Hello, and welcome to episode number 146 of The Shine Show. Today's show is called The First Three Steps to Taking Your Offline Business Online. The reason I created this episode is because I know a lot of you out there have interior design businesses, or you're music teachers, or you teach crafting, or you're a coach, and in this episode, I want to show you how you can fast-track, bridging the gap between having only a local audience and getting started with building your business online, so I'm going to share some secrets and the three steps to taking your offline business online. Before we get into that, I want to remind you that if you are ready to start building your audience and fill it with people who are ready to buy your online courses and memberships, and you're looking for a supportive community to help you every step of the way as you learn, I want to invite you to join me inside A-Lister. We open for enrollment again at the end of March.

A-Lister is the only program that shows you how to finally find your right people online and make your first sale using Facebook and Instagram ads. There are also some juicy bonuses for those that are on the early bird waitlist, so make sure you go to shineandsucceed.com/waitlist, and sign up today. 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. I have so many favorite students, but one of the things I love most is when a student of mine has a successful offline business or a successful local business like Lucy, who had handmade jewelry.

She turned her handmade jewelry into a business, where she teaches others, jewelry makers or people who sell jewelry in markets how to take that online. Then, there's Shelby, who was a successful artist until COVID hit, and then she had to very quickly pivot and take her business online, and I'm thinking about Debbie, who is a successful interior decorator, and she's pivoting to moving her business online, and there are so many others. One of the funniest stories is the story that Lucy told me about how she ended up making the decision that she needed to take her business online. She said she had a pile of stock ready, and each one was packaged and boxed, and she lugged it to and forth, back and forth from her car. She had to set up an all-weather stand so that she can differentiate herself from others in the market to attract her ideal client, and she had absolutely no control of the type of people that came through to the market, that came to the stall that she had set up.

After one of many just unpredictable days in terms of sales, because she relied on market organizers to bring the crowd, she decided to pack it all in, go back home, and figure out how to take her business online so that she can be in control of how many people find her business, and she can be in control of how they buy from her. Now, for a while, she said she wanted to stay warm indoors and be in control of her time and create a system that resulted in stable income. She also never wanted to pack or unpack a car full of market stock ever again, so Lucy decided to take her business online, learning how to use Facebook and Instagram ads. Eventually, she understood her sales patterns and what works in terms of her marketing strategy, and now, Lucy has very successful online business, and she has learned so much, and she is graciously teaching so many other students in both my community and in her community how to do that for themselves. She makes a huge difference to everyone who comes across Lucy and who finds her there, and I'm just so proud of the progress that she's made.

It's not just Lucy, there are many like Lucy in my community, in our student groups, in our beautiful A-Lister Flapper club where we all hang out and pretend it's the 1920's, and we talk about Facebook ads while we pretend it's the 1920's. Her story became one of her most powerful selling tools because she used to be her ideal client. She was the person who was lugging the stuff around from market to market, and then she figured out how to take her business online, and that's been a very powerful way for her to be authentic and to help her ideal customer really find her and stand out from the crowd. That brings me to what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about three things you need in your business when you are wanting to take an offline business online, and the first thing that you need is you need to identify who your ideal customer is.

Just like Lucy, and just like all of the other students, there comes a point where you kind of have to ask yourself, "Well, if I've been able to sell successfully to a certain type of person offline, what does that person look like online, and where do I find this person online?" It's often, there's a bit of a learning curve that needs to happen here, because if you imagine somebody buying from you offline, they've probably made eye contact with you. They've probably been referred to you by a friend. They have probably maybe been in your shop, or maybe they've seen what you make or they've seen what you sell, and maybe they have seen you do the thing that you're good at, so maybe somebody who was working in one of the other stalls at the market saw how well Lucy can sell, or they saw her website, and then said, "Hey, can you teach me how to do that?" I think the first step to really taking your offline success online is to understand your ideal customer from the inside out.

I know that all of you already know your ideal customer for your offline business really well, and I also know that if you're listening to this, you probably want to figure out how to understand your ideal customer even better so that you can find your people online and get them to an offer so that you can start selling to them. My best advice to you, in trying to find out who your ideal customer online is, is just start somewhere. Just sit down and write down everything you know about your offline customer, and if they're the same customer as the online customer, just look for similarities. See what both of them have in common. See what they don't have in common, and see what, most importantly, what their most pricing pain points are and what the implication of those pain points are.

What I mean is if I want to hire somebody to do the ironing, iron my washing, the problem that I have is I have a pile of washing that is just growing and growing by the day, and I don't have time, or frankly, the desire to stand there for hours and iron it. That's my immediate pain point, but the implication of this is I have to give up my Sunday afternoons to iron clothes so that my husband can wear a ironed shirt to the office, or that my kids can put on their beautiful dresses that requires ironing, or for me to put on my favorite dress that requires ironing. The pain point is bigger than just ironing the clothes. The pain point is giving up my Sundays, giving up my Sunday afternoons, having to choose between downtime and iron time. You can see, that is just one example of where your ideal customer might have an immediate pain point, which you will know is there when you have an offline business because they come to you already knowing that they need help solving this problem, but you might need to uncover that when you're going online because online, when you use ads to reach people, you'll be interrupting what they're doing.

You'll be catching them while they're in the middle of watching Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. I mean, hello. Don't interrupt me when Mrs. Maisel is on, except if you can solve a giant, big problem for me that I really, really desperately want solving, then I'll allow you to jump into my newsfeed while I'm scrolling. That's a little bit just of the deeper level that I want you to uncover them. I want you to listen really closely to what they say they want, and this is different to what you offer them.

Often, I would ask a student, even clients, I'd ask them, "Well, what's the biggest problem you solve for your client?," and they immediately tell me what they do, and that's not the question. The question is, "What is the biggest problem you solve?," so just think about how it goes a few layers deep, and then listen really closely to how they verbalize the problem, because different people verbalize things differently. When I did coach training, I learned about visual people, auditory people, and people who kind of need things, really like cerebral, I suppose. There's a word for it, and it escapes me now. For the visual people, you're going to paint a picture. You're going to say, "I'm sure you can see that doing this, this and that is going to help you see a new future."

There's visual people who needs to see the picture, and then there's auditory people who need to hear you speak about it for a while. They might all verbalize their problems in different ways, and your job as the marketer is to pick up on all those different ways that different people verbalize the same problem, and that takes a little bit of listening to what they say. I always suggest getting on a call with them, and then transcribing that call, because even the words they're going to say in a call, if you're just trying to remember it, you're still going to filter it through your language, and when you write it down, it's going to come out as interpreted by you, but when you have a transcript of that call, you can literally take a highlighter and highlight their exact words for how they describe their pain point. The other thing you can try is really ask them, "Why does this matter to you now? Why does it matter to you, and why does it matter now?"

That's going to get them thinking about this implication of the problem. It's going to get them thinking about, "Well, it matters to me right now because I'm really desperate to rest on a Sunday, and I don't want to iron anymore," which is different from, "Oh, it matters to me because I just want to get the ironing done," or you might say, "Which really matters to me now because my children are growing up and I really don't want to be lugging things around to different markets anymore." You might have different examples of this, but figure out why it matters to them now. Then, if they've bought something from you, you definitely want to know what made them buy, and if they didn't buy, you want to know what made them choose not to buy, because those are the most important two, little pieces of information that you can have, because the person who tells you why they bought, well, they're telling you exactly what the offer is that worked, and the person who's telling you why they didn't buy, well, they're telling you, they're kind of pointing you in the direction of figuring out why your offer hasn't worked. The very first thing that you need to do when you want to take your offline business online is you need to identify your ideal customer, and figure out, "What is the pain point that they have?," "What's the implication of that pain for them?," and then how you solve that pain point.

The second thing that you need to know in order to successfully move your offline business online is you're going to need to start to create some social media content. Now, I'm sure this does not surprise you. However, if you are a local business and you have been posting online diligently, you might have figured out that if you want to sell an online course, you're going to need a bigger audience. Now, I'm the first person to tell everyone who come my way that you do not need to turn into America's next best influencer, or Australia's next best influencer, or the UK's next best influencer. No, thank you.

We are not doing that. Inside A-Lister, I teach a very simple $5 a day strategy to help you increase the engagement on your social media, because let's face it, organic engagement is dead, and you want engagement, don't you? I know you want engagement because you are a serious online course creator and you want people to engage with you on socials, not just because it feels good, but because that shows you how you can connect with them, how you can bring them into your world, and most importantly, it helps you to get them on your email list. Social media is such a good place to test your message. When you post something on social and nobody responds to that, that is also not going to work when you run an ad to that, but when you post something on social media and people freak out, and they share it, and they comment, and they say, "Oh, you nailed it. It's like you're talking to me," then you know you're onto something.

Social media can really kickstart your audience building, which helps you build engagement, it helps you build your email list, and it starts to build an audience for you of people that shows them that you can actually impact their lives and what their lives would be like when they have that absolutely incredible outcome that they dream about that they would only have if they sign up for your course or sign up to learn from you. Now, I know that you want to fast-track your list building, so you will love the $5 a day engagement strategy. I've also talked about that many, many times on the podcast, so if you want to learn a little bit more about the $5 a day engagement strategy, just go to shineandsucceed.com and find the podcast page, and scroll back through the 140 something episodes, 146 episodes, and look for Engagement Strategy or $5 A Day Strategy. There's plenty of content there. I have shared a lot about it on Facebook and Instagram, and there's plenty of information about it on the podcast.

However, inside A-Lister, I teach it to you pretty quickly and easily, and my students get those $5 a day ads up in about a week, and we start running them, and suddenly, their social media just explodes with engagement. If you're ready to fast-track your social media engagement and build your list a lot faster so that you can get to actually making some sales to the people you find online, then you are definitely going to want to take the second step, like start running $5 a day ads to your audience. The third thing that is the third step, really, towards taking your offline business online is to build your email list and make them an offer sooner. Now, what do I mean by that? I mean, when you have an engaged audience on social media, you should be inviting them to download your lead magnet.

You can create any lead magnet you want. When I got started, my very first lead magnet was an eBook, and I think the eBook was called Seven Secrets To Success that for Women something, something, Seven Secrets of Successful Women, something like that. It was a bit of a life-coaching book that talked about overcoming overwhelm, and procrastination, and taking responsibility, and living with gratitude, and it was literally just the first thing that I could come up with. I think 70 people downloaded that, including some people who went to high school with me, very random, and including some moms from my mother's group and daycare, and my child's daycare, so not my target audience at all, but hey. I grew my list by 70 people, but what I want for you is to grow your list with only your ideal customers. If you're in that phase where you're not really sure what lead magnet to create, just create anything.

Just get started, and start when you're building your social media, just start sharing that on social media, because you're going to see if people take you up on it or not, and at least that way, you start building your list. Then, when you're ready, you're going to move to introducing ads on your ad account as well, and at that point you will have, of course, been running engagement ads for a while so your conversions will be nice and low, Mark Zuckerberg will reward you for all the delicious engagement you have because you've been running ads and you've been posting regularly, and it's going to make your list building so much easier, but I also want you to make an offer to people as soon as they opt in for your lead net. I want you to make an offer to them either on the thank you page of your ads when they've given you their email address or I want you to make that offer inside an email sequence that comes at the end of, or that's kind of serves as an introduction to you and what you do, and then you sell them something. You sell them something valuable that will make a difference to them. When you do this, this is going to help you bring down your lead costs significantly, so that means you're going to spend less money on ads to get more people onto your list, and you're going to have an email list where you can taste different offers.

The more offers we can taste, the faster we will get to money. It really works that way. I don't know if you've heard me say this, but I say this in my student communities all the time, the secret to making money online is audience, plus offer, equals money. You're already on your way to building an audience because you have engagement, you're building your social media, and you're building your email list, and now you start practicing making them an offer. As long as you're building your email list, you just keep making new offers, until people take you up on those offers.

That's a really safe and easy way to test different offers and to get people to make that first purchase from you so that you can eventually say to your offline clients, "Well, actually, I'm no longer taking any local business clients because my online business has exploded, and I'm being such an inspiration and a success around the world selling my online courses and helping people change their lives." Wasting money on ads is just not something I love, and these strategies really will help you prevent wasting money. You want a big list. You want a healthy list and you want a lucrative list, a list of people that loves your content that you send them every week, and when you're inside A-Lister, I teach you exactly how to make offers to people on your email list so that you can start making those money. Now, not everyone has considered that their business can be taken online.

I'm hoping this episode gets you thinking about the potential to have more freedom in your day, to have more time freedom because you don't have to be anywhere in-person in order to sell to someone. I hope it has gotten you thinking about the level of control you can have over your own life, where you don't have to settle for letting someone else bring their audience to you. You can literally create your own audience, and I hope you are seeing the potential here in creating a consistent, reliable income stream from your online business. Now, regardless of your business type, the principles are the same. Think about your why, focus on your ideal customer, build the systems that suit both you and your goals, as well as your ideal client, and then make offers to them that they will buy.

I might make it sound simple, which is, of course, it's not always simple, but with the right support and guidance, you can definitely take your offline business online, and in less than three months, you should be able to start selling to people your offers online. I've seen it so many times, and we can teach you all of this in-depth in my foundational Facebook and Instagram ads course, called A-Lister, and I would love to have you join us in there. If you want to get on the waitlist to find out about all the goodies that's in there, go to shineandsucceed.com/waitlist. I will see you again next week, and I hope you have a lovely week. Bye.

If you are ready to start building a thriving audience and fill it with people who are ready to buy your online courses or your membership, and you want a supportive community to hold your hand every step of the way, I want to invite you to join me inside A-Lister when we open enrollment again at the end of March. A-Lister is the only program that shows you how to finally find your right people online and make your first sale using Facebook and Instagram ads. There are also some juicy bonuses for those that are on the early bird waitlist, so make sure you go to shineandsucceed.com/waitlist, and sign up today. 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.