Aaron Hoos

A friend of mine wants to start a business. She’s successful at work but isn’t earning what she is worth. Like a lot of people I’ve met, she really wants to start a business but here’s the conundrum:

It’s hard start a business when you’re busy with a “regular” job. On the other hand, it’s hard to quit your job then start a business.

Here’s what I recommend:

START HERE

1. Choose what you want your business to be about. Even if you don’t yet know WHAT you want to sell, you probably have some idea about the topic. Are you a mechanic and want to (eventually) run a business that is mechanical in nature? Do you love jewelery and (eventually) want to do something in that field? It doesn’t matter yet what you sell, but choose your topic. It can be fairly broad.
2. Start a blog. Spend 20-30 minutes a day writing a blog post. Do it every single day. Build up a body of knowledge on the topic. (Okay, if “every day” is too much, then start off a little less — say 3 times a week — and slowly increase over time until you’ve developed a good habit of daily blogging). Aim for high quality, insightful posts that help to advance your reader’s knowledge of the topic.

That’s it. That’s all you have to do in the beginning. If you’re at this stage — a sort of “dreaming the entrepreneurial dream” stage — then this is all you need to do. Don’t worry about search engine optimization, blog design, social media, etc. (That’s good stuff, but it’s not the point right now).

Eventually, you can take it further and turn your blog into a business (as I’ll describe in a minute), but your top priority should be consistent, compelling blog posts every day.

What you want to do is build a body of knowledge, which will:

• Position you as an expert.
• Help you explore the depths of the subject
• Teach you things you didn’t know
• Build an audience (and they’ll be more likely to listen and respect you because you don’t have an agenda of selling them anything)
• Create an asset of information that you can later draw from

FAST FORWARD TO QUITTING TIME
Let’s say you stay with your company for another couple of years. You don’t love it, but the income is nice and the health care pays for your knee operation, but now you find yourself transferred to a department with a boss you don’t like. You can see yourself quitting in a month or so.

The good news is, you have been consistently positioning yourself as an expert for the past couple of years. You have 600+ blog posts and an audience of faithful readers.

Here’s what to do next:

1. Decide what you are going to sell. A product? A service? There are lots of options. Pick one or two that you can do now and shelve the rest for later.
2. Create your sales funnel. Describe the contacts at each stage of your sales funnel and how you’ll engage them at that stage and then move them forward. (Download this Sales Funnel Quick Reference Guide to get you started).
3. Implement the contact-engaging marketing that you’ve just outlined in the above step to engage and market to your Audience, your Leads, and your Prospects.
4. Quit your job. Woohoo!
5. Implement the contact-engaging content that you outlined a couple of steps above.

Thanks to your consistent effort, you have positioned yourself as an expert long before you made the leap out of your job into the world of business ownership.

ADDITIONAL TIPS TO MAKE THIS WORK

• Pick a topic you love and know something about and can spend years doing. Otherwise, it’s not worth it.
• This only works if you are consistent. I’ve seen people do this and succeed. I’ve seen people not do this and struggle. It really does work. Set an alarm, brainstorm some topics, and be relentless. Consider it an investment into your escape hatch. (Check out this blog post about blogging frequency and check out this blog post to discover what you should never, ever do).
• I mentioned earlier that you shouldn’t worry about search engine optimization (SEO) at this point. There are probably some SEO aficionados that are rolling in their graves right now but my reason is this: I want it to be a fun and simple effort. And search engine benefits will still be present in your blog, it just won’t be an intentional thing that you’ll do right away. You can always integrate that in later.
• Don’t fret about what you’ll sell while you’re working. That will work itself out, trust me. Here is a blog post about 5 different types of content monetization to get you started. There are other things to sell, too, but content monetization is an easy first step. If you can’t figure out what to sell, send me an email and we’ll talk about it.

Like anything that is effective, this method takes some effort. There will be days when you want to quit. But this is, in my opinion, the most effective way to start a business when you want to start a business someday but aren’t ready to quit your job just yet.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a detective. Detectives are cool because they start with a hunch and then put together the facts. The more facts they can put together, the more “airtight” their case becomes. The airtight their case becomes, the more successful they are when bringing the villain to justice.

If you want a successful sales funnel for your business — one that churns out one Customer after another — you need to be a detective.

Here’s why:

People have problems and needs and they are willing to spend money to solve their problems and fulfill their needs. But they’re also skeptical about whether a proposed solution will do what it says, and, they are reluctant to part with their hard-earned money.

People want to solve their problems and fulfill their needs but that skepticism and reluctance keep them from trusting and eagerly buying from you. As you use marketing and sales techniques to move your contact through your sales funnel, you will start to break down the barriers that the contact has put up. But you need to do a thorough job — you need to build a case in your favor and you need the eyes of a detective to look thoroughly at the situation and plug any holes in the case.

So business owners need to be detectives to build an airtight case that…

• ensures the product or service being sold is going to solve the problems or meet the needs of the contact
• addresses a contact’s skepticism and helps them to overcome it
• addresses a contact’s reluctance and helps them to over come it.

Build an airtight case about these three thing and your contacts will become Customers every single time. (Conversely, the fastest way to lose a sale is to not have an airtight case).

BUILD AN AIRTIGHT CASE FOR A CUSTOMER-GENERATING SALES FUNNEL
The first step is to create a 3-columned chart:

• In the first column, list as many problems, needs, or reasons that a contact has for buying your product.
• In the second column, list as many reasons that a contact has for not trusting you (i.e. they don’t know you; they haven’t heard good things about you; they don’t know of anyone else who has used your product, etc.)
• In the third column, list as many reasons that a contact has for not handing over their money (i.e. they don’t see the value; they aren’t sure if your product will work; they wonder what recourse they have to get their money back, etc.)

Make the lists long. Spend a few days on this and don’t worry if your lists get ridiculously long. The longer the better!

Once you have these super-mega-long lists, the second step is to think about where your contact is thinking about these things the most. For example, someone who knows they have a problem to be solved, but doesn’t know you yet, aren’t thinking about your guarantee. So make sure your guarantee comes after building a relationship. (That one was easy but some of them are harder to discern what comes first).

The third step is to address each one. If your contact doesn’t know anyone else who uses your product or service, get some testimonials. If your contact is a little worried about whether you provide value, give them case studies and lots of ROI measurements. If your contact is wondering whether the purchase is safe, make sure you highlight your guarantee.

The fourth step is to weave every single point on your three lists into your sales funnel’s marketing and sales content. So all that stuff mentioned above about the guarantee, testimonials, case studies, ROI, etc. should be created and integrated into your sales funnel.

The fifth step to watch your contacts closely to see how they move through your sales funnel. Are people hitting an invisible wall and no longer moving forward? Maybe there’s a problem with one of the messages you are using. Maybe it should go earlier or later in the sales funnel. Or maybe there’s a critical point you missed when you were creating your lists back in step one. Go back and rework those lists to build them out further.

A detective builds an airtight case by exploring every possibility and addressing it, and by finding gaps and researching diligently to plug those gaps. As a business owner, you can put on your detective’s hat to create a sales funnel that compels contacts to become Customers.

Businesses produce and publish marketing content and one of the ways that they can make their content more effective is by carefully thinking about what pronouns to use.

Without giving you a boring grammar lecture, pronouns are the words we use to indicate that we’re talking to someone or about someone. I, me, my, you, they, his, her, etc., etc., etc. Those are pronouns. (There are WAY more pronouns and if you really care to learn more about them, you can click over to Wikipedia’s entry on pronouns. I’ve only covered a few of the pronouns used most frequently in marketing).

PRONOUNS COMMONLY USED IN MARKETING
If you are developing marketing content for your business, you do need to think about which pronoun to use, and you need to make sure you use the right ones at the right time.
The right pronoun can make all the difference in your marketing. Here are the common ways pronouns are used in marketing:

I, Me, My: Used in two different ways:

• When speaking as the owner. Example: “I’m not just the president, I’m also a customer”.
• When as a surrogate of the audience (i.e. someone who your audience can relate to). Example: “As a mom, I know how tough it can be to find a meal that my family will enjoy…”

You: This has three purposes:

• When you want to be adversarial. Example: “Think you know how delicious bacon is? Think again!”
• When you want to specifically address your audience. “This phone is all about meeting your needs.”
• When you want to highlight your audience and make them think about themselves: “It’s all about you!”

They: this is a great way to align yourself with your reader by separating you and them from someone else. Example: “They want to charge $100 for this product…”

We, Our: This helps to generate alignment between you and a buyer. Example: “We can be more successful when…”

She, He, Her, Him: For products that are gender-specific, this is a great way to point to someone who either should be emulated or shouldn’t be emulated. Example: “He’s talking to his doctor about…”

Everybody, Everyone: This one is pretty general and should be used cautiously, and only if you are sure that your audience feels the same way you do about the rest of the populace. Example: “Everyone is switching to a lower-cost provider!”

And, of course you can mix and match as necessary:

• “I know how you feel.”
• “It’s you against everybody else”.
• “We’ve found the solution they don’t want you to hear!”

SALES FUNNEL BEST PRACTICES
In general, I would recommend that you take a look at the pronouns you currently use in your marketing and make sure you are using pronouns consistently. It’s okay to use a mix of pronouns, but it’s critical that you maintain consistency throughout all of your marketing: If you sometimes refer to your sales funnel contacts as “you” and sometimes you refer to them as “us” and sometimes you refer to them as “them”, you end up blurring your point.

This isn’t just a problem moving from one stage in your sales funnel to another. I’ve also seen it as a problem in websites and ebooks as well – the site creator or the ebook writer switches from one pronoun to another when talking about the same group of people.

So, figure out what your main message is and how you want to communicate it. Does it require an adversarial approach? Do you want to make your audience think about themselves? Do you want to separate yourself from “the other guys”? Then, craft your marketing with the most effective pronouns.