Hello from Vancouver

February 05, 2024 | [Read Online]( Happy Monday from here in Vancouver. This is [Yaro](, writing you from a new email newsletter platform called [Beehiiv]( (affiliate link). I made the switch away from my previous email and product selling platform [Systeme]( (affiliate link) because my online coaching business has become very simplified in the last few years. I no longer sell multiple products or operate multiple email funnels. I have this email newsletter and my blog, so I decided to make the switch to a new platform that’s really just about newsletters — [Beehiiv](. It can get very confusing when you decide on what digital platform to use to sell your products and run your email lists. You have shopping cart systems, email systems, course/product delivery platforms and all-in-one systems that do some or all of these things combined. All of the products I created in the last two decades, including my flagship course Blog Mastermind 2.0, all moved into my one membership — The Laptop Lifestyle Academy. This means I only have one product sell, which I only open once a year. It’s a wonderfully simple system, but I should be honest with you — I barely make any money from my coaching business anymore, at least compared to the past. The reason is straight forward. I stopped growing my audience in the space I was in. No new audience means no new customers. Instead I’ve been growing [InboxDone.com](, which I am excited to say is now the most successful company I have ever had, at least by total revenue generated. Can You Still Make Money Coaching? To be clear, my coaching business declined because I stopped working on it. I’d made a very good income for 15 years from it, as have many of my past clients and members who sell digital products and coaching. Some are still active, some like me, have moved on to different businesses. You might be thinking the online market for coaching and selling courses and membership sites has become extremely crowded, thus it’s hard to compete. That’s true. You certainly have to reach a certain minimum standard, especially in your marketing, in order to build an audience and convert customers. Yet I’d argue the opportunity is even greater now than when I started simply because of how large the Internet has become and how much more acceptable it is to pay for services and education online. People pay for therapy, personal training, dating advice, tutoring, and of course business advice, and it’s just normal. Accepted. When I started it was not common that someone had purchased an online course. Today that’s just how you learn things. But… How Do You Stand Out? Here’s the most important thing: You need a clear value proposition to a specific audience. Then, as it has always been, you need to reach enough people in your specific audience and build trust with them, in order to make sales. The fundamentals haven’t changed. All that has changed is how well you have to execute those fundamentals. I recently began coaching someone one-on-one. This person has a history of using Facebook live broadcasts to reach people. Over time, quite randomly, people would contact her and ask for help. Some became coaching clients. This is a good example of something working, but without any consistency or reliability. I told my client that her main goal going forward is to grow her email list. Doing Facebook live broadcasts can certainly still be a part of this, but during those broadcasts she better be inviting people back on to her email list. This gives her control. This gives her the option to reach people with an email and gauge results using metrics. Facebook lives are powerful, but unpredictable and certainly not in your control. They are one way to cast a net, but if you want to keep eating fish every day, you need a system that you control. Predictable Reliable Revenue At the moment I’m all about building systems to return predictable and reliable revenue. My business sells a recurring subscription product, which means our revenue can be reasonably predictable. However, we are very much reliant on maintaining growth over churn. If more clients quit our service (churn) than join each month, then we go backwards. Not good. My co-founder (and the team she leads) is in charge of client satisfaction. Besides passing on ideas and spotting potential issues now and then, I’m not really responsible for decreasing churn. This leaves me to focus on marketing and sales. Growth. My job is to bring in more new customers each month, and ideally, optimize our marketing and selling system so that we can rely on a certain level of steadily improving performance every month. What’s been especially challenging about this for me, compared to my coaching and blogging business, is learning NOT to rely on Google organic traffic as the main source of new customers. For most of my blogging and coaching years, I was able to use the formula you probably know well if you’ve studied my training programs - Blog content > email sequence > digital product The blog content attracts people from Google search results. Some of them join my email list, receive more valuable content, then purchase my online course. You can still catch the replay recording of my [Platform Launch Plan]( workshop or read my [Blog Profits Blueprint]( if this is new to you. With my current business, this model doesn’t work. There simply isn’t enough organic search results in the narrow niche we operate in. If we expand the niche a little, then the competition becomes too fierce and we have no chance of ranking high enough. That’s not to say we don’t go after organic Google search results. We’ve had a content strategy from day one and many customers come from an organic Google search. However, it’s not enough. To succeed and thrive I’ve had to dive into new marketing channels. It’s been hard. I’ve failed a lot and I’m still not where I want us to be. But we have generated over $3 million in sales, so it is working. I’d like to write more to you about marketing and sales since this is very much where I have been focused for the last few years. No customers means no business, so marketing is THE critical function, yet also one of the most difficult to control. I’ll have much more to say on this in future newsletters, but for now, I’m signing off to begin my work week. Have a great week! Yaro [yaro.blog]( yaro@yaro.blog P.S. I appreciate you opening this email and moving it into your primary tab if you use Gmail. Google and Yahoo are making it a lot harder to reach the inbox of their users, so the more you can do to say you want this newsletter from me, the better. 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