The ultimate guide to finding new paying customers on autopilot
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For those who like video (full blog post below):
This is it, the holy grail of growing your business. Today you’re going to learn the ins and outs of finding new paying customers on autopilot. Meaning that you’ll wake up one morning, check your email, and there will be a message with the subject line “X sent you money” or “you made a sale!”. Really sit with that for a minute. How amazing would it feel to literally make money while you sleep? How much would your business and life change when that starts happening? That’s what I’m going to teach you today!
Firstly, I need to clarify something. When I say “finding new paying customers on autopilot”, what I mean is that you have systems in place to move someone from passive fan to paying you money without you actively giving any one-on-one time with them. It doesn’t mean you do nothing in your business ever, and magically money will show up. No, ma’am, this isn’t the movie “The Secret”.
What this means is that instead of marketing one-on-one, like getting on the phone with each individual potential customer or client, you’ll market to larger audiences (e.g. social media) and have specific processes in place to get them to make the decision to pay you themselves.
This means that you can grow your paying customers and grow your audience (aka future paying customers) at the same time, instead of spending your finite time with one person, while the rest have no idea what you even do.
There will still be times when you get on the phone (or whatever form of communication you prefer) to answer questions before someone buys your products, services, or support, but if they’re at that point, they’ve already 90% decided to work with you.
Without further ado, let’s get to the nitty gritty to finding new paying customers on autopilot:
Prerequisites
There are some things you need to have in place before you start this process below, because you’ve got to have somewhere that’s going to act as the marketing hub, the home, of all your amazing content.
You’re going to need a website with a blog, no ifs, ands, or buts.
Bonus points if your website has beautiful branding that helps you stand out from all the other websites that your future customers are clicking to during their marathon online session to find the solution to their problem.
Your website is going to be the one place where you have complete control over the content, calls to action, and where there are places for people to give you their email addresses.
Social media is going to be the sexy bar or virtual networking event where you meet all your future customers, but your website is the home you bring them back to so that you can foster a real relationship with them.
Now onto the real steps:
#1 Who are you helping?
I’m assuming you already have a target audience, or what is called a niche. A specific group of people with a specific problem that you’re going to help with.
If you don’t, and you’re still in the “I want to help everybody!” boat, then do not pass go, do not collect $200, and click here to learn why that’s not going to help you build a successful business.
Why do you need a niche?
You need to have a group of people you want to help where you intimately know their problems and pain points that they experience on a daily basis.
Why?
So that you can use those problems to market to them in their own language and feelings.
For your niche, write all theirs problems down, being as specific as you can. For example, if you support busy moms to overcome anxiety, daily problems they have might include:
- feeling so overwhelmed with life that dinner becomes fast food and take out, which leads to her spending way more money than she needs to be, as well as physical symptoms like upset stomach and headaches. Both these things makes her anxiety worse
- yelling at her kids and husband because she’s having an anxious moment and doesn’t have an outlet for it
- not getting a good night’s sleep because she can’t turn her brain off
Don’t skip this step, and get really detailed. The more work you put into this list, the easier and more effective the rest of the process will be.
Don’t know what your target customer’s problems are, or not sure how she describes it? ASK HER!
Click here to get 3 free questionnaires you can send target customers, and have them tell you directly what they’re struggling with.
#2 Have something to sell
This sounds like a given, but you’d be surprised how many people try to grow their social media and email list without a product or service to sell!
It’s going to be pretty hard to make money if you have nothing to exchange money for.
Whether you’re selling a service, a 1-1 program, group program, online program, or product, you’ve got to have something to offer them first, because you’re going to work backwards to reverse engineer a system to sell people your exact offering.
Unless you have a product, selling a signature 1-1 program is usually the easiest place to start, especially if you’re just starting your business. Click here to get help designing a signature program.
#3 Choose content categories
Since you’re a great student and want to succeed, you’ve already done step #1 and #2 above, so you already have a list with all your target customer’s problems and pain points, and you have a paid solution to said problems.
Now we get to Marie Kondo the hell out of it, and group them into 3-5 categories.
Look at your list of your client’s problems and pain points, and take a high level view of it. Are there 3-5 overarching subjects that many of them include?
To be even more intentional, what are the 3-5 things that your paid solution uses to solve their problem?
Continuing the same example from above, you help busy moms overcome anxiety. Depending on your schooling and expertise, your signature program or service guides them through:
Diet changes, specifically going paleo/gluten-free/fermented foods
Healing the gut, which is related to diet above, but also with targeted supplementation, and maybe even gut biome testing
Meditation, yoga, and awareness
Essential oils
Self love and boundaries
Looking at the example of pain points from step #1, do those match up with the main subjects that you help them with in your paid solution?
- feeling so overwhelmed with life that dinner becomes fast food and take out, which leads to her spending way more money than she needs to be, as well as physical symptoms like upset stomach and headaches. Both these things makes her anxiety worse
✔️ Diet changes + healing the gut
- yelling at her kids and husband because she’s having an anxious moment and doesn’t have an outlet for it
✔️ Meditation, yoga, and awareness + self love and boundaries
- not getting a good night’s sleep because she can’t turn her brain off
✔️ Essential oils + self love and boundaries + meditation, yoga, and awareness
Fantastic!
For this example, the 5 content categories are:
Paleo eating
Gut health
Self awareness through yoga + meditation
Essential oils
Self care + love
All content going forward, whether it’s on the blog, social media, or anywhere else, should fall into those 5 categories.
Does that feel so much lighter, having guidelines for exactly what sort of content to make? For me, this is a game changer!
#4 Top 3 questions
You're now going to come up with the 3 tops questions you get for each of your top 3-5 categories, even better if you can remember the most common questions you got from your current customers before they started working with you.
If you’ve never had paying customers, what are the most common questions you get on social media, or from your friends and family?
These questions are a look inside the brain of future paying customers, the things that they need to know before they’re ready to invest in you.
If you can answer these questions in a way that people can access before you show them your paid solutions, they’ll start to trust that:
a) you really are an expert on that topic
b) you’ll help them get over their concerns and reasons for why they haven’t already solved this problem; and
c) YOU, and not someone else, is the person who will get them results
These top questions all depend on your target customers. Let’s say one of your categories is paleo. One person’s audience might be brand new to it, so their top 3 questions might cover the basics like “what is the paleo diet?”, and “what can you eat on a paleo diet?”. Someone else audience might already be eating a paleo diet, but they have more in depth questions like “how do I eat paleo to balance my hormones?” or “eating paleo for autoimmune issues”.
The better you know your target customer, the better your questions will be for moving someone from interested to paying customer.
#5 Write blog posts
Now it’s time to make scalable resources for your target customers most common questions, concerns, and things holding them back.
For each of your 3 most common questions for each of your 3-5 categories, write a blog post to answer them.
Yes, that’s a TON of content, but this will end up saving you loads of time in the future, and this is the key part in finding new paying customers on autopilot.
Why blog posts?
Blog posts are perfect for sharing on social media platforms, especially Pinterest and Facebook (including Facebook groups).
A person can share one website URL link, which will take new visitors right to that information on one single page.
Research shows that new website visitors decide within 3 seconds if they want to stay there or not, so you need to show them that you’re in the right place in a span of time shorter than it took to read this sentence. They won’t want to be navigating around 2 or 3 other pages to find your amazing information!
They’ll have time to see a headline, the first few words, and subconsciously take in your visuals and branding, and that’s how they’re going to make up their minds to keep reading.
This is why your branding is so important, even if no one can really explain why! People will just know if it “feels right” or not.
Blog posts also make for some great organic Google traffic if it has proper SEO, or search engine optimization.
P.S. You don’t have to write all these blog posts in a few days, you might go nuts! If you write 3 blog posts for 5 different categories, that’s 15 blog posts, which is a lot.
If batching content is your jam, have at it. Otherwise, make a schedule to have all these blog posts completed within a certain time frame, like within a month or 3 months.
A one month time frame might mean you need to write 3 blog posts a week for 4 weeks. A three month time frame might mean writing one categories blog posts over one month, which would be one blog post a week. Totally doable, right?
#6 Content upgrades
A blog post with a great headline, keywords, images, and content can send you hundreds or even thousands of brand new visitors, which means tons of potential new paying customers, each month. The key is capturing those people with their email addresses (which is what turns new visitors into paying customers) with content upgrades.
Content upgrades are like a bonus download for a specific topic in a blog post, with the email subscriber box being embedded directly in the blog post.
Click here for my detailed post on content upgrades, but in a nut shell, this is how I currently average 5 to 10 new email subscribers per day without paying for any ads on social media.
Here’s my current email list sign ups from the past 30 days, no ads, no webinars, no special promotions. 288 new subscribers :) Seeing these results makes this introvert very happy!
So you’re going to use each blog post as it’s own resource for capturing new email subscribers who are obviously very interested in the specific topic of that post, however, there are 2 more ways you’re then going to use those blog posts.
#7 Email autoresponder series
For someone to become a paying customer, they need to trust you. For them to trust you, they need to know that your beliefs match their beliefs AND that you have the expertise to help them.
You’re going to show them you’re an expert by sharing even more helpful resources related to their pain points and problems.
With most email software (click here for my favourite software plus my review of MailChimp), you can send people a series of emails after they subscribe, called an autoresponder or a sequence.
This welcome series can be delivered as often as you like and depends on your audience. You could do every few days, or once a week, it’s totally up to you.
Each email corresponds to one of your categories, and each email contains short descriptions (1-2 sentences) about each of your 3 common questions for that category, and a link to read the article.
At the end of your series, you invite them to check out your sales page for your paid product or service, with instructions on how they can get started.
The autoresponder will look like this:
There are lots of ways to write an autoresponder series for sales on autopilot, this one is very simplified. If you have more categories, you can do a soft sell earlier in the sequence, and a hard pitch at the end.
Selling in this way becomes infinitely easier if one of your content upgrades was taken directly from your paid solutions. For example, if you offered 3 days of a meal plan for free, and those 3 days were taken from your paid 21 days meal plan, you can say:
“Did you like X? You can get X more days/X more support with my full [name of program/paid solution. Click here to check out the details!”
and you link to the sales page for that program, product, or service.
Your autoresponder series should offer value 80% of the time, and ask for the sale 20%. So if it’s a 5 email series, 1 series can be all about the sale, while the other 4 provide tremendous value!
#8 Recycle your blog posts
Now that you’ve written 9 to 15 blog posts to match your most common questions for your categories, not to mention writing content upgrades for one or all of them, it’s time to put them to work.
Most of time, we write a blog post, share it once with our audience, and it’s never shared again. That’s a huge waste, considering all the time and effort that went into them!
Just like you see reruns of your favourite TV shows all the time, you can do the same with your blog posts, no matter how old they are.
Here’s a list of ways you can reuse and recycle your blog posts, so that they can continue to grow your email list and bring you new paying customers on autopilot for months and years to come:
Make an image and share them on Pinterest (click here for more info on using Pinterest to grow your business
Give a shout out to one of your older blog posts once a week in an Instagram AND on Instagram stories (click here for more info on using Instagram to grow your health business)
Do a Facebook live sharing the same info as you shared in a blog post (some people love to watch videos instead of reading a blog post)
Take that Facebook live recording and upload it to YouTube
Use the audio from the Facebook live recording and upload it as a podcast
If you have enough devices, record an Instagram Live at the same time as you do the Facebook live
Turn your Instagram Live into an IGTV episode. If you didn’t have enough devices to go live on both platforms, save the live from Facebook, make sure it’s the proper dimensions for IGTV, and manually upload it.
Put the blog post/video into an auto-scheduler on Facebook so it’s shared on a regular basis with your other amazing blog posts
I recently did this with my latest blog post called “4 ways to save time in your health business with a brand & website”, where the video was filmed live less than one week ago. There was no one on the Facebook live, and about 5 people on the Instagram live, but as of writing this, here’s what the analytics show:
- Facebook video (I’m not overly active on FB anymore): 355 people reached, 85 engagements, 67 views
- YouTube video: 27 views
- IGTV: 365 views and 33 likes on part 1 (had to be split into 2 videos), 79 views + 14 likes + 8 comments on part 2
- Pinterest pin: 77 views, 1 save, 1 click to website
Those aren’t bad statistics since it was published less than a week ago, and only 27 people from my email list viewed the blog post. The rest are probably brand new to my business and resources, and most likely not already on my email list.
The thing to remember with this entire process is quality over quantity.
If you only have time for one piece of great content each month, then figure out a way to use that one piece for now, and you can edit your autoresponder series after more pieces are in place.
The best thing about this strategy is that it compounds over time.
The more pieces of amazing content that are all leading to the same place (your paid solutions), the higher the chances are that you will get sales on autopilot with your email autoresponder sequence.
As your reach on social media grows, and the traffic to your website grows, this strategy is totally scalable and not limited by your personal time.
The more people to your website and the more people in your audience, the more sales on autopilot each month.
You can see from this that it’s important to have that foundation in place BEFORE you start scaling, though, otherwise you’re missing out on an opportunity for people to be able to pay you WHILE you grow.
We always think it’ll take less time than it does to grow, and people always say that they’ll build a website or start blogging when they have more time.
You’re never going to have more time, and all the people that you’re reaching now? They probably have no way to pay you, and especially not on autopilot.
Get your foundation in place first with a website, blog, something to sell, and a solid autoresponder series, and you’re all set to scale, no matter how fast or slow it is!
