5 Steps to Creating the Perfect Offer
I’ve been talking a lot about passive income and creating offers that you can sell on a one-to-many scale rather than a one-to-one scale. But how do you know that you’re creating the perfect offer? I was struggling with this myself just a few weeks ago. Now, I’m sharing my five steps to creating the perfect offer with you!
5 Steps to Creating the Perfect Offer
Want to listen to the podcast version of this episode? I’ve got you covered!
Whether you’re making a digital product, a course, or even a SERVICE, we’re covering the five steps to creating the perfect offer. Not enough people are talking about how to create the perfect offer. They tell you how to make the things and how to market it, but they don’t tell you what will actually do well in your market.
These are not the ONLY five steps to creating an offer, but they are the five steps that people don’t talk about very much. Let’s dive in!
Steps to Creating the Perfect Offer
Step 1: Know who you are trying to help, SPECIFICALLY.
This is the item on this list that you probably are hearing people talk about more than others, so I won’t spend too much time here.
With the first course I ever actually sold, DIY Your Website, I thought heavily about who that course was meant for. It was for someone who couldn’t afford to hire a web designer, didn’t have the skills to do it themselves, but were also techy enough to understand what was at hand. I KNEW the perfect person.
Once I moved past that course, I lost my perfect person along the way. After I created DIY Your Website, I created a LOT of courses in a very short amount of time. (Like, one course per month.) They were specific to tech issues and tech strategies. I made courses like “How to use ConvertKit” and “How to Strategically use Gmail.” Somewhere along the way, I love who I was creating them for. It was easy to think that anyone using the system would need the course for it.
When you’re creating courses and you don’t have an EXACT person in mind who your product is for, you get really stuck on the marketing aspect. You’ve GOT to know EXACTLY who you’re trying to help. Niche that down. If you don’t know who your course is for, you can’t market it well, you can’t sell it well, and you can’t even create the course well.
In the episode about turning your service into a course, I mentioned that the most overlooked thing in courses is the knowledge that we take for granted about our subject matter that our audience doesn’t know. If you figure out who your exact customer is, you can avoid leaving out important pieces of course material.
Step 2: Pick a problem you want to solve and solve it!
Sometimes, we start thinking about creating a digital product, resource, or other thing about a certain subject. Instead of just thinking about the subject, you should be thinking about the problem you want to solve for your ideal customer!
You are always solving a problem. If you’re creating a social media management service, you’re solving the problem that they have no clue what to do on social media, for example.
You want to take people from point A, where they are experiencing the problem, to the solution. Your product needs to be the bridge from point A to point Z here.
Pick a problem you want to solve rather than just picking a subject you want to create something about.
Let’s use my digital planners as an example. I’m not just creating a digital planner – I’m solving a problem for people who want the experience of a paper planner but think it’s too bulky. You get the idea.
Maybe you want to create a course about training a dog. You’re not creating a course about dog training – you’re creating a course to solve the problem of a disobedient dog.
Picking a problem will not only help you create the course well, but it will also help you market it. Your marketing will help your ideal customer see where they’re at right now, the problem they’re facing, and that they should buy your course to get on the bridge to the solution.
Step 3: Make sure that your offer is part of your offer stack.
I will probably do a whole episode on this one soon, because there’s a lot to be said. For now, we’ll keep it as succinct as possible.
People have different names for offer stacks. You might have heard people say your offer ladder, your suite of offers, or something else. It’s all the same thing.
Basically, this means that you’re only ever selling to one ideal client. Ever. Everything you put out into the world should be something they would want to buy.
The reason this is often called an offer ladder is because you usually market to the people at the bottom. Then, once they buy the first resource, they work their way up your “ladder” as they need other resources.
It can happen like this: A customer comes in at point A and they need offer B. But then, they still need additional support – so they get offer C. But there are new people at point A, so more people are always entering your ladder and moving up it.
If you create something that isn’t part of your offer stack and doesn’t appeal to the people who will buy your other things, you’re adding people to your audience who will never buy from you again. We all know that it’s easier to keep a customer than it is to get a new one. It’s also easier to sell more high-end products in the future if everything you do stacks together.
We’ll use my digital planners as a bad example here. My digital planners are flat out useless to my offer stack. I do not want to be the digital planner girl or teach about productivity forever. My digital planners were a happy “accident” in my business. I created a YouTube video about digital planning because I thought it was cool. And I knew better than to create that video without an offer inside of it. So, my digital planners were born, my YouTube video took off, and the rest is history. Next week’s episode is all about how three YouTube videos have made me $30,000, and it’s because of digital planners.
I don’t regret creating them, and I’m grateful that they’ve helped my business and grown my email list. But the people watching YouTube videos about digital planning and purchasing my planner won’t buy my other offers. I’m not saying there isn’t any overlap at all. A few weeks ago, I got a message from someone who found me through my digital planner videos and has purchased other things from me later. But, it’s not a direct alignment.
Imagine my email list has 10,000 people on it and 2,000 of those people purchased a digital planner from me. Let’s say one percent of those 2,000 people is an overlap audience that will actually buy other things from me. That’s 20 people. Instead of having 10,000 engaged people on my email list who I can launch my next offer to, I now have 8,000 people on my email list who are interested in my other offers. If two percent of my list buys my next big product, with 8,000 engaged people that makes 160 sales, but with 10,000 engaged people I would make 200 sales. If I have a $1,000 offer, I am possibly missing out on $40,000 because I have this thing that is getting people on my email list who won’t purchase other offers in my stack.
Your offer stack should be set up in a way where person A will want thing B now, thing C at another point, etc. Make a flow to everything you offer, and make sure that whatever you’re trying to create is part of that offer stack flow. You need to know that people who come in through this offer will want other things you sell.
Step 4: Make the results of your offer tangible.
At the end of your offer, there should be metrics your customer can use to measure their progress, or an action they complete at the end.
Imagine you’re making a digital product. Rather than just being an informational fluff piece, your customer needs to get a win out of it.
This can be hard for certain niches – I totally get that. If you’re in the coaching niche and you’re a life coach, you might be more focused on guiding people toward finding a solution themselves than providing the solution. Think of it this way: the offer has to be tangible and the result has to be tangible, even if the way they get there is not extremely tangible.
If you create a digital product called “5 Ways to be a Better Person,” there’s nothing tangible there. Odds are, you aren’t going to do all of the five ways as you’re reading the digital product, and now you need some actual things you can do. Make the result TANGIBLE. If someone wants to be a better person, think about why they want to be a better person. Maybe they’re struggling in their relationships right now and you want to help them solve that problem. Make the product about the result instead. At the end of this digital product, you’ll be able to restore your relationships. “5 Steps to be a Better Wife” is tangible, but 5 ways to be a better person is not.
Let’s use my 100 to Best You Workbook as an example. (Which you can buy anytime now in my store!) It’s a 100 day challenge, where each day I give you super bite-sized, actionable things to do. At the end of the 100 days, you’re a better version of you and you’re set up for success.
I created it last year at the end of the year. I knew people were going to be starting to go into sloth mode like we do at the end of the year, and I wanted to challenge people to make traction toward the person they want to be.
It’s a PDF workbook with days listed out. When you get it, you can also opt-in to get emails delivered to you every day with the exact same prompts. If I branded that workbook as “Be a Better You in 100 Days,” that is not tangible. When I was marketing 100 to Best You, I marketed it as a way to have your entire life organized, plan out the next quarter of your business, and get clear on your goals in the next 100 days. That is tangible.
Create your offers so that your customer can say “Yeah, I did that!” when they complete it.
(P.S. – you should also follow these steps when you’re creating a challenge! Or really anything. Keep all of these steps in mind!)
Step 5: Sell them what they want and give them what they need.
I’ve done a whole podcast episode on this before that you can find right here.
This ties in with picking the problem you’re trying to solve, making it tangible, and figuring out who you’re trying to help.
Here’s what I mean by sell them what they want and give them what they need. Sometimes, people say they want X, and they do want X. But in order to get X, they need Z first. As an example, imagine someone needs to know how to use ConvertKit. Yes, they need to know how to use ConvertKit – but guess what else they need? They need to know how to strategically build an email list and use ConvertKit strategically. But they don’t know they need that!
So, I’m going to sell them what they want – a course about how to use ConvertKit. And inside the program, I’m going to give them what they need – how to use it strategically.
People want to know how to do affiliate marketing. More than likely, they also need to know how to build an audience that will drive traffic to their affiliate links, so I’m going to teach that as well.
Okay, let’s recap. Here are the 5 Steps to Creating the Perfect Offer:
Step 1: Know who you’re trying to help, granularly. What are their skills, what do they struggle with, who are they?
Step 2: Pick a problem and solve it with your offer. Don’t just pick a subject and make an offer about that. Be the bridge for someone from the problem they have at Point A to the solution at Point Z.
Step 3: Make sure it works well together with your existing offers, future offers, the content you’re creating, your audience – all the things. Create offers that flow with your offer stack!
Step 4: Make your offer and your result tangible. Tangible results just sell better.
Step 5: Sell them what they want, give them what they need.
Here's a final, quick example (and something to get excited about!)
In my own business, I’ve been working on a new course that I am launching on Black Friday. I wanted to make it all about passive income, creating courses, and all the things to make money passively, but I realized that people probably need an audience before they can make money that way. The thing is, people don’t know that they need an audience. So, I’m going to teach audience building strategies, but sell a course about passive income,
Since you're here, I'll even let you in on a special secret: next week, I'm going to announce a pop-up Facebook Group that you can join to come hang out with me! It'll be a huge party with lots of giveaways… so stay tuned. 🙂
Now that you know the five steps to creating a perfect offer, go out and do the thing! I hope this was as helpful in your business as it has been in mine.
