Talk to your audience and make more money

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THIS WEEK’S LESSON

Are you talking to your audience?

I’m as guilty as the next Former Educator Founder …

Sitting in my office, dreaming up 1000 different ways to help a bunch of people and make money while doing it.

• I read a book like The Automatic Customer — and did my best to find a recurring revenue stream.

• I see a post on X about a no-code or low-code SaaS product doing $60K in MRR and I start researching how to do that too.

• I learn that The Hustle sold for more than $20M to Hubspot (a frequent sponsor of this newsletter) and I want to figure out how to build a 7-figure newsletter (outside of education of course!).

None of these ideas are necessarily bad. I’ve actually done the recurring revenue thing and it is a powerful profit engine. And YES — newsletters can be still super profitable too (depending on the category).

But NONE of this matters if you don’t talk to your audience or customers in that market.

So in the rest of this article, I want to discuss three ways I’m talking to my audience and customers right now and why.

The lost art of the follow-up

Last week I mentioned that my launch of The 90-Day Accelerator was a success generating just over $17K with 49 sales.

Well, the real number is 52 sales. That’s an extra $1K from a simple email I sent out that looked like this:

And here are the poll responses:

Notice that two people said they didn’t realize that there was a cutoff date to join. One person hit “reply” and told me the same thing.

Well, guess what? I responded to these three with an email that said: “If I sent you a link to join, would you join today?”

100% of the people who didn’t realize there was a ”last day” to join, ended up joining. That’s $1K more in revenue from less than ten minutes of work.

Reimagining products

If you’re familiar with my work, you know that I’ve been running a mastermind for school leaders since 2016. This is our “flagship offer.”

But my gut is telling me it’s time to reinvent the mastermind product. I have a few ideas of how we might do that.

But what I think doesn’t matter.

So I’m talking to mastermind members over the next 45 days to see how we can improve how we serve them.

I’ve done a few calls so far and what I’m learning is stuff I never would have guessed.

Here are the questions I’m using to understand these leaders better:

The mastermind product will change. But I won’t be making any changes until I first have a good understanding of our member’s current context.

Content to create

Two weeks ago I wrote to you and shared the 7 lessons I learned at the Newsletter Marketing Summit.

Over and over again I heard industry leaders challenge the conference attendees to obsess over talking to your audience.

You can:

• Do some social listening and answer commonly asked questions online (if a Pool Cleaner can use this strategy and crush it, so can you).

• Literally ask your audience in an email or create a poll

• Call or text customers and ask what you can do for them

I talked to a friend, Lori, earlier this week. She’s jumping into the deep end soon and had some questions around creating and growing a newsletter. We only talked for 15-minutes, so I told her I’d write up some ideas for her in an upcoming newsletter here.

I bet she’ll find it super useful and I assume you will as well.

You can never talk to your audience enough

Talking to those you serve is an essential component of any business and you can never do it enough.

If I looked at your calendar, where would I see you taking action on these ideas?

But be careful what you ask for, sometimes you’ll hear how your marketing is cheesy 🙃