This blog post is fourth in an 4-part series about client journey. Read part one here. Read the second post here. And get the third part here.
Your audience comes to you because they need something. Whether that’s a paid service or information on your site so they can DIY something, they need you. So you need to deliver.
You’ve already built your brand awareness with your blog posts and videos. So aside from tutorial videos, group challenges and blog posts, what’s the best way to educate your audience?
Opt-ins
You don’t own your Instagram followers or the likes on your business Facebook page. The only way to “own” your followers is to collect their email addresses so you can communicate with them outside of social media. And opt-ins are the way to do that.
An opt-in is a downloadable worksheet that allows your audience to take your content one step further. Here’s how it works: Someone visits your blog and finds a killer post about one of your zones of genius. You have an accompanying worksheet that they can use to put the information in your blog into practice, but readers must first provide their email address to access it. The reader adds her email address to a form embedded on your website and voila! You have a new subscriber, and that subscriber has a valuable piece of information right in her inbox.
The possibilities for opt-ins are endless, but I recommend creating a few high-quality opt-ins for each of your zones of genius and rotating through those. Any more than that and you’ll spend unlimited amounts of time creating them (and they’ll clog up your email service).
[bctt tweet=”Take your content one step further with a quality opt-in to grow your email list.” username=””]
Nurturing Emails
Once you have those subscribers on your list, you need to stay in front of them. Popping into their inbox from time to time with new, exclusive information keeps you top-of-mind when they need someone with your expertise.
Here’s the (big!) catch: Your emails to subscribers are not Blog, Part II. They’re not the place to regurgitate what you’ve already included in your blog post. Any smart subscriber will quickly figure out that you don’t have a lot to say because your emails are simply a repeat of your blog.
Each nurturing email needs to be original. It needs to offer new value. And it needs to be interesting. Focus on similar ideas or themes as you have in other content you’re producing, but give your email subscribers something new and different. After all, they did trust you with their email address. Respect that.
Free Courses
You can use free courses as a high-level opt-in or simply as a way to showcase your expertise to a wider audience through someone else’s Facebook group. It goes beyond the traditional one-off opt-in to provide more value and a more visible depth of knowledge.
A free course can be hosted elsewhere, too—on a Facebook Live on your business Facebook page, through email, on a YouTube Live series, etc. The beauty of offering something like this is that you can make yourself visible to people in places where you may not have had a presence already.
[bctt tweet=”Hosting a course on YouTube or Facebook is a great way to educate your audience with low buy-in from them.” username=””]
eBooks
An ebook goes beyond the blog post and opt-in. It’s an opportunity to dive really deep into a subject and educate your audience. It’s easy to write an ebook as a compilation of your other content and show how everything fits together.
The great thing about ebooks is that they’re easy to update and revise. So if something changes, just grab the file and replace it with the updated content. It’s also fairly easy to turn an ebook into something much larger, depending on the goals in your business.
Don’t write this option off if you’re not a writer (pun intended). If you blog regularly, you have what it takes!
You can grab my ebook about the content journey right here and see how it’s done!
