Hello, and welcome to episode number 126 of The Shine Show. In today's episode, we're going to talk about what to fix first in your funnel. And at the end of this show, you will know exactly where to focus so that you know you're spending your energy and your money in exactly the right place to make the biggest impact in your business right now. Let's listen.

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.

Well, hello, my friends. It's so nice to be here with you today. In today's episode, you're going to learn exactly what to focus on when you are troubleshooting your funnels to see what you need to fix first so that you spend your energy in the place where you will make the biggest impact. When you know how to do this, you'll start putting your money into the right things where you're going to get exponential return instead of just throwing spaghetti on the wall. So what I'm going to teach you today is going to save you time. It's going to help you have a little bit more peace in your life because you're going to pour your energy into things that are actually making a difference. And it is going to help you save money and put the money in the important places.

Now, if you have been hanging around with me for a while, you may have heard me say that there's a very easy equation to making money online. You only need two things. You need an audience, and you need an offer. So audience plus offer equals money. Audience plus offer equals money. Super simple. It's not quite easy, but it is super simple, and it really is as simple as audience plus offer equals money. So let's unpack those three elements a little bit. Let's unpack audience and unpack offer and unpack money because those are the three levers you can pull. And if you only have three levers you can pull, it automatically makes it easier to start knowing where to troubleshoot your funnels.

First of all, we're going to look at audience. Audience has three core elements. Now, you might be grabbing a pen and a piece of paper to write some of this stuff down. I will be repeating a lot of it because today's episode is quite content-heavy. I'm going to be teaching you some stuff. This is teaching stuff here, heavy stuff. This is like the kind of stuff I teach the students inside The Launch Lounge. So grab a pen and a piece of paper and write down, "Audience plus offer equals money." Now, on another page, write down, "Audience," and then let's divide audience into the things that you need to be focusing on first when you are fixing your funnels and when you're trying to make some money or more money online.

So here are the three parts of audience that we're going to troubleshoot. The first one is list building. List building is number one. Number two is list nurturing. That is the second thing you're going to focus on. And number three, and yes, my friends, I am putting this one last for a reason, is social media. Why do I put social media last? Because really, social media is the last thing you should be focusing on when you are building your audience, and I'll explain why in a second. So under audience, we have list building, list nurturing, and social media.

Now, let's talk about list building. When you are building an audience, the most important thing, the number one activity you should be doing, the only thing you should be focusing on when you get started is list building. I heard the money's in the list. I heard build your list. I heard it 700 million times before I actually listened to it. And can I tell you what the one thing is I regret most in my business? Is not starting my list building sooner. By the time I got around to building my email list, my ad costs were higher, my social media engagement was lower. Thankfully that's about the same time I realized I can run engagement ads to build all those things back up, but it was an expensive exercise, and especially if you're on a tight budget.

So don't think that you're just going to use social media. You are going to use social media too, but your number one priority when you start out creating funnels, testing funnels, and building funnels is list-building. You're going to use your lead magnets to build your list. You are going to test your audience targeting. And when you look at your ad results, you're going to look at your link click-through, right? So in other words, the rate at which people who are seeing your ads are clicking on your ads, and you want that to be above 1%. And you're going to look at your landing page conversion rate, and you want that to be above 45%.

So if you're just getting started and list building is the first thing you're focusing on, then you're going to create as many lead magnets as you possibly can. You're going to put yourself in your ideal customer's shoes and ask yourself, "What is one small win someone can have when they come and talk to me or work with me?" And you can decide if you want to put that into a checklist or a blueprint or an ebook or a quiz or whatever you want to do. Actually don't do a quiz. Quizzes are more advanced. If you're just starting out, don't do a quiz. If you're advanced, please do a quiz, you can do a quiz, you're allowed to do a quiz. But if you're just starting out, steer clear of quizzes because they are a little bit more advanced.

Start building your email list, focus there first. If there's anything you're going to fix first, you fix your list-building first. You make sure you have a lead magnet in place that is actually going to convert. You make sure you have a lead magnet in place that people actually want. And you make sure you have a lead magnet in place that is the start of a conversation with your ideal customer where the next logical conversation is your paid course. In other words, if I'm going to solve a small problem for someone with my lead magnet, I want them to consume my lead magnet and be left after consuming my lead magnet feeling like, "Wow, I just got a fantastic win, and this win has given me clarity for what to do next." And it is that what-to-do-next piece that is your online course then.

So my question to you as we wrap up talking about list building is, is your lead magnet the start of a conversation that ends in them buying your paid course? Think about that for your lead magnet. And if you are currently not making money in your funnels, ask yourself, "Was my lead magnet the opening of the conversation that logically led to them wanting to buy my course?" So that's number one. So let's go back. Audience plus offer equals money. We're unpacking and dissecting audience at the moment because the first thing you need to test is your audiences. Under audience, number one, list building, number two, list nurturing.

What is list nurturing? Actually, not nurturing your list is the number one reason why people don't build their lists. You can put your imaginary hand up. I'm not seeing you, so put your imaginary hand up, but my hand is going up. Hand up if you have started list-building, started emailing them every week, was consistent for about a month, and then the kids were on holidays or the cat got sick or your job got busy or something happened, or you signed up a few clients and then you didn't need to nurture the list anymore, and then you stopped nurturing your list. Oh-oh. List nurturing is one of the key activities in your business. If you're going to build an audience, if you're going to put money behind ads to build your list, you 100% need to be nurturing your email list.

Now, it doesn't have to be something epic. You can just write a personal email, share a story, share a success story of a client or another student or something that happened in your life. Go live on Facebook and share that with them. But add value. Find a way to add value. There's a reason. That lead magnet that you created, people opted into your email list based off of that lead magnet that you created. They said, "I would love to hear from you on a regular basis. Please send me emails." So send them emails and make them valuable. Every single week, send them a valuable email. What are you doing consistently and reliably every single week to nurture your list and give them value? If you're sitting there and you're like, "My funnels aren't working, I haven't made money online," question number one is what are you doing to build your list? Question number two is what are you doing to nurture your list?

So now you know what to fix first. First, you fix your audiences. Under audiences, you fix list-building first, you fix list-nurturing second. Now, what is the third thing, the thing that I said I put third on the list for a reason? The thing that is third on the list is social media. Now, we are often tempted to start by fixing social media. Again, hands up if you've downloaded 700 different content planning templates or content calendars or prompts for social media content. I remember spending Sunday afternoons sitting there creating posts for Instagram and Facebook. Maybe back then when I started it was just Facebook. I think it was just Facebook. Sitting there creating posts on Canva and writing all sorts of captions for my social media, thinking that's going to get me closer to making money, but it does not. It doesn't. So don't start with social media. You start with list-building and you nurture your list. And lastly, you move to social media.

Social media, you are going to start by choosing just one platform, just one platform. And it's not the platform you like best, it is the platform where your ideal customer hangs out. So if your ideal customer is 65, you need to be on Facebook. If your ideal customer is a 40-year-old female who's into arts and crafts, you're probably on Instagram. If it's an 18-year-old, I think TikTok is where they're hanging out these days. I'm not quite sure. Is it Snapchat or TikTok? Probably TikTok. Is Snapchat even still a thing? I don't know. If it is professionals, then LinkedIn is where you need to be. So choose one platform and embrace it.

Start by using content from your lead magnet. Don't reinvent the wheel. You do not need to reinvent the wheel. It's more important that you get lead magnets out than that you create social media content. So take your lead magnet, chop it up into a million different posts, chop it up into different pieces, pull sentences from it, and use that for social media content. And if you already have an email list and you're nurturing that list, you're going to want to promote your weekly content on social media. In my business, if you go to my Instagram account right now, you will see just about the only thing that happens on there is the podcast. I promote the podcast twice a week. So twice a week it goes on the News Feed, and twice a week it goes on Stories. That's all that's happening over there. And you know what? For now, that's enough.

I know where I'm going with it. I have a clear strategy and plan. And to be honest, right now, my energy and my resources are allocated elsewhere. So I am not worried about not being on IGTV and not being on Reels and not being on this, that, and the other. And don't even get me started about Clubhouse and all the other things that are brand new, shiny objects. You don't need to be there; do not get distracted. Focus on list building. Focus on consistently adding value to your list. Promote your content on one platform. So I'm curious, what are you already creating in your business that can be repurposed and reused for social media so that you free up your time and your energy so that you can go move higher up in the hierarchy of things that need fixing? Instead of spending an entire Sunday afternoon coming up with all sorts of Reels dances you can do, spend that time coming up with better lead magnets. Spend that time batch-creating your podcast. Spend that time batch-creating your blog posts.

Your social media is going to be a hungry monster, but it'll always be there waiting for you. But when you pour your energy and your money into list building and list nurturing, you get a return on investment. And by return on investment, I don't just mean pie in the sky stuff, I really mean money in your pocket return on investment. So now you know what to fix first of the three things. So what are the three things again? Audience plus offer equals money. We fix our audience first because we need a tribe. We need a hungry crowd to feed. So audience is the thing you fix first, and you fix it in the order of list building, list nurturing, and social media.

Now let's look at what to fix in your offer. I looked up the definition of the word offer, because I was like, "how am I going to... " When you say offer, there's so many different things that come to mind. Is it my sales page? Is it the bonuses? Is it my course? What is an offer? I think every time, even when you create a social media post, you're kind of making an offer because you're offering people an opportunity to engage with you. So I was like, "How would I define offers?" So I looked it up, and one of the definitions I found was, "to present something to someone to accept or reject as desired. To present something to someone to accept or reject as desired." I think the keywords here is present. Yeah, you're presenting something. You have to present something. So if you've been list-building for 700 years, and you still haven't made an offer, you're not presenting something to people, right? You want to be presenting something to them, and you want to be presenting it to them pretty much from day one because that's the only way you're going to learn what offers convert and which ones don't.

And then the other keyword here is desired. They have to desire what you're offering because if they don't desire it, they won't accept it. Instead, they might reject it. And that sucks. It feels horrible when you make an offer and people reject it. My kids do not love broccoli very much. I love broccoli. I can eat loads of broccoli, I love it. But my kids don't, and I just feel like broccoli is a superfood and you need to eat broccoli. And anyone who gets raised in my house is going to eat broccoli. Dammit, you got to eat your broccoli. So when I put broccoli in front of my kids, they can either accept or reject it. So I have to come up with a better offer for them when I'm offering them broccoli. If I take the broccoli and I steam it a little bit, like literally just a tiny bit, because one of my kids actually really like raw food. So if I just steam it a tiny, tiny bit, so it's just almost just warm but still a bit crunchy and I cover it in mozzarella cheese, they're all over it. They eat more cheese than broccoli, but at least they get some broccoli in as well.

But what I've learned is if I take the broccoli and I put it in the blender and I fold into spaghetti bolognese, which is one of their favorite, favorite meals, they eat broccoli without knowing they're eating broccoli like there's no tomorrow. And I can triple the consumption of broccoli in my house just with this one trick; by folding it into the spaghetti bolognese. My children need broccoli. They do not want broccoli. My offer has to be something that they want, not something that they need. If I offer them what they need, if I present to them what they need, they can accept it or reject it. And they're going to reject it because they don't desire it. So I have to change it into something that they want so that they say yes to it. And then I may have the opportunity to give them what they need.

Your job as a marketer is to understand your ideal customer's desires and to package what they need into an offer that they want. In other words, sell them spaghetti bolognese and give them broccoli included inside. They're not going to want what they don't want. There are three components, audience plus offer equals money. We've already covered the audience. If we look at an offer, there are two very important parts to an offer that I want to talk to you about and that I want to share with you that you can taste and look at to see if it needs fixing. And those things are the promise and the benefits. The promise is the transformation that will occur after they've consumed and implemented what you're offering them. So it is the promise of the desired end state they're going to be in after using your thing, after reading your ebook, after taking your quiz, after downloading your audio, after signing up for your workshop.

I have a few examples for you of where we've just taken the promise of an offer and we've just... Well, actually, we've taken broccoli and turned it into spaghetti bolognese. So we've taken what somebody gave us as an offer, and we just asked a few questions about the ideal customer and then came up with a better promise, and that became the offer. So here's an example of a lead magnet. This lead magnet is coiled... called not coiled. It's called Oil Paint Mixing Guide. Oil Paint Mixing Guide. The person who creates Oil Paint Mixing Guide could say, "Well, everybody asks me for a mixing guide. Everybody wants to know how I mix my oil paints. Everybody wants to know how I get that great color every time. Because they asked for an oil paint mixing guide, I created an oil paint mixing guide." And so that goes on the landing page, and then it doesn't convert quite as well.

And so we change it to Perfect Color Every Time: A Guide to Mixing Colors for Confidently Painting in Oils. I'm going to read that again because dang, this is good. Perfect Color Every Time: A Guide to Mixing Colors for Confidently Painting in Oils. We're still saying, "Oil Paint Mixing Guide." We're just packaging it up as spaghetti bolognese. What the ideal customer here really wants is they want the perfect color every time. So what they might say is, "Can you show me how you mix paint so that I can paint in the perfect colors as well?" And what you hear is, "I want a color guide." And so what you create is a color guide. But the little bit that you missed or that you didn't include in that is, "I want the color guide so that I can create perfect color every time." So there's a good example for you of the promise and the benefit. The benefit is perfect color every time. Whereas, Oil Paint Mixing Guide does not include a single benefit, it is just a feature.

Here's another example from a workshop I recently saw. Career Reinvention Workshop for Women Over 40. Career Reinvention Workshop for Women Over 40. Now, I don't know about you, but when I'm hanging out with my friends, I've never used the words career reinvention. "Oh, I would love to reinvent my career." That's not how we talk. That's how we were taught to write in school, but nobody says, "I want career reinvention. Oh, can I please have some career reinvention?" The answer is no, you do not want career reinvention. What about Love What You Do Without Sacrificing Family Time: A Career Reinvention Workshop for Women Over 40. How's that? "Love what you do." That's what we say when we talk to our friends, we say, "I just want to love what I do without sacrificing time with my family." Love What You Do Without Sacrificing Family Time: A Career Reinvention Workshop for Women Over 40. That's much better, isn't it?

So the promise is love what you do without sacrificing family time. The benefit is you're going to love what you do without sacrificing family time. Spaghetti bolognese instead of broccoli. Still, you're offering the same thing, but you're wrapping it up differently. And here is an example for you from my own learning and from my own life and from my own business. So here's a course I used to sell and the promise of the course. The Fastest Way to Build Your List to a Thousand People. The Fastest Way to Build Your List to a Thousand People. I thought, "Who doesn't want that? Everybody wants to learn how to build their lists using Facebook and Instagram ads." Turns out they don't. So we sold A-Lister. The very first time I sold A-Lister, we sold it as the fastest way to build your list to a thousand people. When I surveyed the audience, I realized nobody wants to buy... Well, they did buy, but they told me it's a grudge purchase, buying something that teaches you how to build your list. Because it's not sexy, it's not what we want.

Instead, later, we turned it into Find Your People Online and Make Your First Sale. That's what they want. They want to find their people online. They want to find people who just wants to buy their thing. And they want to make their first sale. That's what they want. I know that they need to build their list, but I was giving them broccoli. Had to wrap it up as spaghetti bolognese. So when you learn how to make offers to your warm audiences, in other words, your email list and your cold audiences with your lead magnets using ads, then you can move on to fixing the third part of the equation. What is the third part of the equation? Audience plus offer equals money. Money is the third part of the equation, right?

So you need a hungry audience, you need a good offer with a clear promise and a benefit, and then you'll make some money. So if you're not making money, what are we going to look at? After we've looked at building your email list, we've looked at nurturing your email list. We've looked at social media to promote your lead magnets and your weekly contents. We've looked at lead magnet offers that has to be inviting and converting. Now we look at paid offers, making money. Paid offers. And under paid offers, we're going to look at three things. We're going to look at the number of people who are in your funnel. Because if you don't have enough people in your funnel, you need to fix that. Then we're going to look at the number of people who saw your offer. Because if you didn't get enough people seeing your offer, you need to fix that. And finally, we're going to look at the number of people who converted.

Now, I'm willing to bet that when you started listening to this episode or when you saw the title of this episode, What to Fix Next in Your Funnel, you thought I'm going to start with making money. You thought I'm going to start with, "Why aren't people paying me?" And you can see that we actually fixed that last because before we can make money, we need an audience and we need an offer. So the first thing we're going to fix when we're making money is the number of people in your funnel. Statistically, only four to 5% of the people who are in your launch, so in other words, people who sign up for your webinar or say, "Yes, you can send me this promotion." only four to 5% of them will convert. So that means you need at least 100 people to sign up for your webinar or your challenge or your workshop to make four or five sales.

A lot of people are surprised when I tell them this number, because they would build their email list to two or 300 and then invite the two or 300 to a webinar and have a webinar with about 20 people on it and then make one sale. Or maybe they make no sales. And they tell me, "But I had 20 people on my webinar, and only one bought." And I go, "well, that's fantastic. One out of twenty is great." And they're disappointed because they worked so hard to get the 300 on there. What they don't realize is, statistically, that is still a fantastic outcome because if you increase that 300 to 600, now you have two sales. If you increase it more, you have more sales. So I don't want you to feel disappointed when you have low numbers of people in your funnels to begin with, and you didn't make any sales. It is a numbers game. It's online marketing because it's online, and we need to get those critical mass.

So the question is, did you have enough people at the top of your funnel to make those sales at the bottom of the funnel? And if you didn't have enough people, what do you need to go back to? What are you going to fix then? You're going to go back to square one; fix your list building. You're going to go back to list-building, nurturing your list, sending them emails, posting on social media, creating an offer that converts, getting them onto a webinar or a workshop or a free thing, making them an offer. Now that you have more people, you're more likely to make a sale.

So the first thing you want to fix is the number of people in your funnel. The second thing you want to fix is the number of people who saw your offer. This is another one that we run into a lot. Will say, "Well, I had 20 people on my webinar, why did nobody buy?" And I say, "Well, how many of the 20 went to your sales page?" And then you go and look in Kajabi, and Kajabi tells you you had five people view your sales page. And I say, "Well, yeah, it's not that it didn't work, it's just that you didn't have enough people there." Your sales page should convert roughly around 20%. 20% of the people who come to your sales page should buy your course. So once you know you have enough people in your funnel, look at the number of people who actually saw your sales page and ask yourself if that's enough. 20% of the people who saw your sales page should be converting to sales.

If you feel that you didn't make enough sales, look at how many people were on your sales page and see if you had enough people converting from your sales page to a sale in order to know what to fix. If you didn't get enough people on your sales page, where do you start fixing it? You go back to square one: audience. Check that you've got a big enough audience. Check that you are adding value to them every week. Check that you're building your list on your social media. Check that you invited them to the workshop or the webinar on social media. Check that you had enough people in the launch. Check that you had enough people on the sales page. So that's the second thing, sales page. And the third thing is the number of people who converted.

So finally, after building our list, after nurturing our list, after promoting everything on socials, after making offers, after making free offers with our lead magnets, after making paid offers, if you've checked that you've had enough people in your funnel and you've checked that you've had enough people see your offer, then and then only do you check if you have enough people converting. A lot of people just look at the number of conversions and they become so emotional about that number that they forget to actually go back and check the data. Today, on one of the coaching calls inside The Launch Lounge, one of the students said, "It is such a beautiful dance between emotion and data. You have to lean into the emotions that you go through as an online course creator, and you have to build that resilience and that emotional fitness to lean into the emotions of the ups and the downs in order to get to a place where you can say, 'Now I can just look at it from a data perspective.'"

Because it really is only data, but it also is a lot of big feelings that goes with it. But if you just stop at the feeling and you never move through the feeling to get to the data, you risk staying stuck there, and you risk making the wrong decisions about how to fix it. And I see this so often when I see even... Sometimes I see multimillion-dollar online course creators who have hit a plateau in their businesses, who are not looking at their data and then desperately searching for some kind of an expert, some savior, someone who has some magic pill to come and save them from whatever they perceive to be the problem in their business. And it doesn't just happen to one-man shows, it doesn't just happen to five-figure businesses, I see it in seven-figure businesses. It's a bit scary when you see someone looking for a savior and you know that the savior is you need to be really, really, really honest with yourself about your data. If you stay stuck in those emotions, you're never going to be honest with yourself about your data. And then you're never going to learn what to fix.

Now, some people, when they're launching only need three students in a launch to have a profitable launch. Others need 300, and others need 3000. So how do you know if your conversion number is a good number or not? The question is you look at your ROAS. What does ROAS mean? ROAS stands for return on ad spend, ROAS, and it's pretty much a little sum that we use to work out, "Did you make any money?" Because we're putting money into ads on the front end and we're getting money out of our launch on the backend, so we want to know for every dollar I put into Facebook Ads, how many dollars did I get back? The equation is revenue over ad cost. And the idea is that that number should be more than one. If you put in $1 and you got out $1, you are still exactly where you were before you started launching. It would have been better to go and buy a pair of shoes.

If you put in $1 and you get out $2, then you have made money. Then your money has grown. For every $1 you put in, you got $2 out. So you made your dollar back and you might another dollar. That's a good vending machine. Now, ideally, we want the ROAS to be more than two because we got overheads to pay. We got to pay ourselves. We go to save some profit. But it depends on your business model how much you need in terms of return on ad spend for it to be profitable. So then if you want to make more money on the next round when you're launching, you need to go back to the original equation: audience plus offer equals money. And in order to make more money, you grow your audience. Then you make better offers, and then you sell more so that your return on investment becomes bigger and bigger and bigger than the money you put into ads. And that, my dear friends, is how simple it is to make money online. It's simple, hey. You think it's simple? Very simple. It's not easy.

Today's episode was content-heavy. Now, I know that some of you will be taking notes feverishly, and some of you might be going a little bit like, "What?" Wherever you're at right now with this content, I want you to know that it is exactly where you need to be. If you take one thing from today's lesson, from today's podcast episode, think about what that one thing is. Come over to Instagram, find me on Instagram. I'm salome.schillack. And if you can't spell that, I can't spell it either, just... I don't know, search for Facebook Ads and I might come up. Or just search Salome and maybe I come up. Or go to my website, shine and succeed, and you'll find it as well. Come and find me and tell me what the one thing is that you learned today that you're going to fix first, that you're going to do differently, that you're going to make a change. And tell me how you're getting ready for that change to really impact your business in 2022.

It has been a shitty couple of years, right? I mean, the last two years, it's just been doozies. So let's start thinking about 2022, and let's start putting our energy and our focus and our money into the things that really matter so that we can get more of our time back so that we can have more peace of mind so that we can have more freedom and control in our lives so that we can make more money and have that create more freedom for ourselves. So if there's one thing you're taking away from today's episode that you know that if you do this one thing in 2022, then that is going to help you get to where you want to go faster, come and send me a DM on Instagram, come and tell me what that one thing is. I would love to hear from you, please come and tell me.

All right, my friends, you guys have a wonderful, wonderful week, and I'll talk to 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.