In a cluttered market, these are 17 ideas to save your business that you can outsource, and build a magnetic brand while you’re at it.
Whether you’re a startup that’s fresh on the scene, or have a well established brand, running a business takes a ton of grit and resilience… maybe now more than ever.
Whether you’re a startup that’s fresh on the scene, or have a well established brand, running a business takes a ton of grit and resilience… maybe now more than ever.
In a cluttered market where customers see 5,000 ads a day, it takes a lot of connection and thinking outside the box to capture attention, showcase value and make your brand magnetic.
It takes creativity and heart.
And that’s on top of everything else there is to think about if you’re a coach, consultant or professional service provider.
Things like:
Building a website…
Scheduling automated emails to nurture your list…
Setting up automatic appointment setting, so your clients can book straight away…
And building the tech required to run a modern day business.
We get it.
If you’re a business owner, there’s a lot to handle… in fact you deserve a cake in your honour (with rainbow sprinkles and your name piped in chocolate across the top 🙂
But instead of cake, we wanted to give you something better. A rescue remedy of sorts.
It’s a list of 17 essential things for building a successful, magnetic, thriving and resilient business.
We’ve basically looked at everything our Founder Grace did to grow her first business to 8-figures from scratch…
And we’ve cherry picked the most essential, money-moving tasks that every coach, consultant and service provider should implement to start creating a hands-free business that leverages her Genius Zone…
(That unique combination of talent, insight and experience that no one else has.)
Because here’s the thing.
Unless you implement these things, you won’t ever carve out the edge or the time you need to stand out in a saturated market.
The reason we know this is because we’ve spent years working with thousands of coaches and consultants, helping them grow their business to 6 and 7 figures
And in that time we’ve seen what works and what doesn’t
Basically, if you don’t take the right steps in your business and set it up correctly…
Not only will you run yourself ragged doing everything manually and get stuck in tasks that don’t make you income…
But you’ll be setting yourself up to fail – just like the 97% of businesses that do 🙁
It’s a sad and devastating fact, but it is avoidable. And the solution is in this list.
The best part is that you don’t even have to implement these tasks yourself.
At Outourced Doers, you can delegate all of these things to a skilled virtual assistant – or “Doer” who we’ve trained up in over 150 business-essential tasks to get them done just like Grace does.
It’s the shortest, sharpest and most direct way to take them off your plate, so you can spend your time on the things you love and are gifted at – like creating systems and courses packed with value to get your clients results.
So here we go.
Here are the 17 Ideas You Can Outsource To Save Your Business
1. Create a funnel to start turning leads into customers
A funnel is basically a flow, or a series of steps that people move through from first hearing about your business… to becoming clients.
So rather than advertising, answering all the enquiries and letting clients fall through the cracks, a funnel lets you be more predictable and more automated when growing your business as it automatically fires off all the steps.
At Outsourced Doers, we love to use ClickFunnels to create these flows, just like our Founder Grace does.
The starting point of a funnel is usually clicking on a Facebook ad or visiting a website…
And entering an email on a landing page or a pop-up to download a free, value-packed resource (your lead magnet).
For example, if you specialise in marketing for real estate agents, your lead magnet might be a checklist of the 5 top marketing tips to become the #1 real estate agency online.
If you’re selling selling a lower-ticket item like a course for $250, you could have a lead magnet-to-order form funnel… where, while they’re waiting for their lead magnet to download, you could take them to a sales letter page, where they can click a button at the end to purchase your course… which then takes them to an order form.
This is just one of the many different types of funnels that our Founder, Grace uses.
If they don’t decide to purchase on the spot, you’ve captured their email so you can keep showcasing value and building trust away from the clutter of Facebook.
2. Outsource your lead magnet to turn it into a high-converting design.
Lead magnets are basically free, value-packed resources, in the form of a PDF, that show your dream client how to do something from A-Z in a few simple steps.
This 1.) helps them accomplish something, 2.) instills confidence in themselves and hope in a solution, 3.) establishes credibility and trust in your brand.
From years of creating and testing lead magnets, we’ve found there’s a formula to turn them into honeypots.
The key is not revealing too much, so they’re left craving more.
If you’ve identified 5 steps that your target client has to take to get them from where they are to where they want to be…
Your lead magnet could show them how to do step 1.
Then once they download that lead magnet, you can pitch them steps 2-5 in the form of a digital course or coaching to get them to where they want to be.
Instead of learning graphic design and researching layouts… you can simply outsource your lead magnet to a skilled Doer who we’ve trained up in the latest high-converting designs.
3. Get your social media on point
From years of running social media, we have 3 tips.
- Pick several topics or “buckets” in your niche and create content for each of them.
- Consider what questions your clients are asking the most and answer them…
- And spend at least 20 minutes a few times a week socialising.
What you don’t want to spend your time stuck in is these time-consuming (but still essential) tasks:
- Researching and creating hashtags…
- Sourcing royalty-free imagery…
- Collating quotes and researching ideas…
- Scheduling (we recommend using a scheduling platform like Planoly)…
- Responding to and moderating comments.
What you don’t want to spend your time stuck in is these time-consuming (but still essential) tasks:
4. Grow your email list
Growing your email list is one of the most important tasks you can do in your business.
That’s because the average reach of a Facebook post is just 2%, while email reaches 90% of intended recipients’ inboxes.
Unlike your Facebook followers, you actually own that list too – if Facebook were to hypothetically crash, at least you could still reach your email subscribers.
That’s why you should place opt-ins in as many places as you can.
But once you’ve piqued their interest enough to subscribe, the key is to nurture them with emails to keep growing credibility and trust.
At The Doers Way, Grace calls this initial sequence the “Likeable Lady Nurture”… it basically makes you relatable to your niche as a person!
Then down the track, you’ll want to keep showcasing value and eventually offer them your products (in a completely value-packed, non-salesy way off course :-).
These nurtures require emails… but the last place where you want to be spending your precious time is creating automated sequences and scheduling them in.
Scheduling emails is a task that you can easily outsource to one of our trained up, skilled up Doers – we personally love scheduling in platforms like Infusionsoft, Active Campaign and MailChimp to nurture subscribers from the moment they opt in.
5. Get your blogs formatted, categorised and uploaded into WordPress… and design sidebars and banners
Formatting blogs by bolding, underlining and italicising text (just like what you see on this page) makes them easier to read and keeps visitors engaged and on the page for longer.
You might also want to place clear opt-ins and call to actions in the shape of sidebars and banners…
BUT…
This isn’t the most valuable way to spend your time as a female entrepreneur.
Ideally you want to outsource it to someone who’s already skilled in editing and designing… so they can tick it off for you in a fraction of the time while you work on high-value tasks.
6. Get on top of Facebook ads
1.3 billion daily active users… that makes Facebook a deep, rich pond of dream clients and capturing them starts with an irresistible offer and a well-crafted ad.
However there’s a bunch of other details in Facebook ads that you won’t want to miss.
Things like:
- Setting up Facebook Business Manager;
- Checking and replying to Facebook ads comments;
- Collating a daily Facebook tracking spreadsheet;
- And before you do any of this… creating your Facebook page and designing your cover image.
Tick all of this faster with your very own Outsourced Doer.
7. Look at your value ladder – a book is a great entry point and you can outsource design
A value-ladder is all the different entry points that your customers can access your services through.
It might start at a free lead magnet, then progresses into higher-value items at incremental price-points.
A well-crafted value-ladder means that people can access you at a range of price points – because when they first subscribe, they might not be ready to purchase 1-to-1 coaching… their commitment could look more like downloading a free checklist or spending $20 on an ebook.
An e-book is a great, low-cost entry point that you can price anywhere from $20 to $120.
You might want to design a complementing workbook and bundle it up at a $50 – $150 price point.
If you’ve written an ebook, you can outsource the cover design and layout so you can jump to the next strategic task.
8. Stop spending time in your inbox
Have you ever poured yourself a coffee and opened up your email at 8am…
Only to look up at the clock and see it was 1pm?
Mornings are the most valuable time when you should be putting your precious energy into high-value tasks like creating a course to make you recurring sales…
Writing an ebook to attract new leads…
Developing a new system to fix a pain point your market is facing…
Or coaching or consulting a client at your deserved hourly rate.
Replying to emails isn’t one of those tasks.
Instead, we recommend blocking out 1-2 hours in your calendar a day and strictly using those times to send and reply to emails.
Tip: If you’re likely to get someone off side for not replying instantly, set up automatic replies and add a disclaimer that you’re checking your inbox twice daily, and will reply in due course… and add a mobile or office number in case of emergency.
Setting up canned responses in Gmail is another time-saving approach, especially if you’re emailing the same information and answering the same questions often.
We personally love to use Helpscout for emails, which you can connect to a Gmail account, and where if you have a team, a VA or assistant can allocate emails to the right person – so you only see what you have to.
9. Level up appointment setting
Having automated appointments set up makes it super convenient for leads or clients to lock in a time on the spot.
If they can’t, they’ll have to wait to call during business hours the next day, at which point they could put it in the too hard basket, move to the next company, or it could simply fall off their radar.
This is why automated appointment setting is so important.
Many coaches, consultants and professional service providers have automated appointments setup on their website and in their funnels, particularly if they’re selling a higher-ticket offer like 1:1 coaching.
At Outsourced Does, we love setting up calendars in Acuity, Calendly and ScheduleOne to make booking quick, simple and convenient.
10. Tidy up your accounts and automate invoices and late payments
If you’re a busy business owner, the last place where you want to be spending time is accounts.
When it comes to sending invoices and chasing late payments, we recommend scheduling automated emails from your accounting software like Xero to do that dirty work.
On top of this, we recommend having a VA to snapshot, scan and file receipts electronically, manually charge cards that fail and delete any duplicate invoices in your CRM platform to make your life easier come tax time.
11. Setup stripe payments
On the topic of automating your business, we recommend setting up Stripe so you can receive payments over the internet from anywhere in the world.
This means that if a customer wants to purchase anything, you’re set up to automatically take their credit card details and process their payment straight into your bank account.
Our VAs can connect Stripe with your CRM (including MailChimp, ActiveCampaign and Infusionsoft)… change purchases for a customer if they’ve accidentally purchased the wrong item… and manage the whole payment process from start to finish.
12. Edit your videos to get them launched faster
Don’t spend time stuck in Adobe Premiere Pro editing your videos… simply list the edits and email them off to your Doer to get your content launched faster.
13. Create a stunning online course portal
Taking years of experience and compressing it into an online course that your clients can access 24/7 is one of the fastest ways to start scaling your business…
But you can’t do that unless you create an online course portal where your clients can login to access all the content.
And here’s the thing… there’s so many tasks to tick when setting up your portal. Tasks like:
Setting up a new sub-domain
Designing PDFs and worksheets and compressing them…
Uploading worksheets to your course portal and adding in buttons…
Embedding videos in your portal…Setting up your course, modules and lessons…
Designing and uploading each of the module tiles…
And setting up a ClickFunnels membership portal…
We’ve trained our Doers up to create stunning course portals in LearnDash and take these tasks off your plate… so you can simply supply all the content.
14. Manage your Facebook Groups
Creating a Facebook Group to package up with your course is a great way to increase perceived value and charge at a higher price point for relatively low input.
Your Facebook Group is a place where you can post additional tips, tricks and information plus answer any questions to give your students direct access to you.
At the Doers Way, we’ve also successfully used Facebook Groups to run ‘5-Day Challenges’ that have completely transformed the way that we sell our programs.
The premise is offering a ‘The premise is offering a’ from Day 1 – 4 to help students overcome a specific pain point and pour on the value… then pitching a product related to those challenges on day 5.
While Facebook Groups can really level up your offering and pitch, you’ll want help managing your Facebook Group – specifically creating it, designing and uploading the banner, approving requests, posting content and posting encouraging comments to welcome new members in and keep them inspired.
15. Organise your CRM
Your CRM – or customer relationship manager – is where all your subscribers’ and customers’ details live.
We personally love MailChimp, Active Campaign and Infusionsoft.
Your CRM is a core part of communicating to your email list because it basically lets you separate the contacts who’ve purchased from the contacts who haven’t as ultimately you’ll want to communicate differently to these two segments.
Generally the more you pay, the more sophisticated the CRM is and lets you get super niche in the way you segment your list.
Like scheduling emails, it’s et another place you don’t want to get stuck in.
Importing new contacts, merging duplicate contacts and keeping your database clean is all essential for communicating well and keeping a well-sorted list, and ideally this is another task you want to outsource.
16. Start creating surveys and forms
Surveys and forms are a great place to gather feedback, insight and pre-consult information to cater better to your market and hit the ground running with clients.
We use Typeform to send all kinds of surveys and forms to our clients, but like everything in business, they take time.
We recommend writing the questions and outsourcing the build.
17. Live calls
Live calls are a core component of coaching and consulting in a digital world, and make a great bonus or add-on to online courses. When it comes to live calls we recommend outsourcing tasks like generating Zoom links, transcribing live calls and downloading and uploading Zoom live call recordings so you can send them to contacts who couldn’t make it.
Conclusion
So that’s it! These are 17 things our Founder – Grace did to start attracting more clients and more growth…
And they will carve out the edge and the time that you need to stand out in a cluttered market.
The bonus is that all of these tasks are outsourceable… so you don’t have to spend your time stuck in the nitty gritty and the tech that’s part and parcel of running a sophisticated, coaching, consulting or professional service-based business.
Instead, you can JUST START whatever it is your sights are set on to take your business to the next level…
Whether that’s creating a course and filling it with eager students…
Starting a podcast to showcase value and strengthen your brand…
Creating a new system that takes your clients out of their deepest pain…
Or putting your Genius Zone into action through 1:1 coaching.
In addition to saving your business… deleting these tasks will free up your time to do only the things you love and are good at.
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