Ray Higdon

And the way that you know if you are really adding value into the marketplace is to ask yourself:  Are you improving people’s education in their lives whether they purchase from you or not?

Ray Higdon

I’m ready.

Ray Higdon

What we found is there are usually two things that people have resistance around. We address that first because if we just teach “ Hey, here are the steps to build your brand and increase your online selling” and they have those resistant points, they just don’t move forward.

Ray Higdon

The two resistant points are:

• What do I talk about online?
• Why would someone listen to me?

The example we used is my example.

When I first started building my brand online and getting into online selling, I was lost and failing in real estate. I was in for foreclosure. I was dead broke and I hadn’t had success. I wasn’t successful in real estate, lost it all and got my butt kicked.

I didn’t focus on online selling. I just focused on one thing that is value. I focused on education. I did not focus on my resume. I focused on value of how I can bring value to the marketplace that I wanted to dominate which for the last seven years has been the home business niche.

The home business niche is a very competitive niche. But it’s something that we’ve been able to go from absolute zero. No results, no leads, no lists, no nothing to generating almost 4 million dollars last year in that niche through our online presence and online brand.

Ray Higdon

Number 1: Know that you don’t have to be a guru or the very best or have massive results to start building your brand online, and start providing value.

Number 2 : When it comes to what to talk about, you need to take it from internally focused and focus on your audience.

• Who is it that you want to attract to you?
• What problems do they have?
• What solutions do they need?
• How can you help them?

Ray Higdon

One of the easiest acronyms for people to remember for online selling, I know a lot of different people have quoted me on this; the acronym is ILT – Invest, Learn and Teach.

You invest your time and possibly money to learn something and then you teach it. If you want to do online selling you need to invest and learn, and then of course teach.

Most entrepreneurs you’ll meet, they do the I and L. They buy courses, books, attend seminars and listen to interviews just like this. They learn stuff but they don’t go and teach it.

Ray Higdon

And so, we just suggest as your consuming valuable information, if it’s relevant of course to the target market that you’re trying to attract, then take your notes. Take the education you’re getting and transform/translate into online content that will attract people to you.

That’s what we’ve been doing. We’ve done 1,800 blog posts, 700 podcasts, 200s periscopes. We put a lot of free content to attract people to us. That’s how we’ve built an email list of 160,000 people. That’s how we’ve moved people through our ascension path of online selling and selling different products and moving them into our high ticket mastermind programs. Doing this is a very smart way to do online selling, and it works for offline selling too.

That would be the first step is get over those first two resistant/hurdle points.

Ray Higdon

I’ve had a person answer a very simple question that I’ve found many entrepreneurs haven’t answered. And that is “What do they want?”

Most entrepreneurs are working hard and they’re progressing towards something but they haven’t identified what it is they want. What is it that you want? Online selling and profits aren’t enough.

What kind of lifestyle do you want? What kind of people do you want around you? How do you want to spend your day? And focusing on what is it that you want?

From there, you start to identify – What is it that you like to do that solves the problems of your target market?

For example, I love coaching the right people. That doesn’t mean I’ll take or accept all the clients. That’s not what we do. We’ve done that in the past. That’s not what I wanted to do.

Ray Higdon

What I wanted to do is spend my personal time with A players. We structured an ascension path to get those A players to us through a series of product purchases, events, and things of that nature.

I would look at if an entrepreneur says “Hey, I’m ready to go. I believe in what I’m talking about. I’m past those hurdles that we discussed”.

Then, I’ll ask: What is it that you want? At the end of the day what is your end goal? Is it to bring on coaching clients? Is it to provide your services? Is it to Bring on fortune 500 companies and be a consultant to them? What is it that you want?

And then, let’s create profit points between free content and exactly what you want. And so, we have products ranging from $7 all the way up to our $54,000 masterminds. We do 40-70 transactions every single day on our blog of those different products.

We teach people to find: what is it that you want? Let’s design that out, what is the perfect world look like? And that may start with like a test trial or some kind of a smaller program before they move into a larger program. We teach our clients and like to have our online selling with an ascension plan.

Ray Higdon

And then how do we create profit points in between? Sometimes it involves affiliates, sometimes that involves smaller products and things of that nature.

But how do you serve your marketplace, your target market at the highest level and the most profitable way? Answer this and serving your market, online selling, and having an online brand becomes easier.

Ray Higdon

I’m glad you brought that up.

I’m not the perfect logo guy. In fact, I remember back in 2012, I was out in an event. In our profession, we’re known for how often we blog and things like that. I remember the guy on stage said “Hey guys, you should be blogging. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just look at Ray’s blog, look how ugly it is?

Ray Higdon

My first reaction was, “Way a minute, it’s ugly?” Because I’m clueless when it comes to free stuff. But that year we did 700,000 with the blog.

Ray Higdon

You don’t have to have everything perfect. You don’t have to have everything GQ. Now, that isn’t a reason to not have nice looking stuff or not have professional photos. But I’ve found there are many people out there that they spend thousands and thousands of dollars on creating fancy facade and very amazing image but there is no meat on the bone and there is no content.

I like my brand being represented with value. I like my brand being represented with “You put out so much content. You out teach all the competition.”

Ray Higdon

That’s when I’m talking brand and online selling. I’m talking about that kind of brand.

As far of your personal preferences on how great of a dress you wear, or how awesome the logo is or things of that nature, that’s great and that does help sales. But what trumps all that stuff in my opinion and then the opinion of a lot of my clients is value. It’s education.

In the book, Rework by Jason Fried, one of the founders of Basecamp, he said that if you can out teach your competition you’ll win. It was such a powerful way to phrase things that we’ve been thinking for years but no one wants to hear that stuff.

If you out teach your competition, you will build a larger audience than your competition even if they have fancier logos.

Ray Higdon

You look at how much education marketing your competition is doing. How much value marketing is your competition putting out?

If I wanted to dominate plumbing. Let’s just say, “You know what, I’m really into plumbing”. Well, I would be creating daily videos all about plumbing.

What are the common problems that people have before they call a plumber? What are the different questions people have around the whole plumbing deal? What happens when this happens?

Ray Higdon

No matter what niche I would go into if I want it to dominate, I would look at; What are the problems, questions, struggles, or common talking points around that niche? And I would have online content that solves all those different problems.

Lead with value, lead with education. Most people lead with “We’re having a sale today!” or “20% off today!” and it’s not valuable.

Ray Higdon

The way that you know if you’re adding value into the marketplace is ask yourself,

Are you improving people’s education and their lives whether they purchase from you or not?

Ray Higdon

And an important distinction there is we’ve built an email list of a 160,000 people and as of today maybe 28,000 have actually purchased something. Some of them have made purchases of $200,000 worth. Some buyers are bigger buyers than others but we look at it on the other side that means a 130,000 haven’t bought anything. But guess what;

Ray Higdon

And a lot of times, they share our stuff  and it attracts a lot of buyers to us and makes online selling a whole word easier.

I have some people who have been in my list for years, never bought anything. But they’ve shared our stuff with people who became some of our top clients. That’s what I mean by out teach your competition. It’s how much education are you putting out there.

Ray Higdon

Like interviews like this. You’re rolling these interviews out there to add value to the marketplace, to attract people to you. You’re adding value to the marketplace whether someone buys something or not. That’s something powerful. In my opinion, that’s how you dominate any niche in these kind of times that we’re in.

Ray Higdon

Yup, it’s a great question. It is. And we get that question a lot.

Marie Smith said a while back, “Give away what people want and sell them what they actually need.”

Ray Higdon

Another way that I’ve heard it said is:

Ray Higdon

In my opinion, the right mix is somewhere in between there. I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but it’s important to find that balance if you’re interested in online selling.

The majority of our videos are from anywhere from 3-5 minutes teaching a single topic in an energetic powerful way and we just ask ourselves, “Was someone better off by watching this?” If they read the headline and they were interested in that particular thing, then, the answer is yes.

Ray Higdon

Now, in that video we’ll have a call to action, which 98% of the time we make sure to have a call to action. We like to send people to our website. Using a call to action makes your viewer go to your website, and then online selling is simplified. You’ve got a higher quality lead by having that video and the call to action. That will bring them into our list which has other things to sell.

We’ll do a webinar that’s usually an hour or maybe a little bit longer. We teach in that webinar and we always have something to offer. And so, we ask ourselves if someone comes on this webinar, “Will they learn something whether they buy or not?” And we have to be able to answer ‘yes’ to that or we just don’t do it. We like to think of online selling as bring value first, then sell. Of course, there’s a balance there.

Ray Higdon

One thing that it’s important to understand with online selling is that you need to feel good about what it is that you’re selling. I know without a shadow of a doubt, the products that I bring to the marketplace help people out. I know it for sure. And we get testimonials every single day. We talked to people who have implemented it and it worked for them so we know it.

If you want to be online selling your services and products, you have to feel good about what you offer. So, if I know that what I’m selling is worth way more than what we’re charging for, then it becomes very simple. We need to sell more because not many people will totally change their life from watching a 4-minute blog video. They’ll get improvement. But they change their life when they’re brought around the campfire. And they are around for something for a longer period of time such as an accountability program, coaching program or even a course. With a course that they can rewind, watch again, etc. and so forth. It is a balance.

Ray Higdon

Just think about this. We’ve done almost 1800 blog posts, over 600-700 podcasts, 200 periscopes. And our income has almost doubled every single year for the last four years. We give away the farm but our clients are just coming to us more and more.

I wouldn’t worry so much about teaching too much. If you’re interested in seriously doing online selling, then keep adding value to the marketplace. A course is just your opportunity to dive deeper, to go into more explanation, to cover the obstacles that they may face versus a more cosmetic “Here’s how to do something” in a shortened version.

Ray Higdon

Well, I failed English. In high school, I took 5 years to finish because I failed English 4. And I never finished college. You don’t have to be a genius to do all this stuff, and get good at online selling that’s for sure.

Ray Higdon

Yeah, for sure.

Ray Higdon

People are looking for real. We live in a world where there are many people out there that aren’t providing value, that people are kind of cynical and sceptical of. That’s why you have to give them stuff first. Online selling is about giving and adding value first. You got to give them education first before you ask for anything.

As far as YouTube, I have a funny history with YouTube. I had a channel of 20,000 subscribers, millions of views, and I had haters come after it. I had a 127 flags in four minutes and it got shot down and we’ve appealed to YouTube a couple of times and I just said “Screw it”. I just stopped appealing. We got shot down which is scary and sad because you can literally go on fiverr and find flagging jobs which is terrible. We got booted from YouTube.

Ray Higdon

Honestly, it’s tough because I’m trying to raise awareness so that YouTube notices and changes their policies because clearly I didn’t get a 127 flags in four minutes when I didn’t have any 5 years before. It just makes no sense.

I was terrified when that happened so I said “Oh my God, my leads, everything is going like totally going to cubes”.

Ray Higdon

We went to Wistia and what’s good about it is there is no worry about that. There is no community flagging or anything like that. That’s also what’s bad about it and is a charge service. We now pay to host our videos in Wistia. We got a lot of traction.

I would say that the two biggest places we increase our online selling is from my Facebook page. We have some 160,000 fans who are very active. So I do get a lot of traction from posting my blogs in there, and getting them into my list and getting them over to my blog.

Ray Higdon

The other thing is Periscope. We have 93,000 followers on Periscope, 3.4 million hearts. We do get a lot of attraction from those two places. Those are our probably our two biggest and of course the traffic that we control which is our email lists.

Ray Higdon

Create content that solves the problems of your target market and do it over and over again.

And in the beginning, we didn’t know how to exactly monetize and do online selling. So we would just drop links here and there. We’ve since gotten much better at that. We now do events. We teach people how to run events as well.

Ray Higdon

Doing your own events is one of the biggest branding moves you can make because most people are terrified of running their own events.

We did an event this past August, had about 300 people there from all over the world; from Norway, Serbia, Malaysia, Singapore. We did $1.1 million dollars’ worth of sales in coaching and masterminds in three days. We first sold the event online, people came and then we sold in person. We’ve been able to leverage the power of events.

Ray Higdon

My suggestion is two things to think about when you’re thinking about a brand:

1. Value

What value are you bringing into the market place?

Just having beautiful pictures of you on a dock or something like that, that’s cool. Have it. It’s awesome but at the end of the day, how are you impacting your audience, your target market – that marketplace? How are you impacting them in a positive manner?

Sarah Heart is a great example. Here, she is teaching stuff. I guarantee you no matter how good you are, you’re always going to have people that don’t buy. That’s part of online selling. However they still have value. And if you’re adding value, that’s how you know that you’re doing the right thing for your brand.

Are you providing value whether someone is a client or student or not? Provide that value and I have people that have ended up becoming some of our top clients that just consume our free content for 6 months. So think about value. But also think about monetization.

Ray Higdon

2. Monetization

I just look at our business as we have to be an example of a profitable business that solves problems.

And so, you do need to think about monetization so you can do online selling. It’s not just about looking pretty and providing lots of value. It is about monetizing.

How can you more deeply impact your target market? How can you take them from struggle to success? How can you take them through the lessons that you’ve learned in a profitable way? That fits around your lifestyle in a way that you want to live your life.

Ray Higdon

I’m not the anti-pretty picture guy. I’m just saying there are a lot of people with beautiful pictures with hardly any content. If that’s the case I know online selling will be much harder for these people. That is not a winning combination in my opinion.

Ray Higdon

Thank you so much. I’m honored to be here.