If you live outside the U.S., you’ve probably only heard rumors about the insanity that is Black Friday. Or maybe you saw a terrifying clip on YouTube of people strangling each other over a flat-screen tv. Basically, Americans are great at turning every major holiday into some kind of competitive sporting event.
Fights in Best Buy aside, I’d rather turn your attention to one simple fact: people want to buy stuff during the holiday season.
If you provide a product or service, it would be insane for you to miss the opportunities that come with this frenzy of a season.
Years ago, I never would have imagined that my small business would benefit from the insanity of the holiday shopping season. I did a quick test and put up a short little sales page for some discounted copywriting and made more money over those two months than I had all year.
Making extra cash doesn’t have to be some long, hard grueling struggle (especially in comparison to trying to pick up extra hours at my past minimum-wage jobs). It can simply be jumping into the market when the timing is right - and for a lot of businesses, that time is now.
Most business owners I know get all ramped up and ambitious when the start of the new year rolls around, but that’s the worst time to jump on the money-making train (unless you own a gym, then January is a gold-mine of a month).
As a copywriter for far too long now, this is the time of year when clients come to me to help them write out sales copy for the holiday season. I’ve seen a ton of businesses make 10x more than they made all year just by having a strategic plan for the upcoming months.
I’ve already written about copywriting tips for the holiday season, but I thought I’d write out everything I do with clients to prepare them for the holiday rush so you can do it for your own business.
What do you currently sell and what COULD you sell?
You’ll need to make two lists: everything you currently sell in your business and everything you want to sell in your business.
Black Friday is a great time to also take advantage of testing new ideas for your business. If you want to try out a new service offering, NOW is the time to introduce it (especially with a % off first orders) and test the waters.
There’s probably a different way you could package your offerings and offer them to your current customers and clients.
Could you package what you do and sell it?
I’m not a fan of rushing to get things done, but if you’re up for the challenge, you could easily create a digital product or course between now and Black Friday.
This free resource from ByRegina on creating a course in 12 hours should serve as some inspiration: check it out.
When it comes to selling a product, it doesn’t have to be some HUGE life-changing product that has 297294 hours of recorded video and 8,000 spreadsheets. It can be a simple book that quickly solves a problem.
Pick one problem that your current customers face and create a quick win. Some ideas:
How to write and publish your first 10 blogs
Get your first three clients
Add 10 new clients in 5 days
Organize your entire garage in a weekend
10 quick meals that are under 500 calories but don’t taste like eating cardboard
Design your first landing page in under an hour
Do not overwhelm people. The first digital product I sold for $5 was EVERYTHING I learned about starting an online business. It was TOO much information and didn’t provide enough quick wins. Be sure to match the amount of information to the price point. Sure, everyone who bought it got a hell of a deal, but no one wants to read 50 pages of things to do, they just wanted to start gaining traction on their own freelance career.
What deal do you want to offer?
Now that you have a good idea of your products and services, what works for your business when it comes to offering deals?
A certain percentage off? A free consultation? Half off on your digital course?
One thing you want to avoid is giving such a steep discount that what you’re offering is no longer profitable. I did that once and that was a learning lesson. Keep it reasonable.
Validating your idea
If you already have customers buying from you, it’s easy to know what they do and do not want, but what if you don’t have an audience or any customers?
On one hand, I’d challenge you to still put all of these together because having products, services, and sales funnels ready to go at all times is basically a business DREAM, but the last thing you want to do is spend a lot of time creating something that never sells.
One way to test if your idea works is to see if there are similar products or services out there in the marketplace already. If there are, that’s a GOOD sign. That means the market is already validated and you just need to work on getting the eyeballs to see your offer.
Building your sales funnels
Now that you know what you’re selling, it’s time to put together the marketing plan for it.
YES, this is a lot of stuff to do, but once you have these systems set up, you can simply repeat them over and over for years to come.
Putting together a sales funnel requires deeper work than just writing some emails and sending them off. You need to understand the customer and their pain points and introduce your product or service as the solution.
First, you need to outline how people are going to buy and when they can buy. Is this going to be something you continually have up for sale or is it a limited-time offer? This will determine the level of urgency you need in your funnel, when to set up deadlines, etc.
Second, you’ll want to plan backward from your launch date. Write out every single event along the way, including webinars/live streams, when you plan to send emails, when you have any promotional materials being sent, and when affiliates are sending out their emails.
Third, you want to determine your price point. Generally speaking, the more expensive your offering, the longer you want to warm people up to the sale. If it’s over $1,000, you’ll want to spend more than a week or two building up your message. Less than that will use less time.
To build your actual funnel:
Top of the funnel:
This is the surface level and includes your social media, email, marketing activities, etc.
Middle funnel:
This is where you’ll make sure your site is ready for the traffic. Write your sales copy. Make sure all your buttons work. When people land on your page from the top part of the funnel, you want to make sure it’s ready.
Bottom of the funnel:
DELIVER. Whatever you’ve hyped up and advertised, this is when it’s time to deliver. You’ll want to make sure you have the process for this done and ready. Whether that’s the next steps for your service or making sure your online course has all the deliverables ready, make sure it’s all set.
Finding the deeper story in your product
I’ve talked a lot on this site and in videos on how important it is to find the deeper message behind what you’re selling.
With everything sold online, there’s a deeper meaning to it than just what you think on the surface.
The first time I learned this lesson was when I was a personal trainer in college. I wasn’t selling weight loss (although that’s what 99.9% of people wanted), I was selling confidence.
It took a long time to figure that out, and it wasn’t until I heard more and more feedback that I really started to understand this idea. No one was like “Oh wow I’ve lost 10 lbs!”
Instead, I heard things like:
“I can finally fit into those jeans I bought 10 years ago!”
“I felt so good going out with my friends last night because someone complimented me on my progress.”
“Last night when I had to give a presentation to my boss I felt less self-conscious.”
That’s the deeper message.
Even in my own business, I sell words. That’s it at it’s most basic level. The deeper thing I sell is freedom. When your copy is stellar, people are happy to buy. This gives people more freedom to build their business and create the life they want.
Even in my mentorship program, it’s not really about mentoring. It’s the freedom that comes with building up a side-hustle. Finally making an extra $1,000 a month you can put toward whatever you need is wildly freeing.
There’s a deeper reason behind anything you sell, and when you can tap into that, you’ll start to build excitement. Big ideas get people excited. If you’re not sensing excitement for what you’re selling, you are not tapping into the bigger idea behind your offer.
Putting it all together
What are you actually selling? Outline this in as much detail as possible.
How can you think outside the box with what you’re selling? Can you offer a new service? Bundle together a few offerings? Partner with someone who has a complimentary service?
Challenge yourself to put together a new digital product to sell. Or, find a way to freshen up one you already offer.
Make sure people actually WANT what you’re selling.
Find the Big Idea behind what you’re selling.
Put it together and make sure you have every step of the funnel outlined. Have your emails ready, your sales pages, your products/services. Go through it a few times.