Lesson 3 – How to attract your ideal client

By now you’ve taken the first few key steps on the path to jumpstarting your website traffic.

• You know what you’re working towards, why you want it, and are at least willing to believe that it’s possible for you to have it.
• You know what marketing is (and what it isn’t).
• And you know that you need to shift your efforts from simply creating content to MARKETING.

Now it’s time to start taking action!

And no, we’re NOT starting off with an SEO strategy, or Pinterest, or by growing our Instagram.

We’re NOT starting by diving into tactics and strategies that promise to explode our traffic overnight.

We’re starting by making sure we know exactly what we’re doing with our traffic once we get it.

People don’t just discover your website for the first time, see that you have a “Work With Me” page and buy your coaching package.

Trust needs to be built first. Yes, they need to trust that you’re not gonna take their money and run, and trust that you actually are qualified, but more importantly than that?

Your website visitors need to trust that they will actually be able to get the results they desire, or they’re never gonna become your customer.

Building trust is a process.

And you can’t build trust if someone comes to your website once, leaves and never comes back.

That’s why you need to get their email address while they’re there.

And if you’re thinking “Seriously, Shannon!? I hate email. I don’t want to do email.” I get it. You’re not alone.

People that go through this course tell me how much they hate email, they don’t want to build an email list, they don’t want to spam people, and they have no idea what they’d say in an email.

But do you “hate” email when you actually get a good one for once?

• Like a message from an old flame. (me in my early college days)
• Or a job offer. (me a year after graduating college, still making lattes and wondering if a communications major was the wrong choice)
• Or emails from PayPal letting you know you made ANOTHER sale (me every day since I started my online business)
• Or valuable information that’s going to help you get what you really want.

Bingo. That last one is what’s going to get your website visitors to hand over their email address (with excitement).

Actionable information that helps them get what they want.

A request to “join your newsletter to get the latest updates” is not compelling enough to get people to pay attention, let alone build the kind of trust you need to sell your programs and services.

And you don’t feel good about it either!

I give away all the steps to building a website to people who desperately need to build a website but have no clue how to do it – in exchange for an email address. (See my Free 5 Day Website Challenge.)

Yes, your email address is THAT valuable to me that I’ll teach you how to build an entire website to get it.

And the people that sign up for my email list can’t open that email fast enough!

Email is still #1 when it comes to online marketing. Your email goes everywhere with you, in your purse or pocket. There’s no algorithm preventing you from seeing my emails. And once I can reach you directly, I can stay top of mind and invite you to work with me.

And one of those times that I invite you, you’ll be ready.

But… you can kick me out of your inbox at any time. So I gotta earn my place in there.

And how do I earn my place? By helping you get the results that you want.

That’s how you earn someone’s trust as an online business owner.

And when your website visitors get results based on something they learned for free from you, guess what they’ll do?

Tell other people about you.

And it’s not like they’re telling all their friends with the same problem about you because they love you so much and they want to help you out…

It’s much more self-serving than that.

People share what makes THEM look good.

And if they gave your their email address and got some valuable, actionable information that helped them get what they want, they are gonna look like the HERO when they tell their best friend about it and their friend ends up getting what they want too.

And do you see what else just happened there?

You just got TWO (or more) people who you know want to solve the problem you help people solve – but you only did the work to get one.

That’s why building an email list is so powerful, and that’s also why you should give your best stuff away in exchange for an email address.

I call this email list-building strategy the Shareworthy Freebie.

I used this strategy to go from making $0 a month in my business and hating my day job to making $10,000 a month in putting in my notice at my day job.

Next, I’m going to give you the step-by-step instructions on how to use the Shareworthy Freebie Strategy.

Today I want you to prep by answering these three questions on page 5 of your workbook:

• Question #1: What is your ideal customer struggling with right now?
• Question #2: What would their life be like if they weren’t struggling?
• Question #3: What specific steps would they need to take to go from where they are now to where they want to be?
  
  

Fill out your answers to these 3 questions on your worksheet.

Don’t over-think this step.

Set your timer for 10 minutes and GO.

……..

In the next lesson, you’ll use the work you do today to figure out what to create for your own Shareworthy Freebie.

If you’ve already joined the Website Marketing Lab, you’ll want to revisit the “BIG Strategy” (Module 1) and the “GAP Strategy” (Module 2). This will give you a jump start on Lessons 4 & 5.

Here’s a recap of the mini-course so far:

Lesson 1 – The very first step to getting traffic
Lesson 2 – Marketing 101
Lesson 3 – How to attract your ideal client
Lesson 4 – How to create a shareworthy freebie
Lesson 5 – Two examples of how to use your shareworthy freebie to get traffic.
Lesson 6 – How to turn your subscribers into customers

Have you noticed that I’m giving you small actions to take every day? Does it feel like it couldn’t possibly be enough to help you start getting website traffic?

When you take action and actually do these small exercises, even if it doesn’t seem like it’s happening fast enough, you’re creating the habit of taking action and following through.

It’s not choosing the perfect strategy or having the prettiest website that will determine your success. It’s taking consistent action over time no matter what.