If time is of the essence for you to grow your business, you’re going to be surprised by how helpful this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast is… because I see far too many online business owners spending a lot of time making opt-ins that are actually a complete waste of their time and energy.
We know that time is such an important resource for us. Not all list growth is created equal. Not all opt-ins are created equal.
So stop wasting time on these opt-ins!
Let’s dive in…
Here for the links referenced in the show notes?
Join the Take Off program – tashcorbin.com/takeoff
Grow Your Audience free training – tashcorbin.com/audience
Nail Your Niche free training – tashcorbin.com/niche
EPISODE 414: Listen using the player below, or click the links to your fave platform to subscribe and listen over there:
Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on SpotifListen on YouTube
Your time is one of your most important resources, especially as a business owner.
I don’t know many business owners who started their business so they could spend hours and hours a day wasting their time on things that don’t create any traction.
I also know that pretty much every business mentor online talks about the importance of growing your email list. Therefore, for a lot of us, it would be easy to make the assumption that all time and energy invested in list growth is going to be a good use of your time.
Yes, mailing list growth is critical – especially as so many people are losing access to their Facebook and Instagram accounts, and we’re seeing this huge influx of AI-generating accounts, reach issues and algorithm issues.
Whilst I still think social media is a brilliant platform for us to grow our businesses, I also know that having the safety net of a growing mailing list that is being filled with your ideal clients is a really good safety net to be able to fall back on.
It creates a lot more strength and resilience if things start to go a little askew with your social media – whether that be temporary or on a permanent basis.
But just because mailing list growth is critical, doesn’t mean that all time spent growing your mailing list and creating new opt-ins is a good investment of your time.
There are certain opt ins that I see people creating that are in fact a waste of their time… even if those opt ins get new people onto your mailing list.
Why would I say that an opt-in that gets people onto your mailing list is a waste of time?
That’s because growing your mailing list is not the number one job of an opt-in.
You need to build your opt-ins to do their number one job effectively.
The number one job of an opt-in is to move the right people (your ideal clients) closer to purchase readiness.
If you have created an opt-in that fills your mailing list with people who are not your ideal clients, and if that opt-in does not move anyone closer to purchase readiness, then that’s a waste of your time.
I see people create opt-ins for things they’d like to share with their audience… but they haven’t determined whether it would attract and move their ideal clients closer to purchase readiness.
I see people who even create their opt-ins based on things that are not in their zone of genius for their business. They don’t feel comfortable charging for that because it’s not actually what their business is about, so they create a bunch of free opt-ins to deliver that information.
But all it’s doing is filling your mailing list with people who do not want to learn from you in your zone of genius (ie. they don’t want the thing that you charge for).
I’ve even seen people create opt-ins based on what their audience asked for. But they haven’t discerned whether that thing is:
- Best served as an opt-in
- Going to move their audience towards purchase readiness
- Being asked for by their ideal clients within their audience
If we want to create opt-ins that aren’t wasting your time, we want to create an opt-in that does its job.
Whilst I understand it is lovely to create free resources that people find helpful, that’s not actually growing your business.
It’s lovely to create free trainings that are topic areas that are hot right now and people are excited about. But if that’s not going to increase the likelihood that people buy something from you, then you’re investing a lot of time serving an audience that are not going to pay you.
For most online business owners who follow me, that is not what they want to be doing right now. They have a critical income level that they need to be getting to and they have big ambitious growth strategies for their business because they want their business to be a sustainable, profitable, aligned business that they can rely on income from.
If you are filling your mailing list with a bunch of people who are never going to buy from you, or who don’t want to buy from you in relation to your zone of genius, then that is not an effective use of your time.
I would not be doing my job if I continued to allow you to keep making that decision without some insight and information as to how to discern.
At the end of the day, which would you prefer? An opt-in that gets two hundred people onto your mailing list for something that isn’t in your zone of genius and that will never lead them to being ready to buy something from you? Or an opt-in that twenty people grab who are highly motivated, who get very excited for the next step after doing your opt-in, and who are hungrily looking for how they can continue to work with you?
I know which I would prefer.
Not all metrics are created equal when it comes to creating an opt-in that does an effective job of growing your business.
How do you ensure that you create opt-ins that are doing their job, that are an effective and powerful use of your time, and are a great growth strategy for your business?
1. Create opt-ins for a validated niche
What I mean by a ‘validated niche’ is that we’ve selected the group of people in your audience that you want to market towards (that’s your niche) and we have validated that that group of people are motivated to invest in achieving their big goal that you help them to achieve.
It’s not just that you’ve selected a hot part of the market or a certain demographic choice about who you’re focused on with your marketing… we’ve actually validated that that section of the market is motivated, ready, willing and able to invest in your product or service.
Validating your niche is something that we do really beautifully inside the Take Off program. But I do have my free Nail Your Niche training to help you select that niche and look for options to validate that: tashcorbin.com/niche
Inside the Take Off program, we have a niche validation process that we use based on actually making sales.
We validate that people are willing to invest in your particular package by doing a niche testing process (a market research strategy with a niche) that actually results in sales.
In the last few months, this has been such a beautiful thing for me to witness because we have had a big influx of new students in the Take Off program, and watching them go through the niche validation process and making sales of their VIP packages through what was ostensibly a market research exercise absolutely lights me up.
Doors to Take Off aren’t always open, so if you go and check that out and the doors aren’t currently open, you can jump onto the waiting list and I will let you know when the doors to the Take Off program are next open: tashcorbin.com/takeoff
If you want to get started for free on making those basic niche decisions and some ideas for how you might get that validated, then you can grab the Nail Your Niche training here: tashcorbin.com/niche
2. Be clear on the offer your opt-in is moving your niche towards
You need to be clear on this before you build your opt-in.
That might sound obvious, but the number of people who come up with ideas for free resources or opt-ins without actually clearly understanding the pathway from that opt-in to their offer is enormous.
It’s a big risk that you’re taking, and it is the most likely reason why your opt-in is actually a waste of time.
Some people say to me that they’re going to run a webinar, but they’re not going to do an upsell at the end because they just want to grow their mailing list.
You’re wasting your time.
If there are people who are on that webinar who are itching and hungry to work with you, and they want to know what the next steps are but you do not proactively present a solution, they’ll go and find someone who will take their money.
If you have people who complete your opt-in and have moved towards readiness to purchase but there is no logical next step of what they should be purchasing next or how to get more information about working together from here, then you are leaving them hanging.
We need to be very overt and clear in our instructions, especially as people are signing up for our mailing lists.
Before you can craft those next steps and make that offer clear, you need to know: what is it that you’re moving them towards?
Certain opt-ins and free resources that I have will move people towards purchasing the Take Off program. Others move people towards buying a VIP package. Others move people towards my Leverage and Launch program.
Those free resources have been created knowing exactly what they lead to.
If all I did was help people to make their niche decisions, and then I provided no further steps on how they can then validate that and get the mentorship they need to know they’ve selected a niche that is going to buy from them, then I’m not doing a good job as mentor, even in that freebie, because I’m just leaving people hanging.
It’s one thing to decide on what the niche is you want to focus on. It’s another thing to validate that and understand what the data is telling you when you go out there and test that niche and market.
If I don’t let people know exactly how to get that support, then I’m just leaving them dangling and leaving them out there potentially susceptible to someone else using niche-based language who’s teaching very terrible niche strategies, or teaching marketing strategies that go top-down instead of bottom-up (you’ll find out more about what that means if you go and do my niche training).
Bottom-up niche development is the low-cost, low-time investment lean way to validate your niche by making sales.
Other marketing strategists and business mentors go top-down in terms of telling people to go and grow an audience with people in that niche before they’ve ever validated it.
If you’re growing an audience and you’re not sure whether that audience is actually the right fit and they’re incentivised and motivated, ready, willing and able to buy, then you’re potentially growing an audience full of non-buyers.
If I didn’t make it very obvious how to work with me in the next stage, then I’m potentially sending hundreds of people who sign up for my niche training every month back out into social media land, ready to be swooped in on by some non-discerning non-consent-based marketing strategist who’s out there pushing reach as a business growth strategy.
We call those reach-preachers.
I don’t think I’d be doing a very good job if I did set people up for that and then left them beholden to whoever comes across their social media feed next.
Make sure that you’re clear on what the offer is that you’re moving them towards and validate that offer before you build the opt-in. That will ensure that your opt-in can do its job of moving the right people closer to purchase readiness.
Once you know who the niche is and what the offer is that you want them to be moving towards, now we need to…
3. Have clarity on what they think the problem and solution is
What is their diagnosis of the problem and solution that they think will get them towards that big goal?
Your niche has a specific and tangible goal that they want to move towards.
For my Take Off program, the niche is people who want to have a sustainable, profitable business making $5,000 to $8,000 a month.
That’s around the goal that most people who join the Take Off program are aspiring to. That’s the first stage of business growth.
If I know that that’s their goal, it could be very easy for me to just assume that we are all on the same page about what will get them there.
…but I know better.
I know that for people who have that goal in their business, often they will diagnose the problem (the reason why they are not achieving that income level right now) as being because they’re not reaching enough people or they haven’t got a large enough audience.
Whereas I know that in most cases, they don’t have a validated niche, they don’t have a validated offer, and their business foundations are not strong enough.
I could run around the internet telling everyone that they don’t have a reach issue, they just need to validate their foundations.
But those people who’ve already decided that they have an audience size issue or a reach issue are just going to disregard what I’m saying.
Rather than arguing with people on the internet and telling everyone that they’re wrong, I understand that people need me to meet them in the middle. They need me to validate their beliefs about what will help, help them to grow their reach and grow their audience, AND in the process, help them to see the difference between growing their audience with validated foundations, versus growing their audience with unvalidated foundations.
That means that when I create my opt-ins, I am giving my audience exactly what they want.
They’re signing up for the information that they’re hungry for.
I’m teaching them exactly what they want to learn. But I’m also adding additional value by helping them to discern that not all strategies that would help them to achieve that goal that they’re going for (ie. grow their reach and audience) are going to be as effective as others.
You can see that by knowing and understanding deeply what their diagnosis is as to why they aren’t achieving that bigger goal, I can then ensure that my opt-in is going to speak directly to the exact right people.
But then…
4. Within the opt-in, you need to facilitate that big lightbulb moment
In my world, I call that bridge messaging.
I need to help build a bridge from being fixated on reach and audience growth, into seeing that growing your reach and audience with validated foundations is the fast track to making more money as a business owner quickly.
That lightbulb is what I need to bridge people to with my opt-in.
You’ll see this in action if you go and sign up for my Grow Your Audience free resource: tashcorbin.com/audience
In that Grow Your Audience training, I help people to identify which audiences they have, I help them to identify which audiences are the most important to focus on growing in the first instance as a business owner, and I give them a four-stage strategy on how to grow that audience.
I’m giving them exactly what they want and exactly what they’ve asked for.
Within that training, however, I’ve also helped to facilitate the lightbulb that growing your audience with a bunch of unmotivated people who don’t actually want to buy from you is probably not a good use of your time.
Instead, we want to grow your audience with people who are the right fit. We want to grow your audience with people who are hungry to purchase and invest in a solution.
The way that we do that is with a validated niche and validated messaging.
In that opt-in, I’m not only delivering on what they want. I’m also facilitating that lightbulb moment.
5. Maximise the completion of the opt-in
It’s one thing to have two hundred people sign up to your opt-in. It’s another thing to have two hundred people actually finish it.
When it comes to designing an opt-in, if you want to ensure that it’s not a waste of your time or your audience’s time, you need to understand how to maximise the rate at which people complete that opt in.
Getting people on your mailing list is not enough.
If they’re not doing the opt-in (ie. reading the ebook, watching the video series, listening to the audio training, or using the checklist that you’ve created), then it’s not building the relationship with that person. You’re not moving them towards that purchase readiness. They’re just collecting something for later when they’re ready to move towards purchase readiness.
We want to ensure that when you design your opt-in, you’re designing it with completion in mind.
Things like minimising the time, energy and effort that it takes for someone to finish that opt-in, and making sure that you’re focused on getting people straight to the outcome that they want as quickly as possible. Don’t make them dilly-dally and waste their time fluffing around the edges.
When people sign up for my Grow Your Audience training, it is a very streamlined, 40-something-minute training, and it teaches very tangible practical strategies quickly.
I want people to take action on that super fast.
Not only that, at the end of the training, I have a little easter egg that invites people to take a little action with me. It’s a secret at the end of that training.
I can see every week how many people have signed up for the training and how many of them have taken action on that little easter egg at the end.
That tells me how many people are completing it. Not just finishing the training, but actually actioning the training.
That’s really important to me because:
1. I want people who sign up for that opt-in to grow their audience.
2. Once people start growing their audience and can see the difference between a validated audience and one that doesn’t have the foundations underneath it, they are more likely to be ready to start talking about how I might be able to support them further.
That might be with another free resource, that might be by jumping into something that’s short term (like my Client Attraction Challenge), or they might be hungry to fast-track their results and get that validation through making sales so they join the Take Off program.
Wherever they’re up to in their journey, I get insight into that and then I can help them to continue moving forward.
Ultimately, that makes that opt-in a complete win-win.
The people who sign up for it are going to be growing their audience and moving towards validating their business and making sales. And the ones who need more support with that or want to fast-track their way to that validation through making sales can then ask questions about the Take Off program and work out whether it’s the right fit for them or not.
I can of course help them to understand what their next steps might be.
They are the five ways to ensure that your opt-ins do their job and therefore are not a waste of your time:
1. Make sure it’s for a validated niche
2. Be clear on the offer that it’s moving them towards
3. Understand what they have diagnosed as the problem and the solution to get them towards their bigger goal
4. Bridge to that light-bulb moment within your opt-in
5. Make sure your opt-in is designed for maximum completion rates
As I said, if you would like to grab my Grow Your Audience training, you can find it at: tashcorbin.com/audience
And if you want to fast-track that business growth, make sure you come and check out the Take Off program: tashcorbin.com/takeoff
Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast.
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
