The Fool-Proof Way To Come Up With Your First Offer

One of the things I have found as I work with people in those early phases of their online business (as in… starting from scratch) is….

A confusion about how to come up with an offer.

How do you know what people will want? What will they buy?

And the thing is… it is much more difficult to do that when you barely have any audience yet. That phase of starting from scratch and coming up with your first real offer is a bit daunting. I know.

But, it shouldn’t be.

In fact, those initial stages of business actually make things somewhat easy in some aspects. That’s because you don’t have a track record yet. You can literally shift on a dime.

So, the process I take people through is essentially 4 phases. Here they are in a nutshell…

1. Invent an offer out of thin air that you think people might want. Just make your best guess.
2. Test it out (after a lead magnet opt-in).
3. Get in touch with the people who don’t buy directly and talk to them.
4. Based on what you have learned, adjust your original offer and re-try.

See, it’s pretty simple.

You can create an offer out of thin air here. Don’t build a product yet. Just come up with a rough outline of one. And put an offer together for it. You could also offer a service, coaching, a live class, a live workshop series, etc.

That initial offer is a starting point. It’s your hypothesis. I mean, you basically made the thing up based on your best guesses of what your market might want.

And here’s the thing… you don’t have to stress out about whether it will sell or not. It’s fine if it doesn’t! That becomes clear as you continue.

So, with this initial offer in place, you present it to your market. First, you offer up a lead magnet to get the opt-in. Then, after the opt-in, you present your offer.

You present this to whoever you can reach in your market. It doesn’t matter if you have a tiny email list. Even if there’s just 10 people on there, present it to those 10 people. Do the same in any social media groups. Anywhere you can get it out there. And yes, you should try out a little paid traffic to present that lead magnet to the right people.

Any money invested into paid traffic at this stage will definitely be worth it and radically speed up the process.

After a handful of people have gone through this little funnel of your’s, you’re very likely going to have some email subscribers now. You may or may not have any sales. Either way, it’s fine. If somebody bought your offer – sweet! If not, here’s what you do…

Go to your email list and segment the people who did NOT buy. If that’s everybody, so be it.

Then, you email each one of them. Preferably, email them one by one and do so personally. You want this to be a personal conversation, not something where they feel they’re getting a mass email.

In that email, your goal is to schedule a quick conversation with them. Your email is light on the touch – because you’re not trying to sell them anything at all. You’re just looking to learn what their challenges are and how you can best assist.

Once you have them on that phone call (or Skype, or Zoom or whatever)… then that is your sole focus. You just want to learn more about their situation, who they are, their goals. And, of course, what kinds of solutions they would MOST want.

Ideally, you would record this conversation.

Pay attention to the language, the emotion. Take notes.

Do this maybe 5 times, but the more the better. 5 different people.

Then, when you’re done, you sit back and go through what you have learned. Your job now is to re-visit that original offer you came up with. And now with what you now know about what your market needs and wants, you adjust (or scrap and redo) your offer to best fit them.

You design the offer to fit your market. You sit down and come up with the right mix of things to place into that offer that is going to match what they just told you they really want. You do so as exactly as you possibly can.

Then…

Present the new offer and repeat the process.

Now, does it take a little time to do this? Yes.

Might it take you out of your comfort zone just a bit? Yes. I mean, you’re actually going to have to talk to strangers here. 🙂 But, if you thought you would be able to make a great business just by blogging at them and never talking to them, you were in a dreamworld.

This eliminates the guesswork.

It isn’t difficult to do.