Live Your Passion

THE REAL ENTREPRENEURS LAUGHED AT ME

I was about 6 years into online business, and had already made several hundreds of thousands of dollars, in fact was averaging about 30-35k per month, before I ever REALLY heard of the idea of a proper ‘sales page’.

I mean, I GUESS I’d heard of it. Kinda sorta? It wasn’t, like, a shocking concept or something. But it also certainly was not –

a) something I myself had done anything more than a half-assed attempt at, and even then, only a few times

b) something I knew how to do or thought I NEEDED to be able to do, in order to make money online.

Remember that when I say I was in online business already for 6 years at that point – I didn’t even know I was in online business at first! I started a blog. To support my physical personal training business. And even once I started to figure out the whole information product thang, and sell digital offerings, I still wasn’t really calling it my business.

I had a business OFFLINE, and this blog thing was, well, it was my blog! Where I sometimes sold products. Where, almost without noticing it, I had bit by bit ‘hack jobbed’, or fluked, or, to put a kinder spin on it, listened and conversed and communicated and helped people out until somehow I was making 30-35k per month!

But because I really still saw it as my blog … where I kinda sort sold digital products … everything centred AROUND the blog.

So, when I sold things, I would do what seemed logical, and I would sell them on the blog!

Literally in the format OF a blog post, or a few dot points and excited little paragraphs within a blog post, to tell my readers about what I had for them.

The whole thing was just about me having a conversation, you know? Listening. Hearing what people had to say, and how I could help them. And then creating products, programs, mini courses, and so on for them.

Somewhere along the way I certainly vaguely noticed that people did these long online sales letter thingies … and I’m sure there was a part of me which thought about that, and wondered if I should do … I vaguely remember reading them and trying to ‘figure it out’ … but meanwhile? I just kept doing my thing the way I was doing it.

People kept buying.

And letting me help them.

And then sharing their needs and frustrations.

And so I would come up with new ideas.

Do a little write up about it.

Hook it up to a PayPal link, and decide a way of being able to deliver the product file, or whatever it was.

Listen to what they wanted or needed next.

Repeat the cycle!

I always had it in the back of my mind that one day I needed to make things a little fancier … or professional … but I guess it seemed that one day never came, and meanwhile – it had literally never OCCURRED to me that just telling people about what I had for them, via my blog posts, was in any way limiting me, or just not as ‘schmick’ as it perhaps should be.

All of which I share with you for two reasons –

1) You absolutely can create money or any other success without following the rules of your industry

2) Beware the idea that the next level requires you to be fancier

(kinda the same thing, I know!)

In about 2011 leading in to 2012, I started to, for the first time, hire coaches who themselves were successful in the online business space. I’d had many coaches prior to this. In fact I hired my first life coach in my teens, and had always had SOME sort of mentor or coach ever since then!

But this was the first time I had come across women who were doing what I was doing but SO much better, more successfully, making more money, and so on. Who I was inspired by, moved by, a little in awe of, and looked up to! And who I decided to learn from, invested money with, and also avidly and diligently followed and listened to.

You know how it is … when you find somebody whose work and also persona resonates with you so deeply, whether or not you’ve gone full blown fan girl, you definitely DO want to listen to and act on the things they say!

I think I was pretty full blown fan girl. Haha. Not so much in a way of being stalky or needy around these women as people, more to do with being absolutely committed to being the best possible student, and learning every little drop of knowledge and wisdom I could from them.

So, when one of those early online mentors of mine told me that my ‘sales pages’ were ‘cute’ (awwww … Kat … it’s so CUTE, how you do it!), I really took that on board. I wasn’t OFFENDED as such. After all, I was there to learn and grow, and I was MORE than happy to improve. But, hmm, yes. I can remember being a little ‘shrunken’, you know? A contractive energy coming on board. A feeling of being slightly embarrassed, like – I’d been doing it like a silly little girl, and everybody else was clearly the proper grown up, doing it right, and I NEEDED TO BE LIKE THEM.

Have you ever felt that way? Like you need to be like them? Like the way that you naturally do it is a little … cute? A little immature? A little NOT professional or polished enough? A little messy? Or something like that? I felt all of these things!

And maybe sometimes you do too.

Anyway, I did what any good student, A Type sorta gal would do, and I took it on board right away. I needed to DE-CUTE-IFY myself, forthwith! And, like I said, I was happy to!

So, I learned how to do ‘proper’ sales pages.

I learned how to market the way the big girls were.

I learned how to sell like it actually fit within, well, the mould! Of how other people sold.

And, as best as I could, I made myself and my offerings start to manage the accepted ‘way things were meant to be done’.

You know what? I learned some really good shit along the way, doing this. Nothing wrong or bad about knowing how to do a sales page, or what the ‘typical’ way to effectively market is, or any of these things! Of course not.

But what I wasn’t strong enough to recognise back then, what I didn’t realise yet, at that point in my journey, and why the whole thing never quite sat right with me, is that the only REAL thing which matters, in your sales and marketing?

ARE YOU FEELING IT?

If you are FEELING it, and you share what you’re doing, and why, and how they get it, and so on, then no! You don’t need any sort of ‘proper’ sales or marketing process. You may CHOOSE to use it! But it’s optional.

Look at me – I’d made a TON of money already in my messy way! Doing things in a way that literally made the ‘real’ entrepreneurs laugh at me, think I was cute, shake their heads in woe! I had SEVERAL mentors through this era tell me that there is no way I could make it if I kept doing things this way.

The message was clear:

You’ve somehow ‘got away with it’ up til now. And now you need to fix that mess, quickly, before it all falls apart!

Maybe it makes sense, on the one hand, that cleaning and tightening up what I was doing would allow me to grow. And maybe in a way it did … eventually. It’s not as though I don’t incorporate various sales and marketing ‘standards’ into how I do business now. But the thing I had to learn back then, which I REALLY took my time to get to, before finally tearing down everything that ‘they’ had taught me to do, and going back to my messy made-up ‘me’ way, was this:

If my marketing doesn’t have the essence of ME in it?

It doesn’t have shit.