them for it. Or you make an offer on the thank you page after they opt in for your lead magnet. Or you put them in an email sequence that sells them a low dollar product. Three ways that you start making offers to your audience as soon as you start building your audience. The reason I say I don't want anyone to do any big launches before they hit a thousand people on their list is because generally in a launch, you need a bit of momentum. You need a little bit of energy. You need a little bit of [inaudible 00:08:39].

You need some kind of a mechanism. Think of it as a party, you need to host a party where you bring people together in one live energetic thing, and you make them an offer. Typically, these live energetic things, these parties are often either webinars or video series or challenges or workshops. It can be any of those things. You need a mechanism. In order to get enough people to sign up for those mechanisms, I say, make sure you have a thousand people on your email list. But that doesn't mean you wait until you hit a thousand people. It doesn't mean you need a big audience. You don't need any social media followers to make an offer. You don't need any. I'm going to say that again. You don't need any social media followers in order to make money online selling your knowledge.

You need an ad that builds your list and you need to make an offer. The basic premise of this, and if you're a regular listener of the podcast, you would have heard me say this a few times, the secret to making money online selling your knowledge is you need an audience and you need an offer. There are thousands of ways you can build an audience. There are thousands of ways you can make an offer. My way of teaching audience building is of course ads, because I feel that's the fastest way. Because you're always balancing. When you're building a business, you're always balancing your money and your energy. When you don't have money, you pour your energy in your hustle. You show up on Facebook Live. You show up on videos. You make reels. You do all the social media things so that you can get the attention you need and build the business.

As your business grows, you start to release some of that energy that you have to pour in and you let the money do that work for you. So when you start list building, your money is building the audience for you. I'm a big, big, big believer in letting my money free up my energy so that my energy can be applied to solving bigger problems. Now that I'm the CEO of the business, I would rather spend my time coaching my team, motivating my team, teaching my students, coaching my students than being bogged down with trying to get someone to download my lead magnet on Facebook, right? Because I can use ads to do that. You do not need a large audience. Start making offers to your audience as soon as you start running ads. Because I guarantee you, the first offer you make, they're not going to take you up on it. Get that stumbling phase out of your system, get it out as fast as you can.

Get it out while you have a small audience. Practice, get better at it. Don't wait. Learn while you build. There's this thing where we think, if only I can get to a certain point, then all the magic pieces will fall into place. I'm sad to say but there's no magic point that you get to when all the pieces fall into place. The same problems you have today, you're going to have them when you've made 40 or $50,000, when you've made $100,000, when you've made a million dollars. They just look different, but they feel the same. They still feel like, where's this magic bullet? When is this old stuff all going to be cleaned up and the ducks are going to be lining up? Doesn't happen. You don't get there. Build your audience, nurture them, send them quality content every week, and make them offers. That is how you start recuperating some of your ad money. That is how you start making money online even with a small audience.

That's lie number one. You do not need a large audience to launch a course or sell your knowledge. Lie number two, you need a large budget. You need a large budget. What? You don't need a large budget, but you do need a budget. I want you to think about maybe just go into your business bank account and do a little audit of all the subscriptions you're signed up to. All the memberships you've joined. I'm talking about little ones like $10 ones. I'm talking about Canva. I'm talking about Kajabi. I'm talking about that membership you joined for $97 that you haven't been in in three months. You know what I'm talking about. Go in there, have a look and see if there's any money you can free up there that would be better spent on building your audience. I'm willing to bet you'll find at least a couple of hundred dollars a month that you can free up there.

I remember how many things I signed up for when I started. It was ridiculous because we have this belief that this or that tool is the thing that's going to get us there. Or if we have this social media content planner or this thing that allows us to schedule our posts, or I don't know what. All the things, the webinar software that you signed up for that you haven't used. Think about all those things. Your Zoom subscription. What level are you on? Are you on the level that you actually get the best use out of or did you oversubscribe? Think about all of those things. Because I'm willing to bet that if you look at the true value some of those subscriptions have in your business right now and you take that money and you spend it on ads, you are going to get a lot further, a lot faster by putting it on ads. But we don't do that and we don't do that because ads are abstract.

Ads are like, how do I know I'm getting my money's worth? How do I know I'm getting my money back? We want that short-term payoff and so we hold back on spending money on ads, but you do need to do that. I'm willing to bet that you are going to see the value in building your audience with ads a lot faster than you'll see it from that social media scheduling app that you signed up for, or even from the paid version of Canva or even from Kajabi. Because if you haven't got an audience, you don't need Kajabi. All right. What type of budget do I need if I'm going to launch? I teach students, my students, that when they're in list building phase, when they're in audience building phase, when they're just getting started, when they're learning to make offers to their audience, to spend as much as you can afford. But spend, get used to it. Because if you're serious about building a business, you are going to need to give Zuckerberg your money at some point, unfortunately.

Don't hold back. Know that you need to get used to that. But when you get to the point where you have an audience or you have some parts of an audience taking shape, like you've got a thousand people on your email list and you've made them some offers and they've taken you up on it and you are now ready to start pouring some money into a webinar or into a video series or a challenge or a paid workshop, I'd like you to take a thousand dollars. I would like you to have a thousand dollars ready to spend on ads when you go into launch mode. The reason I want you to have a thousand dollars ready is again, the same thing, we need to create momentum. We need to create energy. We need to create a live party feeling for our conversion mechanism.

Now that conversion mechanism can be your webinar or a video series, challenge, workshop, whatever mechanism you choose. That thing where you're going to show up as the host and you're going to tell people how you're going to get them to the stuck state they're in all the way through your methodology to their desired end state, that mechanism needs energy. In order to get energy, we need to get in front of everyone who's in your warm audiences first. Everyone on your email list, everyone in your social media, and then maybe even some people who are in your cold audience. Once we've launched the course to your warm audience and they've bought, that gives us that confirmation that this offer works.

The next time we take some of the money we made from the warm launch and we add a cold element to it, we add some more money in and we bring some cold leads to that webinar, video series, challenge, workshop, whatever that mechanism is you're using, and we test and we go, okay, if warm converts, does warm and cold convert? If that works, then we go, great. It works. Now let's see if cold works. Then we go full like all tabs open to cold. If that works, we can scale it and eventually you can go evergreen. You got to go through these layers of testing first, so you do need a budget. I recommend you start with list building, start by building your audience and use whatever you have. Go check out those subscriptions. Then when you're ready to launch, grab about a thousand dollars, that's all you need to start really.

Lie number two is you need a large budget. Lie number three, you need a team. Do you really, really? I get that. I am a big picture person. I am the worst project manager on the planet. I can very easily create things, put things into categories. But once I've organized it into categories, I want someone else to execute it. I understand your need for a team. I understand that if you've been taking a lot of signature courses that you feel overwhelmed by everything that you have learned that needs to happen inside a launch. All of that copy. All of those images. All of the videos. All of the social media. All of the emails, the sales pages, the thank you pages, connecting it with the webinar software. All the things, there are so many things.

Then you may even be hearing about people adding these bells and whistles, all those bells and whistles and think you need that as well. The truth is you don't. When you understand how to build an audience and how to make offers to those audiences, and you know how to track where your most profitable customer comes from, then you learn to apply the principles of launching to your niche, to your audience, and to your offers. Then you can understand which bits, which to-dos are absolute to-dos, which to-dos are yeah, it would probably be a good idea to have this, and which to-dos are these are bells and whistles that I don't need on the first, second or third launch. Also, some other stuff that your brain is probably going to want to freak out and add last minute, all sorts of fancy zaps and fancy things that you need to add that you think you need to add, that you don't. You do not need a team.

When you start out and you have a clear understanding of how to build audiences and how to make offers to those audiences and you have a minimum viable product checklist of what you need to do. Then you have, okay, now we're going playing a little bit bigger checklist of what to do. Then you have the mother of all launches with all the bells and whistles checklist. It becomes easier for you to filter the information and to create a to-do list that you can literally sit down and check off yourself. Instead of writing a hundred emails, you're going to write the six most important emails or the three most important emails. Instead of feeling like you need a sales page that's a kilometer wide or a mile wide for my friends, long, a mile long for my friends in the U.S., you're going to write one that contains a basic offer, a few objections, and a Q&A section. That's it.

You do not need a big team to launch an online course. That is lie number three. Lie number four is this one, this one hits me in the heart. Lie number four is if you didn't make money, you failed. I'm going to say that again because I know someone needs to hear this. It is a big fat, giant lie to believe that if you didn't make money in your launch, you failed. It hurts me to say this because I've been there, because I felt that way. You will know I am a true-blue South African. Grew up in South Africa, lived there all of my life until I was 23. South Africans, we don't like losing. We are crazy competitive. We are from a young age taught that you only have to be better than the person next to you to make it in life. That's at least what I internalized. Maybe other South Africans will say they didn't do that. Maybe it's just me. I'm crazy competitive.

The thing is, we also, I think a part of how I grew up is just we value winning. We value being first. We value success. Success gets measured by achievement. Success gets measured by what car you drive, what house you live in, what school you went to, all that bullshit. I bought into it, hook, line, and sinker for the first part of my life until I failed so hard for such a long time trying to get a business up. It just knocked my ego to the ground where I had to go, well, either this ego thing is not working for me or this belief that my value is judged by my performance doesn't work for me. I need to change something. Thankfully, I got rid of the belief that if I didn't make money, I failed. Funny enough, as soon as I did that, I did start to make money. When you understand how to interpret data in your launch and what data to look at and what data to track, then you figure out what to fix the next time.

That is when, you know the old cliche, you didn't fail, you learn. Something like that. It's cliche. It's horrible. I hate saying it, but I mean, it's a cliche for a reason. It's not failure, it's feedback. There it is. It's not failure, it's feedback. It's a horrible thing. You'll never hear me say that because it's such a cliché. Unfortunately, it is true. When you understand how to interpret data in your launch. So before that, you need to know what data to track. Then you need help understanding that data, interpreting it, putting it into context so that you can go, oh, so I got the right audience. The audience just didn't convert on my webinar. Then you're empowered to go and redo it again to ask people, can you watch my webinar and tell me what went wrong? Can you give me feedback?

Nine out of 10 times, the answer is going to be overtaught. You taught too much and facilitated sales too little. It's nine out of 10 times what happens when a webinar doesn't convert. But then at least you can go and fix it and change it. That's how the failure turns into the feedback, which turns into the victory. Lie number four is if you didn't make money, you failed. You know this happened to me when I launched my first course. I ran $400 worth of ads and I made $2,000. I was absolutely gutted. I was devastated because it was at the end of a three year long struggle to try to get a profitable business up. Oh, this was the coaching business. We were $40,000 in debt. I figured, well, I can't feed my family on $2,000. My salary working is more than that. I went back to my day job and I hated it. It wasn't until much later, I told Rick Mulready, I had a call with him.

I was talking to him and I said to him, well, my first course failed. I didn't make any money. I spent $400 and I made $2,000. He looked at me like I was crazy. Like I was from another planet. He said, what? That is a four return on ad spend. That means for every dollar you put in, you got $4 back. I was like, hang on. What? So you're saying if I just did it again and I just put in more money, I would've made more money? That was a defining moment for me, because I was holding on so much to this belief that if I didn't make money, I failed. That I thought I failed and then I quit. I'm glad I had that conversation with Rick because I wonder what would've happened if I would've come back. Maybe I would still be driving around selling drugs to doctors. Oh please, no.

That's lie number four is if you didn't make money, you failed. I'm just going to call bullshit on that one. Lie number five, lie number five, lie number five is you're all alone in this. You're all alone in this. Now that's not a lie other people tell us, right? That's not a lie someone in a signature course told you. This is a lie we tell ourselves. The reason I know it's a lie is because I have been there. I felt incredibly alone trying to figure this out. I remember feeling like I'm grasping at anything and anyone who has that secret key who's going to help me unlock this. Masterminds, accountability buddies, so many things, learning groups. You name it. The next membership, the next online course, you name it. I would try it in the hopes that it would make me feel less alone. It didn't, it didn't.

The reason I discovered I was joining all these groups and having accountability buddies and doing calls with people and rubbing shoulders with anyone and everyone who would listen to my ideas and listen to my launch and tell me what they're doing. The reason I still felt alone was what I realized later is because in a lot of these groups, people only share their success. I constantly felt like I was falling behind, or like there was something wrong with me that it wasn't clicking for me, or that maybe my audience wasn't going to work. Maybe my offer wasn't the right offer. Maybe I didn't have enough followers on social media. Maybe I didn't have a big enough budget for my launch.

I kept trying to find out, figure out what's wrong with me. Why do I feel so alone? Why do I see everyone else doing it? I figured, I learned that the real problem is that we have this culture of only celebrating success and progress. That made me feel isolated because I felt like I was the only one struggling. I had this complete internal conflict because I'm like, I am smart and accomplished. I have done things. Why can't I figure this out? I kept thinking, there must be something wrong with me. The truth is your worth as a human, your valueless, your worthiness, your worthiness of who you are and of your value in terms of what you can teach other people and how big of an impact you can make in other people's lives is in no way, no way connected to the results you've seen or will see.

You got to listen to that carefully because I need you to know that one day when you're a big deal, one day when you're standing on a stage and you're speaking to thousands of people and you're making a giant impact, you will be no more worthy than you are today. With all of the struggles you've had to get where you are today, you are no less worthy. The joy of the journey matters, and you've got to lean into it. We are all running our own races. We are all finding the imprint that we are made to make in the world. Therefore, no one can ever be behind. You cannot be behind when you're learning these things, because there is no two people who are doing the same thing in the same way to the same people with your fingerprint. If each one of us follows our own path and trust our own instincts, then we can become the creators of the world we want to see.

That is what I encourage every single one of my students inside the Launch Lounge, to show up and run your race. Discover your imprint. Discover your journey. Share your failures without judgment, starts by not judging yourself. Share your wins without anticipating jealousy, because it just doesn't have to exist when we fully, fully lean into our own journey, our own intuition, our own gut instinct for who our audience really is and how we make a difference for them. We combine that with a basic understanding of the underlying principles of launching online courses. You double that up with an amazing community of the most supportive people on the planet. You get to discover all the places you can go with selling your online courses and making a giant impact in the world and creating freedom for yourself. Whatever that means. If freedom means quitting your job, working around your kids, or making more money than you've ever dreamed off, then that is available to you.

My friends, the doors to the Launch Lounge is only going to be open for another couple of days. If you want to come and explore everything we've talked about today with me inside the Launch Lounge, you can go to shineandsucceed.com/join. Go and have a look at what some of the other members have said. I would be delighted to come with you on a journey to help you make an impact in the world and leave this world a little bit better than what we found it. Hope you have a fabulous week. I'll see you next week. Bye. Thank you so much for listening. If you had fun, please come back next week and remember to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing.

Salome Schillack:

Hello, and welcome to episode 114 of the Shine Show. Today's episode is called, How to Know Exactly Where to Find Your Most Profitable Buyer. And today's episode is brought to you by my brand new masterclass called The Three Secrets to Profitable Online Course Launches Only The Best Facebook Ads Managers Know. And I'm willing to bet it is not what you think. So no more throwing spaghetti on the wall, crossing your fingers, hoping your next launch will somehow bring you better results. Learn how to take control of your course launches and scale your business beyond belief without wasting money along the way. And you can sign up for one of the two classes. Yes, we're only doing two classes by going to shineandsucceed.com/readytolaunch. Now let's jump into the episode.

Giving up your time and freedom to make money is so 2009. Hi, I'm your host Salome Schillack and I help online course creators launch, grow and scale their businesses with Facebook and Instagram ads so that they can make more money and have an even bigger impact in the world. If you're ready to be inspired, to dream bigger, launch sooner and grow your online business faster, then tune in because you are ready to shine and this is the Shine Show.

Have you ever bought an online course? Something that is somebody else's signature program? Something that is somebody else's, "I'm going to teach you step by step how to launch an online course or how to make money online," thing, and you followed the instructions carefully and it still didn't work? Hands up if that has happened to you. In today's episode, I'm going to tell you why it didn't work. There's another thing I want to ask you. Hands up if you've hired ads managers to run your ads for you for your launch, and at the end of your launch you were no closer to rubbing $2 together. Hands up if that's happened to you. That breaks my heart when that happens. I've seen it happen a million times. It has happened to me because it just kind of causes this ridiculous, like whose fault is it really that there's no money here at the ads managers or the client.

And it's just a really crappy situation that I guess it happens to all ads managers. I'm hoping it doesn't happen to all online course launchers because I have a solution for that. But the only way I found that solution was because when this did happen, when I did have clients, when we had clients in the agency who hired us to run ads for them, for their launches and at the end of their launches, they didn't make a profit or they were in the hole, that just broke my heart. And whilst most of my clients have always been very gracious when things like this happened, it still feels kind of shitty when that happens to anybody. You don't want to be part of that. So one of the things that I know about myself is I am insanely stubborn. I am very stubborn. My mother always tells me that too. She says, "You're just like your dad, just as stubborn as your dad." Which I take as a complete compliment. My dad was insanely stubborn, but he was also very smart.

So I lean in when things like that happen. And it is in a leaning in to the question of why sometimes when people follow these signature methods, these step-by-step launch instructions, and sometimes when they hire even the best ads managers, they still end up with a big fat dud. So I really engaged with that. And I just really asked myself, what is happening here? Why does this happen to good people? And what can we do about this? Because I cannot live in a world where this is the norm. And I did discover something that I'm going to share with you today in this episode. And I call this something, this something that I discovered, this thing, I call into the lasagna. It's different from the [Joey 00:05:19]. It's different from the Joey where you say, "How're you doing?" It's not the Joey. If you've heard me teach engagement ads, you know what the Joey is.

This is the lasagna. It's a whole different Italian dish. Yeah, Joey's an Italian dish too. All my 40 year olds are chuckling now. Okay. So let's talk about the lasagna and how the lasagna is going to get you out of this one size fits all signature launch method that you've tried that hasn't worked for you, or how we're going to get you out of hiring ads managers to run ads for you, and then coming up short. Here's the lasagna in short. I'm going to try to keep this short, but this is a whole like big training. I can keep talking about this for days. To make a lasagna, you need three core ingredients. To make a successful launch, you need three core ingredients. To build a lasagna dish, you layer your three core ingredients on top of one another over and over and over. To scale an online course's business, you layer your three key ingredients on top of each other over and over and over. And as you get better at these layers, your ingredients become more sophisticated.

Okay. Now what do I mean with my crazy metaphor? Here's what I mean. Lasagna has three things in it. It has that white saucy thing that some people would say is a [inaudible 00:07:14] sauce. I'm just going to call it the white sauce. You have minced meat, which you can pretty much pick up a packet of pre-made lasagna mince from the local daily, or you can make it days in advance in all sorts of fancy ways, and then you have the lasagna sheets. So there's your three core ingredients. When we are launching online courses, we have three core ingredients. We have an audience. You always need an audience. When you are building an online courses business, you need an audience. You need an offer. You need to make that audience an offer. The offer is the exchange that happens when you say, "You want all these amazing things? Click here to go and get it," and they actually click and they get it. That's an offer that converts.

You can also make offers that don't convert. That's a whole another conversation. And the third ingredient that every online course launch has is a sales mechanism. A sales mechanism is any thing you use, any process you use to create excitement anticipation, and to communicate your offer. So a sales mechanism can be a webinar. It can be a video series. It can be three emails. In its simplest form, it's usually a few emails. And its most complex form, it could have videos and webinars and live broadcasts and you can add to it as much complexity as you want. But if you're just starting out and you're brand new, you need these three things. You need an audience, an offer and a sales mechanism. And when you're just starting out, your audience is probably fairly small. Your offer is probably a lower dollar offer. And your sales mechanism is probably fairly simple. When you grow and you get bigger and bigger and bigger, and you start adding affiliates and all sorts of things, your audience becomes bigger and bigger and bigger, and they come from a lot of different places.

So that adds complexity to that audience. Your offers, you create multiple offers and you might even have paid plans and full pays and upsells and down sells, and a course and a membership. So you have multiple offers that people can buy at multiple different points in their journey with you. And your sales mechanism probably also becomes more complex because that three-part email series you synced out when you just started out, might not work when you're trying to make $10 million in your next launch. You're going to need a little bit of a bigger sales mechanism, a more complex sales mechanism. So you can see how in this lasagna of building online courses, where our three key ingredients are audience, offer and sales mechanism, we can start fairly simply, simple, [inaudible 00:10:56]. You can start in a very simple way. And it is just those key ingredients that gets more and more and more complex, but it's still just key ingredients. And so the way I like to think of it is you get... You build it in layers and when you're just starting out, your layers are fairly basic.

And then as you get better and better at it, now you're making your own white sauce at home. You're not buying it in a bottle from the shop. Now, you're dry aging your meat. And I don't know, I don't cook clearly. You can say I don't cook, but I don't know what they do with the lasagna, but you cook it at least a week in advance and let it sit and let it soak and let it juicify and do all the yummy things. And of course, you're going to make your lasagna sheets at home. My husband actually makes a really good homemade pasta. So you're going to make it at home. So I have an idea of the time and the effort that goes into homemade pasta. Not that I've ever done it, but these things get more and more complex. So you see the problem with signature courses or signature online courses that teach you one step by step [inaudible 00:12:17] numbers way of launching. The problem with it is it does not take into consideration all the variables that you're working with inside your audience, inside your offer and inside your sales mechanism.

That is the problem with signature courses or signature methods. The problem with the ads manager piece is, ads managers can only bring you audiences. That is literally all we can do. We can amplify your offer, but if your offer doesn't convert, we can't do anything about it. We can't do anything about your sales mechanism. We have no control over that. So when an ads manager gets paid to bring massive audiences to offers that have not been proven to convert, or that has been proven to convert to warm audiences, for example, people who've been on your email list for a long time or affiliates, they're warm audiences too. And now you expect the exact same result from a cold audience that was bought with ads, and you end up being disappointed, it's kind of because you were comparing apples with pears. Or if your sales mechanism is not the right mechanism for what you're selling for the price point you're selling. The higher, your price point is, the bigger mechanism you need. If you're selling anything under $200, you can use an email sequence. Super easy.

You just get them in on a lead magnet, sell it to them with a email sequence. But when it gets to $400, $500, now maybe you need a workshop or a challenge. When it gets to $1,000 or $3,000. Now you need a video series or a webinar. When it gets to $10,000, now you need a video series and a webinar, and maybe even to book a call with you. And when it gets to $30,000 $40,000, $50,000 now you're like, "I'm only selling to people who've already spanked $10,000 with me, and they have to book a call and apply." So you see how your sales mechanism also changes according to the value of your offer? Are you guys seeing where the problem is with all these one size fits all signature methods, and with hiring an ads manager, expecting that ads manager who can only bring you more people to make you money? I hope you see problem. That is the gap. That is the big black hole that I identified that made me go, "Oh, this is why people launch and then bawl their eyes out because it didn't work."

So the problem is, all three of these things need to work together in order to produce a favorable outcome. The solution is you need to know how to build your lasagna. You need to know how to measure the impact of each of your lasagna ingredients. So you need to know where your audience came from. You need to know which offers they took you up on, which ones did they say yes to. And you need to know how they moved through your sales mechanism. And whether you're just starting out, or whether you're scaling from a million dollars to $10 million, that is pretty much the basics of what you need to know. You need the information about those things. And I've given that a name. I call that your most profitable customer journey. And what we want to do is we want to use tagging, which I'm going to go into in a second.

We're going to use tagging to identify how your audience behaves when you make them an offer inside your sales mechanism. There's your three ingredients. That's your lasagna. Your audience, your offer and your sales mechanism. So we use a very, very simple tool called tagging that all of us have inside of our email CRM. And this is something that is so easy to do and so simple. And if you start doing it right from the beginning, you're going to save yourself a lot of headaches because the more your business grows, the more complex this is going to get. And the more you go back and look at this data and identify your most profitable customer journey, the more you're going to be able to manage this complexity and actually simplify it. So how do we set ourselves up to know exactly where our most profitable students or members are coming from?

The answer is, in tagging inside our CRMs, our email service providers, I'm talking about ActiveCampaign or MailChimp or Infusionsoft or Kartra or Kajabi. Those are called email CRMs. It's wherever you host your email list. When ever you create a lead magnet or a new offer. That gets linked to your email CRM. Now don't ask me how to do that. I don't do that in my business. It's fairly straightforward. I used to do it a long time ago. I haven't done it in a while, but every time you create an offer and every time you create a lead magnet, they have to give you some information, and then it links to your CRM, which can trigger a tag to be added to their names. In the most simplest of forms, it happens on the form. So when you are creating a lead magnet, the little form piece, the little piece, it used to be called in a box, a light box. Now it's called a form.

It's that little bit where they enter their first name and their email address. That middle piece is called a form, and it's linked to your email CRM. And when you set up that form, you tell your CRM which tags to add to anyone who opts in using that form. Now you're going to do the same thing for each one of your offers. And then you are going to tag these people according to what they opt in for. Tags or in very simple form identifiers inside of your CRM. It identifies specific actions people took. In other words, they downloaded your lead magnet, they signed up for your webinar, they purchased your course, they purchased the upsell on your course, they then downloaded your next lead magnet. They signed up for your coaching. Every time someone converts either to a lead or to a sale in your business, you want to make sure you have a tag set up that identifies them as a conversion in that point in your business.

Because remember, what we're trying to do is we're trying to identify how audiences move through our offers and through our sales mechanisms so that we can see what their most... What our most profitable customer journey is, which means we can then put our money in the places where we know when we put our money in these places, these people actually result in sales. Let me give you an example. You're running two lead magnets. You're running ads to two lead magnets. Some people have 7, 8, 9, 10 lead magnets, and it gives me complete overwhelm. I want to go and sit in the corner and rock when I hear someone has seven or eight lead magnets. You start with one or two, right? One or two. You have to ask yourself, how is this lead magnet solving a small enough problem for my ideal customer to show them that I am the right person to help them, but also to show them that once I've solved this small problem, I can also solve much bigger problems?

And of course then, your bigger problem solving happens inside of your course. Now you go into launch mode and you are running a webinar. So you've run some ads for these two lead magnets, you've promoted these two lead magnets on your social media, and you have these two lead magnets on your website. Now you're going to launch mode and you are running a ton of ads to a webinar. You're running those ads to all of the people who already opted in for your lead magnets, your warm audience, because you want to make sure they sign up for your webinar, but you're also spending a whole lot of money running webinar ads to people who've never ever heard your name. And then you sell your course to them. So here's the tags you'll have. You'll have a tag for lead magnet number one, you'll have a tag, the lead magnet number two, you'll have a tag for webinar registrations, and you'll have a tag for sales.

Now, at the end of your launch, you download the list of all the people who got the sales tag. In other words, your complete buyers list. Download the list of all of your buyers with all of their associated tags. And now, you want to start sorting these stacks. You want to see what percentage of these buyers opted in for lead magnet number one. You want to see what percentage of the buyers opted in for lead magnet number two. You also want to see what percentage of people of these buyers opted in for the webinar. And you might want to say, "Well, how many of the people that opted in... That ended up buying my course, opted in for lead magnet number one, and the webinar? How many people opted in for lead magnet number two and the webinar?"

And those numbers could look very, very different. But if you spot a trend, if you see that out of all of the buyers, 90% of the buyers opted in for the webinar and then there might be 10% that never opted in for the webinar, didn't even watch the webinar. They were on your list, they got the emails and they also signed up. If you know that 90% of your buyers opted in for the webinar that tells you that in order for people to purchase this course, they need to be on the webinar. The webinar is the important conversion mechanism, because most of the people that purchased were on the webinar. So that gives you a clue, right? Now you can look at purchasers to lead magnets. Now, remember, some people can be on both lead magnets, right?

But let's say you go, "Okay. How many of the people that purchased my course also downloaded lead magnet number one?" And let's say that's 20%. And then you go, "How many of the people that purchased my course also downloaded lead magnet number one?" And you see that that is 5%. That gives you a clue as to which lead magnet you're going to run ads to the next time before you launch. Because if you have two lead magnets and 5% of the people who downloaded one of those lead magnets resulted in sales, but 20% of the other one resulted in sales, where are you going to put your money? You're going to put it in the lead magnet that is going to result in sales for you. Now, what if the lead magnet that only converted at 5% gets you leads for $2, but the lead magnet that converted at 20% costs $5 a lead.

Where are you going to put your money? You're still going to put your money into the expensive lead because the expensive lead is now proven to be your more profitable lead down the track. And that is a game changer for most people. Now you know where to put your ad money when you're building your audience. In other words, when you're running ads to your lead magnets. You know where to put your money when you are creating your conversion mechanism, and you can look at your sales results and decide if you're happy with how your offer converted or not. If you're not happy with how your offer converted, then you just need to rinse and repeat it and make a change to that offer, and then run all these numbers again and see if it worked, until your offer converts. But here's the thing. If you're armed with this knowledge, you're not going to go out and spend a bunch of money building audiences for a webinar or for any launch.

If you don't already have data that shows you that your offer is going to convert at least first to your warm people, at least first to the people on your... I mean on your email list and then to your cold people. So, whew, that was a lot of numbers. Are you still with me? Are you following? I hope you're with me. So what this helps us see is where our most profitable customer journey is so that we can put our money into the places where we know if we put our money in there, it is more likely for us to get a sale three levels down, three actions down. It also indicates to us whether our audience needs a lot of warming up before we can launch to them or whether we're ready to run this launch to a cold audience.

So let's take the webinar number again. If 90% of the buyers were on the webinar, and we break it down and we say, "Okay, what percentage of the people, of that 90% had the webinar as their first point of contact with us?" And if that number is high, let's say 75% of those people had their first point of contact as the webinar, now we know that the webinar works really well to a cold audience. Are you going to be running list building ads next time? Probably not because your webinar converts to a cold audience. Are you getting closer to evergreening things? Yes, you are. So you see how this lasagna works? This lasagna works because you're looking at the three key ingredients and you start very simply. You start super simple. Where's my audience? What's my conversion mechanism, and what is my offer?

And then you add complexity to it and you layer it. And as your audience grows and you get multiple lead magnets or multiple sources of leads, maybe you have affiliates that brings in leads. Maybe you use social media, your Instagram explodes, all of a sudden you have 100,000 followers and they're downloading your lead magnet like bananas. You want to know where they come from. So you want to make sure you have that tagging setup, but now your lasagna is quite complex because you have multiple places where those audience is coming from. And then when you have multiple offers, you want to break down these offers so that you can see, if someone buys this little thing over here, they're probably more likely to then buy the big thing over there. That is knowledge that you can be armed with. And then of course, you want to look at your offer and how your offer converts.

When you know these numbers and you use tagging to track your most profitable customer journey, you're able to put your money into what's already working well, which means you get to free up your energy to do the thing that made you want to impact people's lives and make a difference to all of your students in the first place. Frees up your energy to hire people like ads managers, and arm them with the right data so that they can find you the right audience because your offers already convert well. And hire an integrator and a VA and a social media manager and all the people that you can then be the CEO of, and just show up for your team and show up for your tribe, for your community. That is my wish for you. If you have loved today's episode, you are going to love the launch lounge. In the launch lounge, I teach to in depth, how to build your most profitable customer value journey.

This is all new stuff. Even the launch lounge students who are in there now are excited to see all this new stuff. It is coming your way in the brand new launch lounge. And right now, you can register for the master class called the three secrets to profitable online course launches. Only the best Facebook ads managers know. And it's probably not what you think. You can register for that now by going to shineandsucceed.com/readytolaunch. There will only be two classes available. Two classes only. So come and join me on that masterclass because I would love to show you more of what I've shared. Just a tiny bit with you today. So that's shineandsucceed.com/readytolaunch. I will see you next week, hear you, talk to you next week, and I hope to see you on the class. Take care my friends. Bye.

Thank you so much for listening. If you had fun, please come back next week and remember to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing.

Salome Schillack:

Hello and welcome to episode number 113 of The Shine Show. Today's episode is for you if you've ever grappled with the question, why are people loving my content but not buying from me? Today's episode is called What To Do When They Love Your Free Content But Don't Buy Your Course. I can almost hear you groan through my speakers right now if this is you. Now, I have an exciting announcement. We are ramping up and getting ready and dotting the T's and crossing the I's, or is it the other way around, for our upcoming masterclass. In this masterclass, I'm going to teach you how to generate predictable, consistent, and mind-blowing results every time you launch your online course. The masterclass is called Learn the three secrets to profitable online course launches that only the best Facebook ads managers know, and it's probably not what you think.

You can sign up for the class right now by going to shineandsucceed.com/readytolaunch. That's shineandsucceed.com/readytolaunch. There are only two classes. We're only going to host two live classes. You get to pick from one of the two that you want to attend, and then I'll see you there live. Then you're also going to find out more about joining The Launch Lounge. Now let's jump into the episode. Giving up your time and freedom to make money is so 2009. Hi. I'm your host, Salome Schillack. I help online course creators launch, grow, and scale their businesses with Facebook and Instagram ads so that they can make more money and have an even bigger impact in the world. If you're ready to be inspired, to dream bigger, launch sooner, and grow your online business faster, then tune in because you are ready to shine. This is The Shine Show.

Did you ever hear the expression, why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? Yikes. It's an expression my mom used to use when I was a teenager. If you don't know what it means, you would say this to a teenage girl or a young woman if you want to encourage her to be modest. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free means the boys are not going to marry you if you put out too soon. There's all sorts of things wrong with that saying on all sorts of levels. But there's one level at which why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free really works well. That is when you are selling to your students or to your ideal customer in your content. Today on the show, we are going to talk about what to do when they love your free content but they don't want to buy your course.

If that has happened to you, raise your hand right now because today's episode is for you. You are going to walk away from this episode knowing exactly what you should do to keep your audience coming back for your free content, but it also makes them hungry and ready for when you say the court is now open, or here is the link to buy. They go there and they actually buy from you. The reason I'm sharing this with you today is so that you can take what you learn in today's podcast episode and you can start launching profitably and start to scale your launches and your business so that you can get to fat wallet freedom. That's what we're calling it now. Fat wallet freedom sooner. How do you know if you have a problem with your audience loving your free content but then not buying your course?

Well, usually one of the things that would be an indication of this happening is when you keep getting messages from people saying, "I love your podcast," or "I love your Instagram," or "This blog post that you wrote resonated with me so much." You get all these messages all the time. Then as soon as you announced to people that they can buy something, you're hosting a workshop or you're hosting a paid challenge or you're selling the recordings of that masterclass that you did, nobody actually buys. Even if it's not this obvious, there are other more subtle ways that you can also see if maybe you are in this boat where people love your free content but they're just not buying. One of the ways you can see this is if you are working your behind off and you're not making money.

If you're working your tail off and you feel on all the time, you feel like you need to respond to every DM that comes your way. You feel like it is your responsibility to reply to every comment on your social feed. When someone asks you a question that you typically would answer inside your paid program, or that might require a longer explanation, you go ahead and answer it. Even though it's Sunday morning and you are lounging on the couch watching your favorite TV show, you would still answer it. That is a good sign that people are loving your content but they're not buying your course. Maybe you're feeling resentful towards your audience. This is something that popped up inside The Launch Lounge the other day. We had a discussion about what to do when people love your free content but they don't buy your course.

We were talking about feeling resentful towards your audience. That usually is a pretty clear red flag that you are not feeling taken care of by the people that you serve. How do they take care of you? There's only one way they take care of you, they give you their money. That is how they take care of you, because that allows you to hire help so that you don't have to do everything in your business. That allows you to pay for ads so that you don't have to hustle on social media to build your list. Another way that you know that your audience might be loving your content but not buying it is you are just plain exhausted. I remember so well after two years of really, really going at it super hard, how absolutely exhausted I was when I still didn't have any money to show for my online courses business that I started. That was just not really going the way I'd hoped it would go. It wasn't replacing my income as fast as I had hoped it would.

I was going live every single day. I was serving like nobody else I knew, but I was still broke. I know how that absolute exhaustion and tiredness can feel. What do you do about this? How do you turn this around? How do you change this when you are feeling tired or when you don't know how to create different content that your audience will still love, but that actually helps them also buy your course? Here's what I want to offer to you. When you are talking to your audience, there is a fine balance between solving all of their problems for them for free and solving micro problems, which indicates your expertise or points to your expertise and your ability to solve bigger problems for them. When you then go into a launch or some kind of a promotion where you have a clear call to action for people to buy something, once you go into that phase where you are now getting ready, you are switching up your conversation.

From just delivering free content for the sake of building relationship and delivering free content for the sake of adding value, to delivering free content with the pure purpose of taking people on a buying journey. When you get to that phase, this is usually a week, two weeks, three weeks, a month from your launch or inside your launch on your webinar, inside your email sequence. When you go live, your job is not to drown them in content. In fact, if you are drowning them in content, you're probably just leaving them either confused because they need more help to implement what they've learned, or you're giving them so much content that you've totally empowered them to go away and get results without you. Your job when you're facilitating these conversations is to facilitate a transformation.

Now, a transformation is a change. It's a change where you're taking them on a sales journey that helps them see that you understand their stuck state. You understand their pain state. You understand the challenge they have right now, and you show them that you also see and understand the desired end state. So you're demonstrating to them the beginning of a pathway where they're feeling pain, they're feeling stuck. They're feeling frustration and anger, maybe resentment. They're feeling tired. They're feeling all the negative feelings we have when we want to move away from a certain feeling or a state that we find ourselves in. That pathway that you're going to lead them on leads to a desired end state, a pleasurable state, a state that they dream of. A state that they can't wait to get to. A state that when we're all honest, we often wonder if we'll ever get there.

Your job as the person who's facilitating this transformational journey for them is to demonstrate that you understand the pain that they're in, that you have been there, that you have experienced it, that you can empathize with them. Also, that you yourself have found a way out of it, that you have made it all the way to the other end where you got into the desired end state that they want. You take that same hero's journey that you went on from the pain state to the desired end state, and you show them how you've taken other students on that journey or other clients or other people you've worked with for free. Anybody, any testimonial you have, where you can show people who haven't yet bought from you that you have been able to facilitate that transformation for somebody else helps them see, A, that the end journey, that end state really does exist.

There is evidence for it because there are normal people like them who in working with you have gotten to that end state, but also shows them evidence that it can be done. It shows them evidence that you understand where they want to be and how they're going to get there. Now, this is very different from dumping a bunch of content on them in an hour class, right? This is very different from teaching them skills in a free masterclass that when they get stuck trying to implement their skills will actually cause them to stop and believe that you can't help them get the transformation they want. This is very different from creating any kind of situation where they can't move forward without your help. Be careful of that when you are doing your webinar, when you're writing your emails, when you're hosting your challenge, be careful to not dump so much content on them. That unless they have you right there at that moment holding their hand, they're unable to move forward. Because this will just create in their minds doubt about whether or not they can do this.

When I say a transformation starts with a stuck state or a pain state, I want to give you some examples of that. One example of that could be somebody who says, I don't know what to talk about when I go live on Facebook or on Instagram. The desired end state could be, I will give you 365 days of live video prompts so that you never have to wonder what to talk about again and you can start building an audience who loves your content. Another example might be, I want to get rid of the clutter in my office and stop feeling so overwhelmed because the end state I want is a beautifully decorated office that matches my ambition that looks like who I want to be. Or another example could be, I want to stop feeling like I'm gambling with my money when I'm running ads. Instead, the end state that I want is I want to start creating consistent results in my launches so that I can finally quit my job.

You see how that's three different examples of how you can state someone's pain state, someone's stuck state and turn it around into their desired end state, and then help them see that you can create that transformation. Your job is to help them see you understand their pain and it's not their fault and that there is a way out. Help them see that others have done it and that you're not alone. That they will with a few small steps that you can teach them inside your course, they can do it too. Now I want you to take action. I want you to gather a piece of paper, get a piece of paper or open a note on your iPad or your computer. Draw a line in the middle of the paper. On the one side, on the left side, write pain state. On the right side, write desired end state.

Then I want you to go and find all of the emails that students or listeners or readers or audience members or Facebook group members or DMers or Instagram stalkers or any of your followers, anywhere where a follower have sent you a message describing their pain state, telling you what they're struggling with, telling you how things really are for them right now. Then on the other side, I want you to write down any words they used to describe how they wanted to be or what they dream of or what their goals are or what their desires are. You can look through saved email or any copy, anywhere. Especially if you have a Facebook group, it's really useful for this. The other way to go with this is interview them, get them on a call. Make sure you transcribe the call because you are going to be listening for other things when you're just listening to them, answer your questions.

You'll be amazed at what you discover when you transcribe those calls and you go back and read it. You just discover things you never even knew was there. When you're just listening, because you're not filtering in these things that you never knew was there, you miss it. But when you transcribe it and you come back to it over and over and over, and you look at it with fresh eyes, you start to discover patterns in what people are saying and in how they're describing the words they're using to describe their painful states and their desired end states. Or you can post a questionnaire. Create a simple type form or a Google Form or something, and just ask people. What are you struggling most with right now as it relates to whatever your niche is? You can ask them, how do you want this to be in state? What do you see as the base solution? What do you see the based way for this to be for you in the future when you have the answer to this problem?

Once you have that document and you can list those pain states and the desired states, then I want you to start thinking about how are you going to get them to come to a paid event. Host some kind of a paid event where you're going to solve this problem for them. I want you to post in your group or post on your social media or create an invitation on your podcast or on your blog or anywhere where you have eyeballs, anywhere where you have an audience. Post something along the lines of, Hey, a lot of you have been telling me you struggle with X, insert pain point. If I hosted a workshop where I showed you how to Y, insert desired end state, would you be interested? Drop a comment below if you want to attend this class.

Now, if you nail the pain points and you nail the desired end state, then you know that people are going to comment like mad. They're going to tag their friends, their mastermind buddies, their accountability partners. They're going to tag anyone and everyone and they're going to say, yes, please. Now once you have people saying, yes, I'm interested, you create your low dollar clause. It could be a $27 workshop or a $27 challenge or something fairly low dollar if this is the first time you're doing it and you're not quite sure what your audience will resonate with in terms of what you offer yet. You invite all of those people who said, I want to come. Invite them personally to come to your class or your workshop or your challenge, whatever it is that you're going to host. Remember to give them lots and lots of benefits of what they're going to learn. You might say, you'll discover 365 ways to go live so that you can start attracting more people to your email list, right?

If that is what they want, if they want to build their email list. Or something like, you'll learn how to create a beautifully decorated office that you'll be proud to show off to your prospects or students. Or you could say, I'll show you how to finally create a profitable launch so that you can quit your day job and start enjoying fat wallet freedom. Once you know how to do this, you'll be selling out your challenges, your workshops, your masterclass, your whatever. You'll be selling them out so quickly because you're showing your audience that you can create a journey from where you understand the pain that they're in right now to where they can see that you know what they want and what this desired end state is that they want to be in. And you have the way to get them to that desired end state.

Back to the cow, why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? You're going to give them amazing free content and you are also going to learn how to not just speak to content but also speak to why the content matters, and why every piece of content you create is taking them in micro journeys from a stuck state to a desired end state. You're going to do that in small ways when you deliver your free content, and you're going to do it in bigger ways when you're hosting a webinar or when you are inviting people to join your paid challenge or workshop. Now you have the tools to go out and serve your audience to your highest ability. Give them your best stuff. Give it to them for free, but give it to them in a way that helps them see that you are not just someone who can give them content. You are someone who can facilitate transformation for them.

If you start speaking to that, very soon you will start seeing those paying students coming to your courses and your membership very quickly. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. Remember that if you want to find out how to generate predictable, consistent, and mind-blowing results every time you launch your online course, then you're going to want to sign up for my next free masterclass. It's happening next week. We only have two sessions that you can join live. In the sessions, you're going to learn the three secrets to profitable online course launches that only the best Facebook ads managers know, it's probably not what you think. If you want to sign up for those, you can go to shineandsucceed.com/readytolaunch. I'll see you on the class. Thank you so much for listening. If you had fun, please come back next week and remember to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing.

Salome Schillack:

How much do I spend on what in an online course or a membership launch? Hello and welcome to Episode #112 of The Shine Show. In today's show, I'm going to answer the question, how much do I spend on what in a launch? And if you are getting ready to launch your course, maybe you have already booked a date in September and you're ramping up and getting ready, then you definitely don't want to miss out on becoming a Launch Lounge member. We're opening the doors to The Launch Lounge on the 29th of July. The Launch Lounge is the fastest way to get to a multi-six-figure online course business that gives you the freedom to hire a team and get your time back and scale with confidence. And if you want to sign up to the waitlist for that, make sure you go to shineandsucceed.com/tllwaitlist. Now let's jump into the episode.

Giving up your time and freedom to make money is so 2009. Hi. I'm your host, Salome Schillack, and I help online course creators launch, grow, and scale their businesses with Facebook and Instagram ads so that they can make more money and have an even bigger impact in the world. If you're ready to be inspired, to dream bigger, launch sooner, and grow your online business faster, then tune in because you are ready to shine, and this is The Shine Show. Tell me if one of these things are true for you. You hired an ads manager because you were ramping up to launch your online course. They got you a whole bunch of leads for your webinar or your video series or your challenge, and then none of those leads converted to sales. You saw zero sales from those ads.

Or maybe this one is true for you. You invited people on your social media to your webinar or your video series, your live launch, you invited everyone on your social media and a handful of people actually signed up. And so you decided to fill up the audience with some more people by running ads, and you ended up wasting a couple of thousand dollars because you struggled to find the right people on Facebook and Instagram. Your launch ads ended up costing a fortune, and your launch sounded a little bit like crickets. Or maybe this one is true for you. You launched your course. You had a lot of people show up for your launch, and they came from both your email list and they came from cold audiences that you found with ads, and you had a fairly successful launch. You made more money than you thought you could actually make. And now you're just wondering how are you going to replicate that, because you're not quite sure what you did right and what you did wrong, and you're not sure how to replicate it.

So I want to say hands up if any of these three things are true for you. Don't put your hands up if you're driving. But if I just described something that happened to you, send me a DM on Instagram and let me know that I nailed it, what happened with you in your launch. And now the reason I nailed it is because I hear these stories every single day. I hear them from my students. I hear them from my friends. I hear them in the mastermind that I'm in. I just hear them everywhere. And the one thing that I want to tell you is I need you to know that it is not your fault that these things happened. It is not your fault that you feel like you're playing Roulette with your money every time you turn ads on for your launch, or you feel like your launch strategy is like throwing spaghetti on the wall and just hoping something would stick.

The reason these things happen is because nobody taught you these things. Nobody taught you the relationship between traffic and conversion, and what I mean by that is nobody taught you the relationship between the journey that your customers go on to go from being cold people on the internet, who has never heard of you, to someone who's maybe slightly more engaged because they interacted with one of your videos on Facebook, to someone who's warmer or warmish, like bath water warm, because they downloaded your lead magnet, to someone who's quite hot because they downloaded your lead magnet and they downloaded your launch freebie, and to someone who is on fire, red-hot, sitting there, waiting, holding their credit card, shouting at you, "Come on. Open the door so I can buy your thing."

There's a difference in how different audiences engage with us, behave, and how they end up actually spending their money with us. And nobody teaches this stuff to us because when we buy online courses from anyone who teaches a signature method, they tend to just teach their signature method, which is perfect and fine and great, but it leaves out some foundational principles. And then when you learn Facebook ads to fill these audiences, the training for Facebook ads are often more focused on getting you over the tech challenges than on actually teaching you the marketing, the funnel building, the audience journeys and how to create these journeys with purpose deliberately in a way that you know that you're purposefully putting a message out. And that message is going to be repeated X number of times, and when people have heard the message enough times, then they're ready to move on to the next phase of your marketing messaging. And then they move onto the next phase, and then they buy from you.

And unfortunately, most Facebook ads managers also do not know this. And so it ends up being a scenario where if you're the person who hired a Facebook ads manager to help you launch, you end up a little bit with the blind leading the blind. I want you to imagine for a moment that you decide you're going to travel. Right? COVID is done and dusted, and the Australian borders are open and I can get on a plane. So where am I going to go? I mean, I can come up with 700 places I want to go right now, but one of the places I want to go to is London. I used to live in London when I was in my early twenties, and I have not been back there since I was 26 and I'm 40 now. So I have not been back to London for a long time. I am dying to take my kids to go and show them my old stomping grounds and to go and show them London, because it is a magical place to me.

So if I wanted to go to London, I might pick up the phone and call the travel agent and say, "Travel agent, I would like to go to London." And the travel agent would say, "That's wonderful," and she would book me. She or he or they would book me a flight, and I'd be very happy because it make the brief perfectly. I told her I want to go to London. She booked me a flight to London. So I take my flight and I get on the flight and I get to London. And when I get there, I don't have a hotel. I don't have a car. I have no itinerary. I have no activities booked. I have no adventures. And I could turn around and say, "Well, the travel agent didn't do what I said because I said, I want to go to London. The travel agent only delivered on the ticket. What I actually wanted was a whole journey. I wanted an adventure. I wanted something that unfolded and made me feel things and made me excited."

And so that's what happens 9 out of 10 times when I see online course creators hiring Facebook ads managers to help them with their Facebook ads, is they say to them, "I want you to bring traffic," which is the same as saying, "I want you to buy me a ticket." And then the Facebook ads manager brings the traffic. The traffic doesn't necessarily go on a journey of any kind. The traffic just gets there. It's like the traffic made it to London, but the traffic ain't going on holiday. And then there's this massive disconnect between the online course launcher and the Facebook ads manager, because they both thought an adventure is about to unfold, but there was no adventure. There was just traffic and then a whole lot of nothing because the traffic didn't convert. That adventure, that act of creating a journey, that is called your customer journey, and that is a missing piece in most people's online course launches.

It is an understanding of how people interact in different times and at different places with our content and then making sure that we put the right message in front of them at the right time, so that they move along in our customer journey from being super, super cold audiences to becoming lukewarm, to becoming hot, to becoming extra hot and spicy and can't wait to give me a credit card warm. But when you are an expert in your niche, you are not necessarily an expert in creating customer journeys. And when you hire a Facebook ads manager, who is an expert in the techie side of Facebook ads, then it's as good as telling the travel agent that you want to go to London and them handing you a ticket. They've done their job. You're going to London. Right? That's basically what you're doing with your Facebook ads manager.

So the solution is... And when we bring the solution back to the name of this podcast episode, this podcast episode is about how much do I spend on what in a launch, when we look at the solution to the problem of how do we build these audiences and how much do we spend on what during a launch, the answer to that question is it depends on your customer journey and it depends on your budget, your overall budget, because if you have a very large budget, then you can throw money at the problem. And if you throw enough money at the problem, you're going to get conversion somewhere along the line. If you don't have a lot of money, then you have to allocate the money that you do have to the places in your customer journey where you can make the biggest impact with that money. But it's also not just about having a little or a lot of money. It is also about knowing where to spend the money based on how your audience has been proven to interact with you.

And what I mean by this is when you launch the first time, you want to make sure you launch to a warm audience. That means you have a healthy email list. You have a warmed up social media presence. They know your launch is coming. They've been preparing for it because you've been going live and telling them about it and they are ready to rumble. And then they convert, and once you have data to know that your warm audience converts, then you can add in a cold audience element. Then you're going to warm your audience up again, but you're also going to run some launch ads to people who have never heard of you, because if you go straight to cold, you're probably not going to know if your offer converts to warm or not. You're probably not going to know what the problem is with your offer if it doesn't convert, because cold people are just not going to be as forthright to give you that information.

So let's think about the customer journey and how we create customer journeys in our online courses, and I'm going to start at the end and work our way back. Imagine you're in an online course launch and you are at the doors closing, enrollment closing time. Let's say, it's 4:00 PM on a Thursday. You've just come out of a two-hour Facebook live. You're exhausted. You're ready to hit the Prosecco and stick your face in a chocolate cake and then go to sleep for three days. You are at the end of your course launch. The thing that you need to be asking yourself at that point, and as we go through this, we're going to work our way backwards, at that point is you're going to say, "Hmm, did they buy? Did they buy? How many people bought?" And then working your way back, you're going to ask, "Did they attend?" If it was a webinar that you had, then did they attend the webinar? Those who signed up, did they actually show up?

If it's a video series, those who signed up, did they actually watch the video? If it's a challenge, those that signed up, did they participate in the challenge? So then you look at attendance, and now we're taking another step back and we're saying, "Did they sign up for my launch event? So did they sign up for my webinar or my video series or my challenge?" So that's the next question. And then before that, we're going to look at, "Did they sign up for my pre-launch runway lead magnet?" That's a specific lead magnet you create to answer the last few objections someone might have before they're ready to sign up to your course. But then there's another step before that. We're going to say, "Did they sign up to any other lead magnets I've been running in the past two, three years?"

And so you can see we work our way back from the sales through the launch, through the attendance of the launch, to the sign up for the launch, to whatever else they signed up for that got them on our email list. And the way you know this is by using the tagging inside your email CRM, the system that you use to home the home of your email list. So every time they opt in for a lead magnet, they get a tag for that lead magnet. And then at the end of your launch, you can run a report to download your email list of everyone who bought the course, and then you double-check the tags against their names so that you can figure out what percentage of the people that actually bought your course was also signed up for your webinar, and of the people...

And let's say for argument's sake, a hundred percent of the purchases were signed up for your webinar. Technically speaking, that should be right, but let's say you had a hundred percent of the people who bought your course signed up for your webinar and you discover that 80% of them signed up for two other lead magnets leading up to that. That's a clue to you that in order to get a buyer out, they need to sign up to at least two other things before they're ready to buy. When you have that type of information, wouldn't you be running ads to these people to get them to sign up to two things as fast as possible? You would, because now you have data about your audience's behavior. You have data about your customer journey. And see, this is the piece that makes me want to cry when I hear someone's say, "But I hired a Facebook ads manager and they ran ads and none of the ads converted," because it is this piece that's missing.

And neither you, the course creator, have ever been taught how to do this, nor has the Facebook ads manager been taught to do this because they have been spending all their time learning to navigate iOS, and they've been so busy doing that, that they completely forgot about the fact that marketing is human connection. And so therefore, this human communication flow, understanding your customer journey, is the most important piece. When we have this information, we can deliberately plan this customer journey because we know what our audience is already most likely doing or what they need to be doing in order to result in sales for us. When we know the journey they go on, we know exactly where to put our money. And suddenly the cheap leads I got from the quiz I created that I can now see resulted in very little sales is not as valuable to me as the leads I got from the ebook I created that cost me three times more than the quiz, but also resulted in three times more people actually buying my course.

When you know your customer journey, you're in the driver's seat when it comes to running your ads and when it comes to your launch results, and you know exactly what to do next in order to create profitable launches that scale to six and seven figures. Now in our agency, we use this very effectively to run five different projects for every client. Every client has five different ad projects, and I'll go through these five briefly. I have trained about them a lot before I teach it inside The Launch Lounge, and I have a lead magnet called The Definitive Guide to Launching an Online Course with Facebook and Instagram Ads, which you can grab from my website as well, and we'll put the link in the show notes as well, where I dive deep into this. But for now, I'm just going to give you the overview, the headline of this, these five projects, and the reason I'm giving you this is so that I can then explain to you how we allocate the budgets into these five different projects.

The first project is the engagement project. It's engagement ads that we run because (a) Facebook wants engagement, (b) because it stimulates engagement on social media, which means when we're hustling our little hearts out, we actually get two-way conversation. It reduces conversion costs long-term, and it helps us build warm audiences that we can re-target that does not require the Pixel, which is important right now. So we run engagement ads. We typically only spend about $5 a day on engagement ads. That's Project #1 that we run for every single client and that I tell every one of my students to do. Project #2 is general old, run-of-the-mill list building. It's the kind of list building that you learned when you just started out. It's your simple lead magnet. Get them to opt in. Get them to download your lead magnet and get on your email list. Everybody should be running these.

And the reasons we've run these is so that we can taste different lead magnets to run these reports at the end of our launches and see which lead magnets actually were the most effective ones in starting the conversation that resulted in a sale. When we enter the third project, the third type of project, it is still list building, but this time it is a launch runway list builder. So this is the list builder that our audience needs in order to start overcoming their own objections to our course. Now, maybe you don't have a runway-specific lead magnet. That's okay. Then for you, Project #2 and 3 are probably going to be the same. You're just going to ramp up the budget as you go into this runway phase. You're going to still use the list builders you've been using, but you're just going to ramp up the budget because you want to breathe new life into your list building.

So Project #1 is engagement. Project #2 is general old list building. Project #3 is runway-specific list building. It is when Stu McLaren goes into TRIBE launch, he starts running that TRIBE membership guide ads. You'll see that. You know when James Wedmore's going into it because he starts selling the little lead magnets. He's got these hundred-dollar courses about how to get the first thousand people on your email list without ads or what to do if you don't have a course topic yet. All of the things that are typical objections that he has to overcome in his launch, he tries to overcome them in the runway list building phase. Phase #4 is your launch. We're going to run ads to fill up your webinar. We're going to run ads to get people to sign up to your video series. We are going to run ads for your challenge. We're going to run ads for your live event. And then we're going to use retargeting to get those people who went to the webinar page, but didn't register to actually sign up. So that is Phase #4.

And then Phase #5 is the sales ads, and these are all the retargeting ads. They're all the ones that says, "The early bird bonus is now available," or they're testimonial ads, or they're the ads that says, "The doors are closing and you're about to miss out if you don't hurry up." Those are the five phases. So let me recap that. Phase 1 is engagement ads. Phase 2 is list building. Phase 3 is runway phase, and that's also list building. Phase 4 is your launch ads where we fill up your live launch. Phase 5 is sales. So we run different projects. Now, what I want to do in order to answer the question, "How much should I spend on what in my launch?" I want to talk about the size of your budget because not all budgets are made the same. And unfortunately, it is very true in the case of Facebook ads, the more money you have, the more you can do. Right?

So if we have lower budgets, we're not going to run ads in all five phases. We're also not going to focus our attention heavily on cold audiences because we first want to build our warm base. So let me divide this into three different categories. Category #1 is a launch budget of about $2,000 to $5,000. If you have less than $2,000 for your launch, I want to recommend you spend a hundred percent of your budget on list building and you just launch to your list. If you are still not making more than $2,000 to $5,000 from your email list, every single dollar you have needs to go into list building. So let's say you're at the point you have two to $5,000. Your first launch for these people are going to be divided this way. Your budget will be divided this way. You're going to spend $5 a day on engagement ads. That's a given, and you're going to do that anyway. And then for your launch, you're going to spend 70% of your total budget on list building. 70% of your total budget goes to list building.

You can decide whether you just want to use one lead magnet or whether you want to test two different lead magnets so that you can, at the end of your launch, run a report and see which one of the two lead magnets actually led more to people signing up for your course as well. 70% of your budget goes to list building and you can run that over two different lead magnets. 30% of your budget is going to go to your launch ads thing, and the reason we're spending the bulk of it on list building is because this is what's known as a warm launch. We're adding 30% of launch ads into cold audiences, into webinar ads, because we want to see if there is an impact, if there is people who actually buy the course cold, but most of our money are going where we are generally feeling more secure and where we can kind of predict that people are likely to take our course so that we're not wasting our money.

So this is an email-driven launch with support from ads. So 70% of your budget goes to list building and 30 goes to launch ads. Once you've done that and you've made some good money with it, and you know that when you build your email list, people buy, and you know that when you run webinar ads or launch ads, people actually also buy, then you can start increasing the budget that you spend on a launch to a cold audience. So you're still going to run $5 a day on engagement ads, but now the split is going to go more towards the webinar than to the actual list building. So you're going to spend about 20% to 25% of your total budget on the pre-launch list building. And then 70 to 75 goes to the launch event, which is the webinar or the video series. And then at the end, you'll spend about 10% on sales ads, which is going to be retargeting all the people who signed up for the launch but have not yet purchased the course.

So for this warm and cold launch, I'm going to give you those percentages again - $5 a day to engagement, 20% to 25% of your total budget on list building, 70% to 75% of your total budget on the webinar, and 10% on sales ads. Now we move into the $5,000 to $25,000 launch range. At this stage, you're probably not warm-launching anymore. You have tested your offer. You have seen that it works to a warm and a cold audience. You have seen that it works well enough to a cold audience that you can focus most of your dollars on cold audiences. You have been building your email list ongoing throughout all of this, and you have a good, strong, healthy email list. You also know exactly which lead magnets people need to download in order to become sales, in order to purchase your online course.

So when all of these things are true for you, then you're looking at spending about 40% of your budget on list building, and that includes your list building between launches, but it also includes your runway list builders, so the one that you're using to overcome the objections leading into your launch. And then about 45% of your budget goes into the launch, the actual launch. You're going to run ads to cold and warm audiences to get a lot of new people into your world. And then you're going to use 10% of your budget for sales ads, and that's, again, the retargeting ads with the enrollment open and enrollment close and the bonuses and all the things. So that's what you're going to do if you're spending between five and $25,000. Then if you're spending more than $25,000, you are going to grow this budget even more. Right?

So now instead of spending $5 on engagement ads, you're going to be spending 5%. 5% of your total ad spend will go to engagement ads. 20% of your launch budget will go to regular, old, straightforward, plain run-of-the-mill list building. It is your lead magnet that you have identified as the lead magnet that brings in the sales down the track. And then you're going to take 10% of your total budget, and you're going to run that to your runway list builder. And that runway list builder is probably a list builder that you're going to run to people who are already on your email list. Now you might be thinking, "What? Say what? Why do I want to run a list building ad to people who are already on my email list?" Because you tagged them and you saw that when they have downloaded these two things, they're more likely to convert to sales. And this second list builder is purely designed to overcome their objections. So that by the time you announce your course, they've already knocked these false beliefs out of the park.

Now the next project you're going to be spending ads on is the launch phase. You're going to be spending about 45% of your budget there, and this is where you get to invite cold people to join you on your webinar or your video series or your challenge. Whatever it is you're using to launch, you're going to spend about 45% of your total launch budget on getting cold and warm people to sign up for your launch. And then once you have done this, you're going to spend another 20% on those sales ads at the very bottom of the funnel, where you are retargeting those who were in your launch with the FOMO ads, the "You're going to miss out," and "The doors are going to close," and mid-cart bonus and early bird bonus and testimonials and all of those delicious ads.

So that is how much you should spend on what during which phase of your launch, and I trust that this episode has given you a lot of clarity if you have been the person who hired an ads manager and that ads manager wasn't able to get you any sales for your launch, or if you've invited people to your launch, no one showed up and you ended up wasting money running ads to that launch, or if you have launched successfully and you didn't know how to replicate it. I'm hoping that now you know that with some simple tagging in your CRM and by understanding where to put your budget, you have a clearer idea of how you can start to layer these audiences into one another, start to build this relationship, start to create this customer journey deliberately and with purpose and intention.

And if you loved what I just taught you in this episode, you are going to love The Launch Lounge. The Launch Lounge is the fastest way to get to a six-figure online course launch, so you can start hiring a team to get your time back and scale with confidence. And we are opening enrollment to The Launch Lounge membership on the 29th of July. If you want to get all the juicy details of the early bird bonuses, go to www.shineandsucceed.com/tllwaitlist. That's TLL for The Launch Lounge waitlist. Get on the waitlist and hang tight because the 29th of July, it is going down. Have a lovely week and I'll see you again next week. Bye.

Well, there you have it, and it is not long until we open the doors to The Launch Lounge membership, which is the fastest way to get to a multi-six-figure online course launching business that gives you all the freedom you want, allows you to hire a team, and finally get your time back and scale with confidence. And if you want to know all about that, make sure you get on the waitlist. There is goodies for those that are on the waitlist, but you got to get on it. You go to shineandsucceed.com/tllwaitlist. I'll see you there. Thank you so much for listening. If you had fun, please come back next week and remember to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing.

Salome Schillack (00:00):

Hello and welcome to episode number 111 of The Shine Show, today I interview my fabulous, one of my favorite people, Suzan Czajkowski. She is one of our Launch Lounge students, so I've had the privilege of hanging out with her every Friday for the last year. I've gotten to know her really well and the thing that Suzan and I have in common is we are both crazy introverts. We both would rather die than hang out on social media.

So my interview with her is called How to Thrive as an Introvert on Social Media with Suzan Czajkowski, and I know that if you're an introvert, you are going to love today's episode. Also, don't forget that we are opening enrollment to the Launch Lounge on the 29th of July. The Launch Lounge offers you all the support you need to create profitable online course launches that scale your business so you can hire a team, get your time back and become the CEO of your life, without wasting any more money on outdated ad strategies or taking on yet another online course.

If you want to get on the waitlist for the Launch Lounge you need to go to shineandsucceed.com/tllwaitlist. That's TLL waitlist. And now let's jump into my interview with Suzan.

Giving up your time and freedom to make money is so 2009. Hi, I'm your host Salome Schillack. And I help online course creators launch and grow and scale their businesses with Facebook and Instagram ads so that they can make more money and have an even bigger impact in the world. If you're ready to be inspired, to dream bigger, launch sooner, and grow your online business faster then tune in because you are ready to shine and this is The Shine Show.

Suzan, thank you so much for joining me. It is a lovely for me to have you here and get to hang out with you today.

Suzan Czajkowski (02:08):

I'm thrilled to be here. And really I always enjoy your company anyway. So I'm excited to be able to spend some time. This is great, thank you for having me.

Salome Schillack (02:14):

Yeah. You're welcome. I can't... Why [inaudible 00:02:16] we can travel again. And I can come over to the US and give you a big hug and sit down. I feel like on a day like today where you're at with the snow storms coming in, I feel like we need to sit down somewhere near a fire place and have some Gluehwein. Do you guys call the Gluehwein?

Suzan Czajkowski (02:36):

I don't even know what Gluehwein is.

Salome Schillack (02:38):

Oh dear. It's a mulled wine.

Suzan Czajkowski (02:41):

Oh, I'm in for that. There's an amazing restaurant looking at could be just even go out of the house these days. Looking forward to going back to this restaurant that has this huge stone fireplace. And they've got nice chairs near but you can also like sit on the edge of the fireplace and they've got some of the best chocolate chip cookies that you can find.

Salome Schillack (03:02):

I'm up for that. After all this ends I am going to travel just for chocolate chip cookies. I've always loved traveling but after this I'm just going to just travel all the time.

Suzan Czajkowski (03:14):

Yeah, I think we all are. We're all just going to uproot ourselves and move around for a while.

Salome Schillack (03:17):

Yeah, as like now I'm realizing just how much I love traveling. Now that-

Suzan Czajkowski (03:22):

You've been to this area, I'm in the northeast up in Boston, but you've been to New York.

Salome Schillack (03:26):

I've been to New York yes. I have not made it to Boston, but Boston is one of my number one places to visit on my list as soon as the borders open.

Suzan Czajkowski (03:36):

[crosstalk 00:03:36].

Salome Schillack (03:36):

As soon as they let the Aussies out. Who let the dogs out? No, who let the Aussies out as soon as they let the Aussies out because we can't go anywhere.

Suzan Czajkowski (03:45):

And you know a few people in this area.

Salome Schillack (03:47):

I do. Donna's there too. My sister. My online sister lives in Boston.

Suzan Czajkowski (03:52):

She's a good friend of mine too.

Salome Schillack (03:54):

I love Donna. So yeah, Boston fireplace I'm up for it.

Suzan Czajkowski (03:58):

Mulled wine. Mulled wine and chocolate chip cookies. Interesting combination, I think we can make it work.

Salome Schillack (04:04):

I have always been able to make alcohol and sugar work together. But that's not why we're here. We are here to talk about you and your amazing business. And just tell us a little bit about who you are? What is the difference that you make in the world? And who do you make it with?

Suzan Czajkowski (04:23):

Those are such big questions. So I own a marketing company, and I specialize in working with introverts, introverts who own businesses, and for whom being an introvert is a challenge when they're trying to market themselves because they're uncomfortable showing up all the ways that they see that they need to market themselves are high energy and put yourself out there and keep yourself out there and talk about yourself and talk about your business and talk to people you don't know, all these things that make introverts really uncomfortable and drain them of energy very quickly.

And so I work with introverts to help them find ways to market themselves that are more in line with how they show up in the world. Enabling them to show up authentically and make connections because they're just being who they are.

Salome Schillack (05:07):

Yeah, I love that and we're going to unpack that a little bit. How did you get to do that?

Suzan Czajkowski (05:13):

How many things do we do by accident in this world? It's a very, very long journey but my business has been open for 12 years and it started with like, I used to build websites many years ago. And very long journey short, I ended up helping just one-on-one helping people market their businesses and kind of just let's walk you through from the beginning all the way through and just market your business and get everything in line and make sure it's not working right.

And overtime, I was doing a lot with email marketing, I was working with one of the big email companies Constant Contact, as in one of their outside people who do a lot of presentations. And so I had like all these different specialties, and I'm trying to... Do you want the long version of this story?

So there's some very specific things that happened along the way to where I'm at now. One was that I got burnt out, being very specific with just email marketing, and digging into these little things. And I transformed my business over a couple years into this place where I am now where I'm helping people with their marketing overall. And so I've got a number of clients for whom I do that with where we're just like, what's going on in your social, in your email, and lead magnets and getting it all working together? Where's your website?

And that transition came because first of all, I was bored. But second of all, because entrepreneurs get bored, we just do. We're like, "I've been doing this for three years. Anything else? Anything else?"

Salome Schillack (06:35):

I don't think I've ever done anything for three years?

Suzan Czajkowski (06:38):

Exactly. If you get bored very quickly, you might be an entrepreneur. So with that, I made the shift. But in the two years, it took me to really truly shift my business, I did a lot of digging in and investigating what do I love? Who do I like working with? What's going on in marketing? And what's happening? And what's the shift happening that I can jump into? And one of the shifts that I saw was a big rising of this need for authenticity.

And you know, I'm in the States, I think some of it had to do with some things going on in the presidential world. Maybe, hard to say.

Salome Schillack (07:13):

Maybe.

Suzan Czajkowski (07:14):

So but that was a few years ago when I started tripping over authenticity and how very important it was. And people were really seeming to come out of their shell. But rolling from that to who needs to be authentic the most, who really needs that the most and realized as I was looking at the questions of who do I like to work with? Who do I enjoy working with? Who do I help the best? I realized that I was surrounded by introverts.

Salome Schillack (07:40):

Yeah.

Suzan Czajkowski (07:41):

And I just hadn't realized it in that yet. When I saw that I started taking a bigger picture and is like all my friends are introverts except like one. My family's all filled with introverts, and I hadn't even noticed. And when I say I did it by accident, it's something I was doing all along. I just didn't know that I was doing it.

Salome Schillack (07:58):

That is so cool. That's very cool. I think the internet is changing to like you say with authenticity matters more now. I think when social media, let's say the first 20 years of social media was the rise of the influencer. And I think we're moving away from that. I think we are more and more moving towards the rise of the micro-influencer, the smaller but deeper relationships, smaller followings, but deeper relationships, which I think opens up a lot of possibilities for introverts, or at least shifts the way introverts view social media and how to build a business on social media as an introvert.

Suzan Czajkowski (08:47):

One of the things that you just said that I think is important is like you're saying the rise of the influencer, I just actually saw a report today about how influencers are going to take a bigger and bigger hold. But one of the reasons influencing works and this relates directly to being an introverted business owner that needs to market yourself is it's banking on trust.

Salome Schillack (09:09):

Yeah.

Suzan Czajkowski (09:11):

We trust these people. That's why they can influence us. And when it comes to introverts, and their style of marketing, because they really thrive in these one to one environments. Because they really need to just be who they are, because they don't turn it on and keep it turned on all the time. They really just are being themselves, they're more approachable, they're easier to trust.

Salome Schillack (09:39):

Yeah. And I find being an introvert myself is that once you have that trust, the relationship goes deep fast. I feel like there's an initial lag in building relationships with people on social media, but once you get past a certain point, people are loyal for life.

Suzan Czajkowski (10:01):

Yeah, 100%. And that deep relationship is another piece of it, is introverts really value deeper relationships. They don't want the shallow relationships, that falls into the pile with small talk. They're like, "No, if we're not having a real conversation. Why are we talking?" There's a challenge there, you need to go through the small talk to get to the deep stuff and one of the things I do with my clients is really talk more around the skills of small talk.

You don't have to like it but you do need to do it as a bridge to the deeper talk. But they really want to get to the deep talk where the deeper conversations, the important things, versus other people who I think are like, "Nope, it's all the small talk, and then we're going to do the business," and they're not gonna go deep.

And it's where that deep conversation is where you're building and securing that trust. And it's not like, "Oh, trust me," it's like trust me, you can trust me, it's a different type of trust, where they can't, it's a relationship they're building.

Salome Schillack (11:01):

So how do you teach your clients to build trust this way on social media?

Suzan Czajkowski (11:09):

A lot of it is through consistency, and repetition. Because people have to be able to know what they're going to get from you. Because they get it all the time and you can't not show up. You can't show up sometimes and then go away and then show up again, there's got to be some consistency there. It's not just show up in all sorts of different ways. It's like show up the same way.

One of the hardest things to do in marketing is consistency. And so we lean into things like automation. We look at energy, and we'll use your energy the best so that you can do the work and then we set it up with automation, doing a podcast like this, it's a great answer. I have a client who is an introvert and she was getting ready to sell her book, and she was getting ready to get on the road and get on the stage and talk to people. And you talk to her and she's very quiet and calm, just like you were. She's very centered.

And I was like, "Do you want to go on stage?" And she's like, "Oh, no, oh, no, no, no, no, no." And so we got to talking about what she wanted to do, and the word podcast came up. And the beauty of podcasting is that you can do it out of sync with when you deliver it. And it enables you to show up consistently, but you can do your recordings during the time when your energy is the best.

Salome Schillack (12:24):

Yes, and you can batch your energy in a way. So I really like that. I wholeheartedly agree with you about the consistency thing. And I think that is where introverts and I have fell into this trap many, many, many, many times with having false starts with like, oh, it's the beginning of the year, I'm committing to going live X number of times. And then by the sixth time you are so exhausted, you drop that one because something interfered, and then you drop another one and before you know it, you're not doing it anymore.

But there is something beautiful in learning to manage boundaries, I think in a way where you set a boundary around when you're going to be on and when you're going to be off. And then in those on periods, you can batch record podcast episodes, or you can batch record social media content or batch record something and then have off periods as well.

Suzan Czajkowski (13:27):

Yeah, absolutely. And the thing is, is we can anticipate when we're going to feel high energy, we know when that's going to happen, right? I do actually do lives, I'm more of an ambivert. So I'm in between introvert and extrovert, but that an introvert side kind of gets in my way a lot. So even if you're not a full on introvert, it can still get in your way. But I know when I'm going to be not just higher in energy, but also, clearer in my head [crosstalk 00:13:53].

Salome Schillack (13:53):

That's a big one. Yeah.

Suzan Czajkowski (13:55):

You can't just, "Oh, I've got lots of energy that I can't talk," when does it all come together? And I know for sure that for me, for example, like you're saying, when are you on? I know for sure that on Monday mornings I am on, I'm energized. I'm focused, usually. I've usually gotten some sleep. I can pretty much count on Monday morning. I've personally identified Monday morning as Monday morning marketing mayhem. And that's just when I spend my time doing my marketing for my business. And that includes going live, because I know I'll be in the right headspace for it.

And you're right, we can fall apart after about the sixth episode. You're like, "I just can't do it anymore." But I've learned especially because I focused it when I did that I got past that sixth one and it's just been hate rhythm and this is just what I do Mondays.

Salome Schillack (14:43):

Yes, but it's because you started with honoring your energy, honoring that energy. It's funny because for me, Mondays for me is quiet day. I don't want to talk to anyone on a Monday. I schedule my calendar in such a way that I don't have to talk to anyone on a Monday or on a Friday, I can talk all day from Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I'm happy to talk all day, and my energy will be on. And if it's the only thing I get done is talking to people, I'm very good, I love it, I'll be energized.

But three o'clock this afternoon when I pick up my kids and I'm done talking to people, I don't go back into my office and start working. My work is done... My work was talking to people all day. That was my work and it took me a while to get to a point where I realized, that is the work, the talking to the people. That is the work. I know I can not talk to anyone at nine o'clock at night.

Like that is one of the prime creative spaces for me but I need to be alone, and I need to have my noise canceling headphones on and I can think very creatively at nine o'clock at night. But I cannot talk to anyone and I also don't talk to people on Mondays or Fridays because then I need quiet because I need to center myself. And I need to plan my week. And I need to think about where I'm going, it's that thinking, planning mode that I need to be in. So it's funny that you say you decide what your boundaries are and once you've decided it, then it becomes a habit.

Suzan Czajkowski (16:21):

Yes, exactly. You've got to identify them. You've got to learn how to clarify them. And for me, and for some of my clients, we label them. So calling it Monday morning marketing mayhem is like this is what I'm doing.

Salome Schillack (16:34):

Yeah, I like that.

Suzan Czajkowski (16:34):

And it's on a schedule and if somebody were to say, "Hey, can you meet Monday," I'd be like, automatically, I can't because it's labeled, it's on my calendar for mine. And it just is and it's just like you have identified. If work is talking to people, I don't do that on Mondays unless I really can't fit something in that has to happen. So there's an exception from Monday afternoons, but nothing happens before noon.

But yeah, my clients are all Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and then I have one regular meeting on Friday. But other than that, I don't... Fridays outside of that, or that downtime, that if you want to get into your head and you want that headspace so you can be creative, so you can think clearly, so you can focus on something, you've got to make the physical room as well.

Salome Schillack (17:17):

Yeah, that's very true.

Suzan Czajkowski (17:18):

That's what I hear you doing, the time, the physical room, creating a space for you, you can do those things.

Salome Schillack (17:25):

Yeah. And it's funny, took me years to figure it out. I'll be honest with you, it took me years because I'm naturally not a morning's person. I get an afternoon slump, like I'm a little bit prone to having a little bit of a nap after lunch.

Suzan Czajkowski (17:42):

I was just going to say, this is an important piece of the conversation, knowing what your energy is, and how it naturally flows. You don't fight it, you don't schedule a meeting in the afternoon, you go, "Okay, two o'clock in the afternoon, I am going for a walk or I am sleeping or I am doing something else." And that's exactly right. I am a morning person. And that's my creative space. So I'll get up at five in the morning or something crazy like that, depending on what I'm working on at the time and spend a couple hours working on my stuff. I did that today.

And when I was done working on my thing, and it was eight o'clock in the morning and time to work on my client stuff, I felt so positive because I created that time and taken it and used it and spent two hours in my own head. And it just really set the day with a nice tone.

Salome Schillack (18:27):

But the way that I had to figure it out, I used to think that well, because I'm not a morning's person, then I shouldn't speak to people in the morning, I should speak to them in the afternoon, and get my work done in the morning. But that didn't sit well with me, but once I figured out that no, I need a big block of quiet on a Monday, the whole Monday and a big block of quiet because I am that, like I need big blocks of me time to refill, like an hour of me time is not going to do it for me. I need three days.

When we go on holiday, I tell my husband the first three days I'm not going anywhere, me, the couch, a book, Netflix. That's what it is for three days. And then I kind of come out of my shell again. But once I figured out that, if I manage it in terms of big block Monday, big block Friday, and then I can just go, go, go Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and not see talking to people as an interruption.

Because that's what it used to be for me, talking to people used to be an interruption of my actual work, which is weird because it is my actual work. You have to establish those boundaries but what I wanted to ask you next is if you teach your clients how to manage their energy and your time blocking like this and creating healthy boundaries around it, what about replying to posts, replying to comments on social or being active in Facebook groups, because I find that is something that's incredibly draining for me as well.

Suzan Czajkowski (19:59):

Yeah, one of the things that is important to note is that every introvert is different. And so for some introverts that is incredibly draining, and for other introverts, they're perfectly happy to do it because they're not face to face with anybody. So it depends on who the introvert is but there are, I do have one client who very specifically, she's like, "Oh, my God, they're everywhere. What do I do?"

Salome Schillack (20:19):

I feel a bit like that sometimes.

Suzan Czajkowski (20:22):

Everywhere, they're everywhere, like, okay, so this is what we're going to do. We know what time you're posting, you need to be... If anybody responds right away, you really need to be tuned into that. After that, let's keep a monitor on it and after we just got to talk about when can they walk away from that post? Because if somebody responded to it three days later, do they have to reply? It's like, "No, you don't."

And so we talked about that, some of it's the time, how long has it been since the social was posted? But also, how many did you get? If you got 10 responses, you can respond to the first five and you're fine. But it's helpful to respond to more if you can, but we also talk, can I do the responding? Every now and then I'll see something and I'll pop in there and I can do it. So having somebody serve as a resource to help you so you don't even have to be the one doing it is an interesting answer.

Salome Schillack (21:12):

I think what I learned that's helped me is I have to first take responsibility for the need to take care of it. It's when I resist it, that I feel like I need to run away from it, and that it is going to catch up with me. But when I take ownership of it, take responsibility for it, then I can go okay, "In these circumstances, it's okay for my assistant to reply. In those circumstances..." For example, I have a Facebook group where I'm now training them to just post their question twice a week, and I will answer it in a video.

Because I know I can go live for 20 minutes and answer their questions, which is a lot easier than trying to type out a long-winded answer in a group, or the same as what you said, I give myself permission to let there be comments that are unanswered, that's a big thing, like it's this-

Suzan Czajkowski (22:09):

One of the things I think I hear you saying is regardless of how it is, putting that plan in place, we can lean into the plan. I think some of the stress is not knowing what to do. Can you do anything like you're saying resisting it versus putting a plan in place? Okay, I'm going to reply to the first five that come in that day, I'm going to monitor it. I'm not going to just sit there on there. I'm going to check it two hours later, I'm going to [inaudible 00:22:34] and that kind of thing. What are my windows? What's my plan? What can I do? What don't I have to do? You go in there with a plan, whatever that plan is and then you've got a road that you can navigate?

Salome Schillack (22:46):

That's right, and then you can evaluate the plan and see if it worked or not. But it's made a huge difference for me having a rule that I don't ever reply to anything on social media on my phone. So now I am forced to come and sit behind my computer and put a timer on and do the replying, I have it blocked off in my calendar. And then when the time's up, I'm out and that has made a big difference.

So we've talked a lot about like managing energy, managing your time, managing social media, but what other ways are there that you find very effective to help introverts market themselves?

Suzan Czajkowski (23:23):

I think one of the best things we can do is find something that they don't have to manage, that they can put out there once and let it run as its own machine. So that's part of it. And then the other I just use what I feel is the magic word is setting up a marketing machine where you've got things in place, you've chosen what you're going to do, you've set aside what you're not going to do, and then you turn it into a machine that's just going to run for you.

But in that marketing machine, we need something that you don't have to tend, you don't have to keep recreating, you create it once and you put it out there and then you're focusing on just getting more eyes on it. And that is something like a lead magnet and that lead magnet and you talked about it recently in one of your podcasts and it was fabulous because I'm like exactly right you have to get the right lead magnet out there.

And if you do, doing so much work for you, you did it once and you're just getting it out in many eyes and hands and emails as you can get and it's a lot lighter of a weight for marketing than other things. Social media can be very heavy, blogging can be very heavy, anything that you're having to create more content and more content around is heavy.

Salome Schillack (24:34):

Yeah, that is true.

Suzan Czajkowski (24:36):

Create something once and then you just put it out there and you're creating things around it. When you do a lead magnet, you're going to have to create things like Facebook ads to get it out there but the Facebook ad content draws on the content and the lead magnet. You're not starting from a blank slate.

Salome Schillack (24:52):

Correct.

Suzan Czajkowski (24:52):

[crosstalk 00:24:52].

Salome Schillack (24:54):

And the beauty of having... You might need to taste a few lead magnets to find the one that's your sweet spot. And you might need to taste a few ads to that lead magnet to find the sweet spot. But once you do, I have a lead magnet that's been running for, I want to say almost since January last year, so it would almost be a year and those ads have so many comments on them. And now I'm going, "I want to change it." But that is like the gift that keeps on giving. And it just delivers people onto my email list every single day on autopilot.

Suzan Czajkowski (25:30):

And I have a client that I've done that for. Mine do okay, I'm still searching for my best lead magnet because sometimes you have to, but I have a client who, out of the gate had the right lead magnet. And it took us a while... I started working with her this past January. And it took us a while, she had the lead magnet she didn't know that's what it was. And the day I saw it, I was like, "Oh, I know what we're doing with that." And turned it into the lead magnet set up so that she could use it on her website and then started running ads in April.

So she had zero people on her email list in April and because we had the right lead magnet, you also need the right audience. And we found that fairly quickly, we had to move things around a little bit. But we figured that out and we started in April, and by September, she had 2000 people on our email list.

Salome Schillack (26:19):

Fantastic.

Suzan Czajkowski (26:21):

I know you're supposed to put chunks of money, and we didn't put a lot of money into it at first, it had its own power and it just turned away, a little bit of money and just kind of kept feeding it and it just kept chunking people in and she was getting people every day and it just really, really worked. And then one day, we were like, "What if we threw some real money behind this?" And so we just did a test and we were like, "Whoa, okay." [inaudible 00:26:45].

Salome Schillack (26:46):

I love it when that happens. I love it. There's so much value in the kind of low and slow. A lot of people think they need to wait until they have the big chunk of money and it's just not true. The low and slow gets you further faster than the fast chunk of money.

Suzan Czajkowski (27:04):

And honestly, if you look at her low and slow versus the chunk of money, I think she got... If you look at it, and you can say she probably got about the same number of people. But it just either way it worked. It worked really, really well. And I was just really excited for her because as an introverted business owner was trying to market herself it gave her confidence.

Salome Schillack (27:23):

Oh, that's fantastic.

Suzan Czajkowski (27:24):

She was getting feedback. She was getting comments, all sorts of conversation that she would... She was somebody who had to be like, "Do I have to answer all these questions?" I was like, "No, no, we just want to monitor them. Make sure that they're saying anything crazy in there." Because they've been running for a while at that point. I was like, "No, it's fine."

Salome Schillack (27:41):

That's fantastic. And the beauty of that is now you can create an automated email sequence.

Suzan Czajkowski (27:47):

Yeah.

Salome Schillack (27:48):

That nurtures them.

Suzan Czajkowski (27:50):

For the lead magnet, you're going to have one anyway.

Salome Schillack (27:53):

But you can build it out, I'm at the moment looking at building out for lots of 90-day nurture sequences. Look, we're thinking about it and I'll share more once we've done it and we know that it works. But nurture sequences that follows 90 days of, it's a process that goes through 90 days. And if people have stopped opening emails, at the end of 90 days, I'm going to break them off of my list, they'll go into a reengagement sequence, but then they're going to get booted off, because Google looks at our open rates, and it looks at those things, and if I can get to a point where I have an amazing lead magnet, which I do have in place, that brings me the right customers on autopilot every single day.

And I have a nurture sequence in there, that builds the relationship with them, gets them to trust me without me being in it at all. And then on top of that, I have the weekly podcast that comes out. So they have that opportunity of almost real time interactions. And I have a Facebook group and I have all these things that by the time we're selling a lister or by the time we're selling the Launch Lounge, or by the time I'm inviting people to become clients in the agency, so much of the work was done on autopilot, because we poured that energy in beforehand.

Suzan Czajkowski (29:15):

Yeah, that sounds amazing actually, I can't wait to hear more about that. [crosstalk 00:29:18].

Salome Schillack (29:21):

A year from now I will have a full report.

Suzan Czajkowski (29:24):

No, I look forward to that. And I've heard people doing that and I think there's a shift towards doing some of that. One of the things that I do in the marketing systems that I'm putting together with my clients is after they've gone through a short automation, getting them into the regular newsletter circuit. And I like that because it is even though we're writing it asynchronously to when we send it out. It's generally speaking like you're saying semi-real time, what's going on right now, the holidays, this same client, let's talk about the same client Rosie. And she's got this lead magnet that's just going great. She's also got a podcast that's done really, really well.

And between the lead magnet and the podcast, one of the things that's really exciting, I think I just shifted topics here. One of the things that's really exciting is when you see something take off, when you see something hit. And one of the things I like about the regular newsletters is that you can engage and ask questions and see whether or not your list is engaged and that'll help tell you whether or not you've got the right people.

And it's the same with a podcast, like what you're doing where you can take a look and people are responding to it? Do they like it? And getting that bead on do we have the right audience is really helpful when you're ready to sell something to them.

Salome Schillack (30:31):

That's true. And it teaches you the language to use too. I look at the hits in terms of podcast episodes, in terms of email headlines, in terms of all of that, and literally recreate the same thing, the same thing, and people still have a need for it. We think everyone retains everything we share with them, they don't, they retain a very small amount of it. And if it hit once, six months later, it's going to hit again. And six months later, it's going to hit again, and you learn the language of hitting that pain point or that desire with your ideal customer, which is really good.

Suzan Czajkowski (31:10):

Yeah, there's a lot of magic, exactly what you're saying. There's a lot of magic in using the words that your client would use, and that's one of the problems that I see business owners have across the board is we talk in our industry language. I'm making an assumption here that everyone knows what I mean by a lead magnet. We got a lead magnet out there and everyone's like, "I'm happy to do that. Tell me what it is."

Salome Schillack (31:31):

Yes.

Suzan Czajkowski (31:31):

And so making sure that we speak in the language of our audience so that they know that we understand them. I think the magic thing we're going for is for them to say in their head, "How did she know that? She knows me so well." I'm just thinking that but that's where trust lies. We get them and we help them understand that we get them because we're speaking their language.

Salome Schillack (31:53):

And learning the language comes from this energy of consistency and it's the low slow consistent, it's the introvert energy, not the extrovert energy that does the learning that gets to the point where the person says, "Wow, she's in my head."

Suzan Czajkowski (32:11):

Yeah. And somebody turns around, and you're still there. You haven't flown away and gone to someplace else. You're not a hit and run, you're here and you're still here, and you're still here because you're reliable, you're consistent, you're trustworthy. So they can lean into that and then as they get to know you, and this is what you're doing in your podcast, you teach them the words that are in the industry that you're trying to help them in. But they aren't there when we meet them.

Salome Schillack (32:40):

No, they're not, we've got to take them with us. You've been an entrepreneur for 12 years?

Suzan Czajkowski (32:45):

Yes.

Salome Schillack (32:46):

What's been the hardest thing?

Suzan Czajkowski (32:48):

That transition was really hard and really scary when I went from, I don't want to just do this one thing in email, or I want to do moving into the very, very big picture, that two years of not knowing what was at the other side of this transition, just knowing I was in transition, really, really scary. And what's interesting to me about that is that I have moved many, many, many times in my life, there were 20 years where I moved once a year, as an adult by choice.

And so transition actually is a place of comfort for me, that two years of, "Okay, I'm not doing what I used to do, but I don't know what I'm going to do next," and I'm in this investigating space was very, very scary and very, very hard and important. And I'm happier now than I was then by a lot and every entrepreneur is going to transition because again, they get bored or something happens, or the market shifts, and they're small, so they can shift with it. You need to choose to shift with it. You can't say, "But I'm still going to do the same thing I'm going to do if everything is, you're selling CDs and music has gone online, you need to think about whether or not you want to go online. You need to go with the market.

And it's the same thing and you've got to listen to yourself, and you've got to trust that what you're doing is going to help you if you just listen to yourself, to the world and it's a scary time, because we want to do, do, do and now you've got to sit and listen and it's just hard.

Salome Schillack (34:16):

Yeah. And did you find that in 2020 that was the theme for you as well?

Suzan Czajkowski (34:21):

2020 wasn't as hard for me as a lot of people because I already work from home and I have for 12 years and I don't have any kids and staying home I'm like, "Oh, no, I have permission to do the thing I was doing anyway." And I think for a lot of introverts that was... And I've seen a lot of memes on this where it's like, "Oh, yeah stay home." I have no problem with that. You homeschool, one of my favorite places so that works for me. So there was that, it was a scary year. I'm not in any way just counting... Not only is it scary, it was hard for all of us in our own different ways. Then I think the... I don't leave the house became fear of leaving the house which isn't healthy, right? There's a lot of bad stuff that happened for everybody but that idea of staying home that's where I was like, "I got that [inaudible 00:35:08]."

Salome Schillack (35:09):

I felt a little bit the same about that. I was a little bit annoyed that I lost my privacy at home, then now all of a sudden, I have to share the house with my husband and my children during the day, which is like, this was my me time.

Suzan Czajkowski (35:23):

Yeah to be able to run around the house all day on your own and not have the kids to trip over. Yeah, absolutely, and I think that I'm of a small group of people who can actually have that. But we were talking you and I once and you were saying, "You put shoes on," and you were like, "Wait this is uncomfortable." Because we're used to being at home in our socks or barefoot.

Salome Schillack (35:42):

Yeah, I don't wear shoes anymore.

Suzan Czajkowski (35:45):

Exactly.

Salome Schillack (35:47):

What has been something that's been surprisingly easy for you about building a business?

Suzan Czajkowski (35:51):

The tech has been surprisingly easy for me. And I had [crosstalk 00:35:55].

Salome Schillack (35:55):

Which some people will hear you say that and be like, "What?" First year.

Suzan Czajkowski (36:00):

So to be clear, and we didn't really go through this. My background before I became an entrepreneur included technology. I started out in the Air Force as a technician working on electronics, like at component level, working on like resistors, and transistors.

Salome Schillack (36:16):

So were you the only woman in the room?

Suzan Czajkowski (36:19):

I was one of the few, but there were others. There were actually others at the time and that was in... A bit out of date myself here. That was in the late 80s.

Salome Schillack (36:26):

Wow.

Suzan Czajkowski (36:26):

I got out right before Desert Storm. Long story short at Hewlett Packard and I worked in the fitness industry as a personal trainer, and I went back to school and got some degrees and taught and stuff. I've been in a lot of industries, doing a lot of things, my degrees are in communication and so I approach marketing from a communication standpoint, and I only do digital marketing, which is electronic, so you can tell all these things that I've done, and we rally together [crosstalk 00:36:59].

Salome Schillack (36:59):

I actually think you and I have the same degree. I have a Bachelor of Arts in what they called communication science. That's what they called it in South Africa, and industrial psychology, which is organizational psychology.

Suzan Czajkowski (37:15):

So I have a BA and an MA in interpersonal and organizational communication.

Salome Schillack (37:19):

Oh, okay.

Suzan Czajkowski (37:20):

So there's some crossover, there's some absolute crossover. But I was doing interpersonal and organizational is how do we speak one-on-one and in systems?

Salome Schillack (37:28):

Yes.

Suzan Czajkowski (37:28):

But there's some psych in there as well, you kind of [inaudible 00:37:31] that in there as well. And women's studies, a lot of women's studies and my master's thesis was women in leadership in the US Forest Service. And there the first woman leader was in 1976 and I did this in 2000, so there had been about 25 years of leadership, and just in the 25 years, that women had come up in the US Forest Service as leaders, the leadership strategy, the leadership style changed from being... I'm not finding my words here, being really directive to more engaging and participative, but it shifted from telling him what to do to getting everybody to participate in leadership. Authoritative, there's the word, authoritative to participative. So it had shifted-

Salome Schillack (38:22):

Which is the masculine and feminine.

Suzan Czajkowski (38:24):

Exactly. And that influence that women had in leadership, but then coming up in leadership had, there was a lot of things that we had to shift and move in the organization, in the US Forest Service in order to enable women to be able to be leaders. And a lot of that was just accepting it just in a lot of like technology and stuff like that things have to shift if women are going to be a part of it.

Salome Schillack (38:48):

Yeah. Awesome. Fantastic. I did not know that about you. That's really exciting.

Suzan Czajkowski (38:53):

It was fun, I've ranged around a lot. But the benefit is that I can adapt whatever industry my clients are in, I can usually get my head in there pretty quickly.

Salome Schillack (39:03):

I think you and I have that in common too.

Suzan Czajkowski (39:06):

I believe that. I mean, I'm in your membership and I see that every time you talk to somebody, they tell you what they do, and you're like, "I got it," and you're in so I can totally see that. You're adaptable.

Salome Schillack (39:14):

Yeah, it's one of my strengths. I know that I can very quickly read the room or the situation. I want to know from you if somebody is listening, and they feel like they are like, "Yes, I totally associate with you." What would be your best advice for them if they are just starting out on this journey of building their businesses? What do they have to focus on? What are the mindset shifts? What are the key strategies? What would you say?

Suzan Czajkowski (39:45):

One of the first things they need to do is talk to the people that they're hoping to serve or that they're intending to serve. Find out what the problems actually are and you listen to two things. You listen to what the problem is, don't just go out there and be like, "Okay, I'm going to fix this problem." Go make sure and it exists and talk to the people, but also listen to how they say it. What are the words they're using to describe the problem? An example of that is I would say, I want to say the introverts have a problem being seen, and that they have a problem with visibility. But what they say is, they don't want to put themselves out there and they don't like to talk about themselves.

It's totally different way of saying it but I want them to understand me, I need to say it in their words, if I want them to believe that I can help them. I need to say it in their words. So that's one of the very first things that people need to do is find out what the problem is in the language of the people they want to help. And in the process, you're building connections and invite those people to help you see what the answer could look like.

Salome Schillack (40:51):

I love that. I love that. So that could you be making them working for free at first and they might be making a lower offer and keep offering until you get results and help them get more results and increase your prices that by, that's how I started coaching.

Suzan Czajkowski (41:07):

That's how I start, I think almost everybody has started that way.

Salome Schillack (41:10):

That's how I started with Facebook ads as well, I ran so many free Facebook ads before I started charging for it.

Suzan Czajkowski (41:16):

When you do something free, it allows you to make the mistakes, it allows you to ask questions, it allows you to take 30 times as long.

Salome Schillack (41:21):

That's true and in that phase, you make a ton of mistakes. You mess it up but the beauty is you get to say, "I messed up, I learned, I'm moving forward, I'm not going to wear my mistakes as a coat, I'm going to shake it off and move on."

Suzan Czajkowski (41:40):

So now in the future, because I made that mistake in the future, when I see that I'm going to know what to do instead, I will be able to do it faster.

Salome Schillack (41:40):

Exactly.

Suzan Czajkowski (41:49):

And when you go on down the road, and you're 10 years in and people are paying you more money, they're paying you for the education that you got 10 years ago, they're not just paying you for the time you spent just now, they're paying you for everything you've been through that enabled you to do the thing you did just now.

Salome Schillack (42:08):

Exactly. And it also it gets you to a point where you just, if you're selling services, like you and me in the agency, I have no problem standing for my prices, nobody can negotiate my fees with me because I am that sure of the value that we deliver. But three years ago, if someone wanted to negotiate I maybe would have because I was still like, "Oh, am I pushing it? Am I not?"

Suzan Czajkowski (42:38):

And there's a whole other conversation in there about the value that a price [crosstalk 00:42:43]. When you can, you get to a place in your business where you're like, this is my price, because this is my price.

Salome Schillack (42:51):

It feels good to get to that place. It feels good to be like, "We don't negotiate that bit."

Suzan Czajkowski (43:01):

Yeah, it's not a question of the amount, it's the question of are you in or are you out?

Salome Schillack (43:05):

Yeah, exactly. Because I'm not going anywhere [inaudible 00:43:09].

Suzan Czajkowski (43:09):

If you don't sign on, their leaving that space open for somebody else to sign on. And I'm okay with that.

Salome Schillack (43:14):

Yeah. And there's plenty of other people you can go sign on with. Thank you.

Suzan Czajkowski (43:21):

And the other side of that though is, as people who are in business, as long as you and I have been, where we're in this place, it's hard to find the time to build our businesses and to grow our businesses and to develop them. And so if somebody doesn't want that space, I'm like, that's called development space that I can use to build [crosstalk 00:43:37].

Salome Schillack (43:38):

Yeah, correct. Yes. And I always look at it as I explained it to someone the other day as well. I said to them, "I charge an abundant fee that allows my team to have abundant space to do abundant work for you. If that doesn't sit well with you, and you would prefer rushed space, hustled space, hustled time to do a rushed hustle job for you, you need to go find another team."

Suzan Czajkowski (44:07):

There you go. And that's about fit, do they fit?

Salome Schillack (44:12):

Yeah. I appreciate the time you have spent with me. Thank you so much. Introversion is a topic you and I can both talk about all day long. Because I'm also, some days I'm extreme introvert but then I love being on stage and I love talking about myself and I can do that all day long. But if anybody wants to find out how they can learn from you, or work with you, where can they find out more?

Suzan Czajkowski (44:39):

So there are a couple of spaces. Like I said, I'm on Facebook every Monday and that's a live show.

Salome Schillack (44:45):

Where do they find you on Facebook?

Suzan Czajkowski (44:47):

On Facebook at Suzancz S-U-Z-A-N-C-Z is where I'm at. And that's my morning show on Mondays at 10:30 Eastern time. But my website, best place to find me would be suzancz.com and I'm opening the Introverts Marketing Academy in just a few weeks, which is very exciting. And so it's introvertsmarketingacademy.com.

Salome Schillack (45:12):

Fantastic. I love it. Wonderful. So if you're an introvert like me, go and look up Suzan Cz, how do you pronounce your surname?

Suzan Czajkowski (45:21):

Czajkowski.

Salome Schillack (45:23):

Czajkowski?

Suzan Czajkowski (45:24):

Yeah.

Salome Schillack (45:25):

Fantastic.

Suzan Czajkowski (45:25):

You got it.

Salome Schillack (45:26):

I'm glad when I meet people who have harder surnames to spell than Schillack.

Suzan Czajkowski (45:30):

When I look at Schillack, I'm like, "That's not hard. Have you seen my name?"

Salome Schillack (45:36):

Yeah, Schillack is pretty easy, although I still have to like I have a little rhyme in my head to try to remember how to spell. Suzan thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. And thank you for what you've shared with everyone here tonight.

Suzan Czajkowski (45:49):

Thanks for having me. I really, really enjoyed talking to you.

Salome Schillack (45:52):

You are very welcome. Well, there you have it. And now you know how to build a thriving business even if you are an introvert and Suzan's one of the amazing students inside the Launch Lounge, you can become a Launch Lounge student too by going to shineandsucceed.com/tllwhitelist. Inside the Launch lounge, you will find all the support you need to create profitable online course launches that scale your business so you can hire a team, get your time back and become the CEO of your life. Without wasting money any more money on outdated ad strategies, or buying yet another online course.

Salome Schillack (46:38):

Thank you so much for listening. If you had fun, please come back next week and remember to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing.