What we’ll be covering:
Step 1: Find and fully accept your Passion
Step 2: Defining Market Fit and Potential
Step 3: Creating a Customer Persona
Step 4: Building a Following/community
Step 5: Building a List of Potential Customers
Step 6: Monetizing Your Audience
Step 7: Scaling Your Profits
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Step 1: Find and Fully Accept your Passion
When you’re trying to uncover your passion, here are a few questions you might ask yourself:
What are my favorite hobbies? What do I spend my spare time doing or reading a lot about? What unique skills or experience do I have?
When people come to me for help, what do they usually ask me for? A simple trick to find out what you’re passionate about is:
The Party Test – Imagine you are at a party and you don’t know anyone. Someone comes up to you.
What could you end up talking them about for hours on end?
Is it your kids? Gardening? Guitar playing? Cooking?
Chances are, you will come up with one or two items, maybe even a handful. Which brings us to the “fully accept” part, which is probably the biggest stumbling block for a lot of people, as well as the main reason that people find it difficult to “find their passion” in the first place.
Most people actually know what their passions are, but don’t believe:
- That they know enough about it to make money from it
- That they are good enough at it for it to produce anything worthwhile.
- That there are creative ways for them to actually earn money from it.
My advice is to:
- accept that your passion is real and worthy of investment,
- believe that there is a way to make money from it and
- learn whatever it takes to get better at it.
Voila! Passion found!
The point of building your online business around your passion is so that you are energized and driven by what you do every day—even when things get tough, as it inevitably always does in any business. So, while the challenges, risks, and long hours may remain the same, the defining difference between a passion business and a non-passion business is that you will be far more determined to keep going when you are passionate about it.
It’s a common misconception that you need to be an expert on a topic to provide value. You don’t, and you shouldn’t let this stop you from getting started. Even the experts had to start somewhere! You must provide value, and the chances are pretty high that you don’t realize how much you know. Or how much others actually need it!
If you’re still unsure and can’t think of anything – Think about this:
What life experience do you have that could be used to help others overcome the same challenges?
Next, you will need to think about how your passion overlaps the market’s needs. Here, you will need to determine its market fit.
Step 2: Defining Market Fit and Potential
Once you’ve specified your passion and skillset, the next step is defining market fit.
Market fit can be described as the group/type of people that would love to buy your product/service. Consider:
Who would benefit most from your knowledge/experience?
Is the market size/demand big enough for you to profit from it? Where are you most likely to find this type of person?
There is always a slice of people in the market who can benefit from your knowledge/expertise.
- Do you have a unique process for doing creative work?
- Do you eat a special diet that you had to research and learn about?
- Are you always sharing tips with others doing the same hobby as you?
- Do your friends come to you for advice on anything?
There are large markets out there that are in need information/tips/guidance like that which you’ve formulated from your life’s unique experiences.
The most effective way to find out which parts of your knowledge/experience people are most in need of is by using the Google Keyword Planner.
Check out Google’s Keyword Planner at the link below: https://adwords.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/
Think of key terms/phrases associated with your passion and use the Google Keyword Planner to see what people in your field are searching for as well as the number of searches. This will give you an idea of the market size/demand.
If the numbers are quite large then you’ve got some great market potential!
If not, keep trying different keywords/phrases till you hit the big numbers. You should find a market with a high demand for your chosen keywords/phrases relatively easily.
The specific winning keywords/phases will also give you some clues to how you could position yourself to meet its demand with your particular skillset.
Now that we know how to define our market fit/positioning and potential, we can start to step into the shoes of these potential customers to understand their needs and wants on a deeper level. This brings us to our next step, creating a Customer Persona.
Step 3: Creating a Customer Persona
Any good business starts with serving their customers’ needs; that’s why this step is essential to creating a successful product marketing strategy.
A great Customer Persona will fully represent the ideal profile of a customer that is a true fan of your work and will happily sign up for your content and purchase from you.
You must understand their needs according to their profile, so you can structure an offer that best serves them.
- What is your ideal customer’s age? Are they female or male?
- What are their biggest problems/stumbling blocks that can be solved with your solution? And how can your solution be tweaked to address these problems better?
- Where would you usually find them? (online/offline, social media platforms, forums, communities, etc.)?
If you do an excellent job of defining your Customer Persona, then thinking of ways to interact with them as if they are standing in front of you, asking for your help, becomes much easier. This depth of thinking also helps to further tailor your product or service to them and allows you to connect with them beyond the transactional level. You should be able to choose languaging that builds rapport quickly. You need to know what motivates them and keeps them up at night.
Knowing this will also allow you to structure your product with the right solutions that target the right pain points. As well as how to package and deliver this in a medium/channel/form that will resonate with them.
Once you have mastered how to match your unique offering with your ideal Customer, let’s move onto building a list of prospects by building a following/community.
Step 4: Building a Following/community
A following is a community of people who are truly interested and engaged in what you provide/create and its message. (i.e.,true fans of your work) These are people who will happily want to stay “in the loop” on any information/updates you would want to share with them.
Your following represents your future potential customers so you will need to cultivate a strong rapport with this community of people and invest time and effort in listening to their needs and producing valuable solutions for them. Doing this will build your authority figure status in your field, to the point that your audience will begin seeking out your advice. They will also start to value your professional opinion when it comes to any product/service recommendations.
There’s no shortage of platforms where you can build a following. The big guns include YouTube, Instagram, Facebook. And once you have started building, you will also become aware of the smaller nooks and crannies of the internet that you can also use to build your brand. These will include various online forum sites, niche fan platforms, and even other influencers blogs/sites can be online gathering places that can be creatively engaged. You can also start to engage your following offline through events and conventions. All these options can be overwhelming in the beginning.
The best place to start is where your potential customers already are. This may be in niche-specific Facebook groups, or on Instagram/Snapchat due to a younger demographic. Or maybe even on local chat forums.
Don’t overthink it!
Start by cultivating a rapport with those people in the places that they interact and engage.
- You could start an Instagram page or Facebook group and start following/inviting people that would be interested in your content.
- You could start publishing tutorial/review videos on YouTube.
- Or start commenting on forums/blogs/Youtube videos and building authority among its followers.
Find where your potential customers are and open channels of communication with them so you can build rapport. Help solve their problems, give them value, and they’ll want to engage consistently with you to the point where you’ll eventually be able to sell targeted offers to them. But before things get out of hand across too many platforms, you will need to put a system in place to organise your followers.
Step 5: Building a List of Potential Customers
Now that we’ve gone through the importance of building your community of potential customers, the next thing you will need is a way to organize your channels of communication to be able to consistently deliver any offers. Doing this will create sustainability in your business and the platform for further growth.
The proven means by which you turn a potential customer into a solid lead and in turn, into a paying customer is through the use of what we call in online marketing, a sales funnel.
More specifically, here, you will need to set up an opt-in funnel.
This opt-in funnel is a small series of webpages that aim to obtain the email address of your potential customer, thus turning converting followers into subscribers on your list. This list allows you to communicate through regular newsletters/updates to build a relationship with those subscribers and becomes the foundation for turning subscribers into potential buyers for any of the products/services/referrals you might want to offer.
Tip: Try using something like Leadpages.net to set up simple, fully-featured opt-in forms.
People won’t just give you their email addresses for no reason, however. This is where you must first prove yourself by providing value upfront by delivering quality content made from your unique knowledge/experience of your passion.
Give first before you ask for anything.
This can include reviews from your experience, tips, advice, creative ideas from you’ve mined from your Pinterest sessions, any relevant methods/blueprints/frameworks, beginner’s guides/notes on “do’s and don’ts” or any other related value-add – which can be packaged in a straightforward PDF format and offered in exchange for their email address. Yup, easy as that!
Remember that email still remains the primary channel of communication with customers for all online companies. Any social media platform can easily pull the the plug on your account access at any time, but your list and the trust that you earn with its subscribers, will always remain yours.
Tip: Try out MailChimp.com to start building your subscriber list, it’s free and easy to use!
You will need to ensure that your opt-in form platform is linked to your mail provider of choice. You can learn how to do it on the leadpages.net site.
Next, let’s move onto how you’ll actually make money with your subscriber list.
Step 6: Monetizing Your Audience
So you now know how to start a following/community, and you have the means of reaching all of them at once, with one simple email.
How does the money part work?”
The most common mistake beginners make is to start monetizing way too early before any trust has been established. Another mistake is taking too long to monetize.
So, let’s start with a baseline.
You will need to stick to the value trend we have set up so far and always begin by sending your subscriber list emails containing free value/solutions/exciting engagements before you start sending them any promotional ones. These could be short snippets of info, facts, short articles, PDF reports, or even valuable curated video/article content from other sources. Anything that will help your readers (in line with your brand, of course)
It doesn’t have to be unique content that you create, but it does need to provide value to people. You’ll want to send at least two substantial articles of valuable content before asking for anything in return.
When you engage meaningfully and solve problems, reciprocity will always follow.
Now lets discuss the ClickBank Marketplace. With ClickBank, you can earn a commission of 75% on products you promote.
With high levels of commission and wide range quality of products available, this marketplace alone could be the sole basis of your online income.
You’ll want to start looking in the ClickBank Marketplace category for products that are most aligned to your passion/content, and that would interest your subscribers the most.
Then you can start evaluating the products in more detail. The products near the top of the list are the ones that sell the most for its affiliates and as such, are most likely to convert into sales based on your promotional efforts.
A couple of tips:
ClickBank affiliates usually lookout for products that have a “gravity” score of 10 or higher. This means that at least ten different affiliates are promoting the product and making consistent sales from it.
Another cool feature to look out for is that some ClickBank products offer “re-billing,” which means that they work on a subscription type model that bills their customers every month and where the product owner is willing to pay you a percentage of that, on an ongoing basis!
So in short: Choose a relevant product from the ClickBank Marketplace, create an affiliate link, include this link in any passion aligned content that you create (eg. blogposts/social media posts/ email newsletters) and send it to your followers. Anyone that’s interested in the offers will purchase through your link and you will be paid the commission. This commission could be once off or recurring depending on the product per buyer. That’s it!
Once you have this income process set up and running, the next step is to scale it up.
Step 7: Scaling Your Profits
The two main ways to make more money, which generally applies to all businesses, are:
1. Getting more customers
2. Increasing the profit per customer. So how is this applied?
One option is to increase your efforts on Step 4, i.e., building your following. This will grow your audience consistently, thereby increasing your subscriber list. Then, you can increase the profit per customer by maintaining your delivery of value-driven content to your subscriber list so that they want to buy from you over and over again.
But there’s an even more effective way to scale your profit margins.
By packaging your own passion centered content together as your own product in the form of a pdf, video, or audio series, you can sell directly to your subscribers and keep 100% of the profits.
Some of the best-known bloggers have achieved this by simply batching together about 10 of their best performing, related blog posts together to create an informational PDF product.
Once you have your own product, you can multiply your marketing efforts exponentially beyond your own subscriber list, by listing it on the ClickBank marketplace.
Affiliates will sell your product for you to their distribution channels and lists while you continue to sell to your subscribers directly.
There are around 100,000 active affiliates on the ClickBank marketplace, looking for exciting, high-conversion products to promote to their following/community, thus driving massive amounts of traffic to your product and in turn multiplying your sales.
Tip: You can create sales/lead/landing pages and membership sites with tools like Kajabi.com, Clickfunnels, or ClickBank’s own purpose-built simple inhouse tool, the ClickBank Builder.
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While this may seem like an easy process, I must tell you that taking the right steps and actually following through on becoming a super affiliate is really HARD.
There are many ClickBank marketers making millions of dollars a year, but those results are not the norm. It takes effort. Like building muscle, you have to go all in and really commit to learning what it takes to get it done.
With that said, pretty much ALL ClickBank super affiliates use the same set of proven principles and strategies.
All of which are broken down and taught step by step within the ClickBank University 2.0., containing targeted trainings, resources and tools worth thousands, as well as special curated add-on trainings, built inhouse, that covers everything you need to know. There are also Bi-Weekly Expert Classes, where they bring in people who have made it as role models in online business to demonstrate Justin’s and Adam’s training in action with people just like you. And you’ll even learn from experts like Gary Vaynerchuck, Abel James and Matt O’Connor.
ClickBank has more than six-million clients worldwide, which secured it in becoming the 87th largest Internet retailer in North America (2016) and is one of Idaho’s largest privately held technology companies and their team has paid out over $3 Billion dollars to their clients.
This training comes straight from the source. The guys that have achieved super affiliate status themselves were brought in to teach what they know, i.e. the exact steps that they still use to earn those Monster ClickBank checks.
But implementing these proven strategies still takes hard work. I’d be lying to you if I said it didn’t.
Here’s the thing though:
I can tell you that most super affiliates would rather be their own boss, create their own businesses, and achieve their dream of becoming financially free than work for anyone else.
In other words? All the hard work is worth it.
The funny thing is that most people starting out as an affiliate, are not trained, and would rather not seek out solid education on the topic to invest in their own success. They wing it. And it always ends up costing them.
They lose time, money, and motivation, and don’t last long enough to see any success. Because they don’t know what works.
That’s why ClickBank views their ClickBank University 2.0 as essential for online business owners to learn the ropes and ultimately succeed, especially if you’re determined to be a high earning ClickBank Super Affiliate.
Most of the people that opt out of training are really just out to chase a quick buck in the online marketing field. But they end up losing more than they get out by making all the same old mistakes and learning all the wrong ways to do things. Then, they quit before they learn how to do all the right things. Its madness!
Investing in training is like buying years of trial and error (i.e. experiences of paying for and testing all the wrong software, tools, systems and tactics) from the guys that made it to the other side as a massive success and who can now show you what works.
Why not seek mentorship from those that have achieved what you want instead of learning from those that haven’t done it themselves?
Learning from those that are already successful is the secret sauce to success.
Assuming you’re up for it, ClickBank University 2.0 is for people that want to build the framework for becoming a super affiliate from day one.
Enrollment is now open, and I encourage you to watch the video before it’s gone.
Thanks, and take care!
Disclaimer: ClickBank University does not own or operate this website and is not responsible for its contents. It is owned by FeedsPortal an independent online media company.