The power of 'baby steps' and how to implement them in your solo biz...

How to get the most from email marketing...

Design your business to be an 'email-first' business

Most solopreneurs (in my experience) treat email marketing as an afterthought at best and inconsequential at worst.

The result? They rarely make it work effectively in their business.

What exactly is an 'email-first' business?

It's a business that consistently drives its interested audience (from multiple platforms) towards its email list, and generates the bulk of its income from its email subscribers.

Why does it work?

It's down to one thing - 'baby steps'... 👣

With an email-first business, you're not asking strangers to buy from you right off the bat; that approach is normally beyond their comfort zone.

Instead, you're striving to serve and add value well before any money changes hands.

You're providing tiny baby steps for your audience to take, each one nurturing them towards the next.

The image below depicts the difference between how an 'email-first' solo business runs and how most people run theirs...

Of course, there are many more aspects to running a successful solo biz, but getting this foundation firmly embedded gives you the springboard to create a predictable income from a sustainable business.

So, here's a simple plan; (if you'd like to give it a go)

1. Create content to share with the world (share what you create across your digital landscape to raise their awareness of you)
2. Start driving all attention towards your email list (from your socials, your website, your email signature, your podcasts, networking events, basically from everywhere!)
3. Welcome your new subscribers into your world (i.e. your email list) and solve the problem they show up with.
4. Continue to drip-feed more value to build rapport and trust. (during this phase, collect information about them - i.e. their challenges, objectives, preferences, etc.)
5. Offer them a product or service that solves one of their problems in a non-salesy, helpful manner.

This may seem like a long-winded way to make a sale, and in isolation, it is - but we're not doing it in isolation, we're doing it for EVERY interested subscriber to our list, therefore we end up with people at every stage in the process.

An email-first business runs like clockwork, but only if you design, launch, and grow it.

Ⓧ The bad news is there's no 'magic bean' to sew.
✔︎ The good news is that it's been proven to work by millions before us.

As solos, the question we must answer is - are we prepared to do what's needed to make it happen? 🤔

Introducing a Kit feature...

RSS Feed Automations

RS...what?

I can hear you - it sounds like something techy and tricky, right?! 😵‍💫

And it kinda is... but not really - let's get into what they are and how you can use them in your Kit account.

What are RSS Feeds?

RSS stands for 'Really Simple Syndication' - a feature that's been around for decades (started by 'Netscape' in 1999, remember them?), so nothing new about the tech, but most people don't leverage its power.

Essentially RSS is used to pull data feeds from a nominated source and 'feed' it into another platform, e.g. a website or email.

An example of an RSS feed

If you have a website, chances are, you also have a 'feed'. For example, for my website, the feed is https://provenflows.com/feed (yes, that simple).

I can insert that feed into Kit and configure it to watch for any new blog posts that I create, and when I do, it'll take those blog posts and send them to my email subscribers... all without lifting a finger! (If that's what you want - you can also configure it to prepare the email for you, and then you send it manually).

How to configure your RSS feed

If you'd like a step-by-step tutorial on how to set yours up in Kit, check out this article I wrote a while ago (when Kit was ConvertKit - it all works in exactly the same way today).

Read the RSS article

P.S. Just to give more context to RSS feeds and how you probably see them without realising, they can be used to feed data from websites like BBC News, New York Times, and TechCrunch.

Below is a screenshot of me pulling BBC's RSS feed into Kit...

If I really wanted to, and was given permission by the respective creators, I could curate a content feed from numerous sources and email it to all my subscribers, including you, of course! 😊

It's a nifty wee feature...

Tech you might find helpful...

WhatFont

Have you ever visited a website and thought to yourself... "That font looks really cool, I wonder what it is?".

I know I have... many times!

And, typically, I'd start trawling through the web page source to see if I could detect the fonts being used so that I could use them on my website (or documents) - which is painful, to say the least!

Enter, 'WhatFont'!

Obviously, the person who developed this Chrome extension had the same experience as I and thought, "I'm going to create a tool for this very thing!".

So, with the extension installed, simply click the icon, hover over the text you're interested in and the tool shows you the font being used (just as in the image above☝️).

If you'd like to use the extension, you can get it free here;

Get the WhatFont extension for Chrome

Ask me your questions...

Answering questions on email, Kit, or solo biz is my favourite thing to do - hit the button below and ask yours now...

Ask my question