This is the build your life coaching business podcast where you can learn to make more money as a life coach. My name is BJ Butler, an ex corporate guy who helps life coaches with everything online business so that they can focus on coaching. Every episode helps you get more clients, make more money, and eliminate overwhelm. But if you don’t want to do it itself, contact me. Acting as your chief operations officer, I’ll lead a team to do it for you. And here we go. Welcome back. I am so excited that I get to be the one to tell you about the great offer conundrum.

Dun dun dun. The reason why I’m so excited to tell it to you is because the information that I’m about to talk about just doesn’t match what life coaches are doing today. And it’s really true for all online business owners. I’m talking about free offers and that we spend way more time talking about our paid offers and totally overlooking our free offers. A free offer is a lead magnet. I usually call it a lead magnet. It can be a mini course, downloadable pdf, free webinar, masterclass, whatever. It is something that educates your potential clients on everything that they need to know in order to hire you.

So if you have several offers, one of them is free, another one is a low priced offer, and one of them is a high priced offer such as your individual coaching program or a group program. It is all of ours natural inclination to go spend as much time developing the individual program or the group program and telling the whole world about it over and over again in all different ways and just totally overlooking the free offer. But in reality, no one will ever hear about your individual coaching program if they don’t first hear about your free offer. Let me explain. So first I’m going to talk about three facts about free offers. These are facts of the world. These can be proven in court. Number one is you spend more time offering and selling your free offers than you do your paid offers.

Marketing is developing relationships with other humans. Sure, often. And the way I teach is that we’re doing it through the computer, through video, through our voice, but in the end we are creating relationships. And you don’t just jump right to and this is how I can help you. You have to set the scene. You have to start with where they are and what problem they have right in front of their face. And you have to guide them along, pull them along to even get to the point where you can say, and this is how I help. And it’s important that you’re talking about your free offer a lot, and it’s important that you put a lot of time, or I shouldn’t say time, into your free offer, but that you’re pouring a lot of value into your free offer.

Because if your potential clients don’t think that the free offer is great, then they won’t think that your paid offer is going to be great. You could say it that the way you do one thing is the way you do everything, and people naturally think that way. So if a potential client is looking at your lead magnet or going through your mini course, they’re going to assume that your paid offer is going to be the same amount of quality, the same amount of value. So it just makes sense that unfortunately, I say unfortunately that you have to put in a lot of value into your free offer. I say unfortunately because it feels hard, because we’re not getting anything immediately for it, because we live in a society where we need immediate returns on our effort. And I’m exaggerating a little bit, but it would be nice to get paid for exactly the amount of work that we put into it. But in reality, the way it works, you put in value into the free offer and you collect value from it in terms of revenue, in terms of payments later on in the sales cycle. But that leads me right to the second fact about free offers.

And that’s free offers determine the value of the paid offer. And it’s for the exact same reason that I just said. People assume that the quality and the value that are in your free offer are also going to be in your paid offer. When your free offer is high value, people are going to pay more for your paid offer, for your coaching. And the third fact about free offers is why I call it a conundrum is because in reality, coaches spend the least amount of time and energy on their free offers because it feels like it’s free. So therefore we shouldn’t spend any time on it and we shouldn’t talk about it. But in reality you should. That’s how you end up having someone to talk to, someone to tell about your coaching.

Let me put it another way, in terms of the four stages of the sales process. The first stage is that they meet you. Somehow they hear about you on social from another person, somehow they hear about you. The second stage is that they receive some sort of free value from you. They could sign up for your newsletter. Just the information that you tell them in their newsletter can help them along. That provides value, and it’s free. Also, lead magnet any of your free offers that I’ve been talking about.

That is the second stage. They’re receiving free value. Number three, when they have the information that they need to learn if you are a good match for them, they’ll move along to the third stage, which is a free consult. You heard me say free, right? The third stage is another way of getting free value from you. They’re learning if you too are a good fit, and if you are, then you move on to the fourth stage, which is they’ll work with you. They hire you. So the first three of four stages are all free. Those are free offers.

My point is that we do actually spend most of our time promoting free offers. Promoting and creating free offers. So here’s the part that can help you right now understand how you can amplify the value of your free offer. This can be used whether you have a lead magnet out there, you can use it to find your blind spots, figure out what it’s missing, or if you’re going to create a new one. Use these questions, go through them and figure out how to make it best for your potential clients. Number one is what would inspire your potential clients for this one, think about the coaches that you follow. Think about the emails that you receive and the information that you receive on social or the videos and the podcast that you consume. What about them do you find inspiring? Use that feeling.

Remember that feeling when you’re creating your free offer. Question number two is, what keeps your potential clients from taking the next step with you? If you can answer this question, if you can incorporate the answer into your free offer, that’s going to help them move along in their customer journey. The second question is, what keeps your potential clients from taking the next step with you? You want to be able to answer this question in both the marketing of your free offer and also once they have the free offer, you want to be answering the question, well, what do they need to know in order to work with you? So it’s answering objections before they have even asked them, or perhaps they’ve even realized that they have them. Question number three is, what would truly add value for them? And this one gets easier with the more clients that you work with. At first you’re kind of guessing. You have an idea, you probably went through the same process or a very similar process to how you coached today and you know, the problems that you had beforehand and how you found relief or how you found improvement. So just think of ways that you can genuinely add value. And if you are coming at it from a place of really believing that you are adding value.

You will. You will add value. The fourth question is, what makes your offer unique or different? You can say that other coaches do this, but I do that. Something along the lines of normally you would hear it explained like this, but I am the only one that I’ve ever heard of that explains it this way. And I think it is so much simpler. But I know that we can help solve your problem if we work together. So for me, other coaches will teach you strategy. Another business coach can handle everything you need to know about email.

Another coach can handle everything you need to know about social ads. But I do it all. You only have to work with me, just one person. And I have relationships with experts who are amazing at what they do. For example, I’m pretty good at writing, but my copywriter, he works magic. It is amazing when you read his writing. You’re sitting there noding your head, yes, I want that. When my clients are considering hiring me, it’s like hiring a general contractor versus like say you’re doing construction on your house.

You could either hire the general contractor or you could hire the carpenter, the plumber, the electrician, the drywaller, the painter. You could hire them each one by one. And it’s really how much of your time do you want to put into it and how much expertise do you want to gather? Do you want to have to learn? I do do coaching. So if you do want to learn it, I can coach you through it. If you want to put that effort into running your business, I can coach them so that they can learn so much faster than just relying on trial and error. Because if you just rely on trial and error, you’re going to be at it for a while. And as you’re going through the learning curve, there’s a lot of mistakes that you’re going to make that I’ve already made and that I can help you sidestep, but you don’t have to learn it. I can create the sales pages, create the websites, create the emails, handle the automation so that my clients don’t have to.

And while I will never know enough about running online businesses because I will always be learning, I have learned so much in the last five years that I’ve been operating online businesses that I can’t even imagine why you would try to start one without leveraging all of the knowledge of an experienced online business owner. I made a lot of mistakes and you know what? I’m bragging about that and you don’t have to. So there, that’s my pitch that’s how I am different from other coaches. And lastly, question number five is what’s it worth? What is your free offer worth now? People are going to be paying $0, but what value are they going to be getting? Because think of it this way, if you think of it as a zero dollar thing, then you are probably not going to put as much effort into it and people are going to pick up on that. People are going to perceive it as a zero dollar thing and people don’t want zero dollar things. People want things with lots of value, things that are more exciting and worth a lot. The thoughts that need to be going through your head when you’re creating your offer is that you need to believe that it is worth a certain amount and you can come up with the amount in your head and you sell it like you’re selling it for that amount. So that when people get to the bottom of that landing page and they see that it’s free, they’re like, yes, slam dunk.

I want that because you just explained that they’re getting so much value and it’s going to be worth their minimal amount of time to grab that value from you. Okay, that’s it. On free offers. Whether you are updating your free offer or creating from scratch, go through these five questions. It will make it so much better. And make sure to spend enough. It’s not about time. Make sure that you’re putting enough value into your free offer that it is meeting the amount of value that you want to be providing so that your client moves along in their customer journey and ends up buying from you.

That’s it for today. I’ll talk to you next week.