What is the difference between marketing your business and making sales and, prompted by a client request to promote a high ticket event for him, Nicola discusses why you can’t just send cold Facebook traffic to a sales page.

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Clicks And Leads is a “tongue in cheek” digital marketing Vzine by entrepreneur, author, podcaster, speaker, Nicola Cairncross.

Mentioned in the Vzine

• Find out more about Nicola’s Clicks And Leads Academy where you can access the Be Everyhere Online diy course and get the help you need to start your online business
• Would you prefer Nicola and her team to do the grunt work for you? Find out more at ClicksAndLeads.com
• Get Nicola to speak at your event

On the blogs

Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders: Chris Barrow
Vzine 059 | Ethics In Business
Vzine 058 | Keep Focused On Income Producing Activities
Own It! 172 | Law of Attraction (Part 1)
Own It! 171 | Essential Journeys

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Hi, everyone, it’s Nicola here, and it’s suspiciously quiet ’round here today. I can see the odd cat going past, and there’s a few roosters having a go down the hill, but apart from that, it’s no chainsaws, no dogs at the moment. So I’ll try and get this v-zine out to you while the circumstances are favorable.

So what’s been happening this week? Well, I’m off to Write Club in a minute, and it’s our Write Club Classic meeting, which means we actually talk about writing, and I have to confess, I haven’t actually done any in the last month or so. The Write Club podcast is taking up all my writing time.

Actually, business and the Write Club podcast has taken up all my writing time, so I’ve really got to get my finger out on this one, because I keep feeling that I’ve committed to writing a novel, but I’m not actually doing any writing. So I need to get that sorted out.

I’ve been out to dinner last Friday, and then we went out, where’d we go on Saturday? I can’t remember where we went Saturday. Oh, yes, to watch rugby at someone’s house. I’m not into rugby, really, but I go because a FOMO. I don’t like to be left out of these little gatherings. So catching up is the order of the day, and trying to get some novel writing done.

I’ve just remembered, I’ve got a new client coming on board on Friday. This gentleman is a very well-established corporate performance leadership coach, and he wants to turn what he knows into digital products, and then he wants to attract a following and attract clients from making videos. Done a lot of stage speaking as well, so he should be really good in front of the camera.

We also surprised all our existing clients on the Clicks & Leads Be Everywhere Online Done for You service by creating little ident videos at the end. I’ve got to credit Sarah for this. It was her that found the software, and they absolutely love them. It just rounds off a video nicely. We don’t put them at the beginning, because you wanna get straight into your videos on YouTube and Facebook and LinkedIn, but at the end, it gives a nice little touch, and it shows the person’s website, where people go to get more information.

So, yeah, it’s all rolling along nicely, and if you’re someone who is a coach, consultant, or specialist of any kind, just go and check us out at clicksandleads.com to see if we could help you be everywhere online in under 20 minutes a week.

Today, I’d like to talk to you a little bit about marketing versus sales, and I’ve been prompted to think about this this week because we are doing a lot of marketing, branding kind of marketing, for several clients under our Be Everywhere Online program.

And it’s an interesting one, because things are changing. You know, you can’t just send cold traffic to an opt-in page and expect to get opt-ins at any reasonable price anymore, and you can’t just then jump those opt-ins to a sales page and expect people to buy anymore.

It’s much, much, much easier and nicer and even less expensive to warm people up first, to get people to know, like, and trust you.

Actually, I’ve been preaching this for the last 20 years, ’cause that’s how I started back in 1998. That’s how you did it then. And it just got more and more sophisticated and more and more high-pressure.

But actually, the best way to build a sustainable business online is to build a tribe of people who know, like, and trust you, and then make appropriate offers to that tribe occasionally.

And the reason I was prompted to think about that this week was because one of my Be Everywhere Online clients, who we’ve only been working with for about three weeks, we had to build a new website for them, we had to build a new Facebook page for them, because the existing properties he’s got online are frowned upon by Facebook. They talk about things Facebook doesn’t like, like trading and cryptocurrencies and making a lot of money very quickly.

So I’ve been creating a brand and identity for him, and then we’re bringing in the people who are interested in what he’s saying in his videos, which is all about success thinking, and, you know, what people’s options are.

So, yeah, and then he popped up and he said he’s doing an event in about three weeks’ time, and can I run some Facebook ads to it? And I had to say, look, this isn’t gonna work. I’ll do it for you, by all means, if you want to pay me to do it and you want to spend the money, but I know from working with someone else just recently that you cannot just run even moderately lukewarm traffic to an events page and expect them to sign up for a high-ticket event, which is what this new customer was talking about, and expect people to buy.

They’re just not going to get their wallets out and buy something high ticket without knowing you fairly well first.

They might come along to something about 97 pounds, 147 pounds over two or three days, because that is a good deal, but they’re not gonna spend something like £1500 – £2000 on a three-day event on the back of only having visited your website once or only having visited your Facebook page once.

So you have to really work a lot harder over a longer period to time, fill those kind of events with people who know, like, and trust you.

One of the other things that made me think about this was one of the other new clients, you know, some clients like to ask lots of questions before they sign up, and I’m totally cool with that. I like people to come in knowing exactly what’s gonna happen and not be disappointed or feel let down because, you know, one thing they assumed was going to happen maybe doesn’t.

But this client was saying, well, you know, should we be using a tracking tool like ClickMagick, and I said no, because we’re not going to be generating, on the kind of budget we’re talking about here, we’re not gonna be generating that much traffic. And we know that you’re doing nothing else to drive traffic to your website, so we know that anybody that opts in or anybody that buys, is coming from the traffic we’re generating from you.

So we can just track the amount of page visitors with Google Analytics, and then we can look at your mailing list host to see how many opt-ins you’ve had, and of course look in your PayPal account or Stripe to see how many sales you’ve had. It’s simple. We don’t need ClickMagick yet.

Got any questions at all about how I work, or how I work with clients, then do fire off an email. I’m always really willing to answer people’s questions. Either come along to my Nicola Cairncross Mastermind group on Facebook and sign up for free there and ask your questions in there, or just send me an email at nicola@nicolacairncross.com, and I’ll be delighted to answer any questions you have at all.

Education is the key to not making expensive mistakes online. Hope that helped.

On the blog and the podcast this week, on last week’s v-zine, I talked about having some ethics in business and how it’s really essential to be able to sleep at night, and if a client comes, then you shouldn’t just take their money. You should definitely refer them to someone else if that’s what is required, and they get a better deal out of going there, because clients really find it incredibly reassuring if you don’t try and sell ’em on your products and services every single time. And yeah, I want to be able to sleep at night, so that’s what I was talking about last week.

And then on the podcast last week, we talked about essential journeys, ’cause it was Snowmageddon last week in England. Not here, as you can see. It’s definitely springtime in Greece. But they were talking about what was essential journeys, and how Judith’s man had to walk for an hour and a half in the snow, just to get to work before he even started, but she was obviously very relieved, ’cause he turned up with her shopping, and she hadn’t been able to go out for several days.

So, then I got thinking about what essential journeys were, because Justin Brooke, who is a big hero of mine, he’s a big media buyer and an incredibly successful Facebook ads and Twitter and Google ad, you know, he basically does paid media. And he’s just bought himself and his family an RV, a huge RV, and they’re going off traveling around America, because they homeschool, and they’ve got internet on the RV, and they’re just having experiences and making all life that is full of fun and new places, all the while while their children are young enough to enjoy it, and I just think that is just such a fantastic thing.

And he started posting about it and saying how he’s not interested in speaking on stage that much anymore and having a multi-million business. He just wants to have a great life and enjoy himself and not be stressed, and there’s a lot of people joined in that conversation, and it was really weird, because it was the second anniversary of Steve dying last week, and it made me really value what I’ve got out here in Greece.

So I’m going back to the UK to speak in May for the International Coach Federation, so if you’re a member of the ICF, and you go to their annual conference, I’ll see you there. And I’m doing a breakout session as well on being everywhere online, so that should be fun.

But it just made me realize that, you know, there’s probably a lot of people out there who still want to be fabulously wealthy and build a huge business, but a lot of people that I’ve known for the last 10, 20 years online are now starting to examine their values and work out what they really enjoy in life, and I’m really grateful to live here and have a lovely stress-free time, and when I go home, it feels a little bit weird, let me tell you, but I’m looking forward to seeing Phoebe and Nelson obviously.

So yeah, essential journeys. Do you need to make them? Should you be making more of them? Should you be traveling more, seeing more of the world while you still can?

Go and check out the blog and the podcast. It’s nicolacairncross.com/blog. Everything goes onto there, whether it’s Own It, the podcast, my own v-zine, or the occasional article I write. That’s sort of a good starting point for checking me out and finding out whether you’d like to work with me on either being everywhere online done for you or being everywhere online where I mentor you, how to do it yourself. Speak later. I’m off the Write Club now.

Find out more about Nicola’s Clicks And Leads Academy and get the help you need to start your online business today

Creative Direction & Video Editing
Phoebe Soremekun

Intro Music
Pool Cosby

Incidental Music
[No Copyright Music] Happy Life – FREDJI
[No Copyright Music] Palm Trees – Ehrling

Drone footage of The Mani
Georgios Ser-Aouas

Check out more videos on my YouTube channel