Ep #96: Selling with Copy

Welcome to the Make Money as a Life Coach® podcast, where sales expert and master coach Stacey Boehman teaches you how to make your first 2K, 20K, and 200K using her proven formula.

Hi coach lovies, how y’all doing today? I heard that you are very sad that I don’t call you my lovies anymore. You’re still my lovies. There was a whole post about it in 2K. Everybody’s speculation about why I don’t call you all my lovies anymore.

Listen, of all of the theories that were posted, one of them was that I’ve grown up a little bit. That might be true, but let me just tell y’all, I think I told you guys once before that lovies is my nickname for Bear and Neil. And then we got miss Bella Beans.

And although we love Bear very much, Bella Beans needs lots of attention and energy, and she doesn’t just need it, she demands it on a regular basis. Bear is so sweet. He does not get jealous at all and actually, I love what he does.

He’s like, I’m totally good if you give her all the attention, and when I do need attention, I’m just going to come take it. I’m just going to come up with her and wag my tail and say love me too. But a lot of our crazy dog parent energy goes to Bella Beans now in her puppy stage, and we have different nicknames for her.

So I could start calling y’all my sweets. That’s what we call Bella. Bella, Bella Beans, B Beans, we have all the nicknames for Bella. Most often, it’s sweets. I don’t know why lovies didn’t transfer over to her, but it’s sweets for Bella. So that’s probably why it kind of phased out.

I know, there was lots of speculation about it, but it’s really just about the nicknames. Actually, it’s really sad too. I was telling Neil the other day, he used to have a couple nicknames for me and now he doesn’t call me that either. I stopped getting – it made me think about it when I saw the post in 2K that I don’t call you all my lovies anymore.

I was like, oh wait, I don’t get my nicknames from Neil as much anymore either. So all of the attention, even my love for you all is just all getting directed to Ms. Beans. I still love you all.

So what’s going on coaches? I do think coaches is like – I’ll mix it in. You’re my coach lovies. How about that? Alright, what is going on with you guys? Are you ready? We’re going to talk about selling with copy. I know you guys have been dying to hear about copy.

It’s like you guys are just – it’s like a frenzy any time I talk about it. I’m going to have so much fun with this episode. Okay, so let’s just dive in. So here’s what happens a lot with copy. A lot of you start obsessing about it too soon. You give it too much weight and responsibility for creating your R line, your result that you’re trying to create, for creating money.

Especially when you start thinking about it too soon. And you try, because you think it has so much weight, you try and learn some perfect formula, or you believe there is some perfect formula out there, like there’s this perfect structure that you have to study and find.

And overall, above all of those things, most often your brain is not on the right track when writing to your people to begin with. So for all of these reasons, I don’t have you study in foundational selling, when you’re first learning how to sell and make your money.

Your brain only has a certain amount of capacity. Even in my 200K mastermind, I teach them everything about having a 200K business, really, having a two-million-dollar business, what they will learn from 200K to two million. I teach them all of that in advanced selling at the three-day event.

But then I have them choose three personal focuses for the six months. Three essentials. We call them the three essentials because your brain, you don’t want to overload it, trying to improve everything all at once at the same time and learn all of the things. I think a lot of you guys try to do that.

Instead of just focusing on your first 2K, on meeting people, telling them you’re a life coach, making offers to help them, that’s the three essentials in the beginning, instead of doing that, you want to learn copy and make websites and hone your niche and worry about your pricing and make sure you have your ideal client avatar and you want to learn all of the things.

You look at someone’s 200K business or two-million-dollar business or five-million-dollar business and you try to get there from where you are. And your brain just can’t process it all. It can’t even process all the things I teach in 200K at once. So that’s why we do the three essentials.

So in the beginning, your brain needs to be focused on just the basics. The meeting people, telling them you’re a coach, making offers, and then after you get consults, you want to just focus on selling on those consults and overcoming objections.

So writing good copy is not required for any of those essentials. Seriously, not required to make money in the beginning of your business. So you want to think about what’s required and focus all of your attention and energy there.

So I really started focusing on copy the year I started to scale. So the first year I started to scale from $325,000 to $860,000, that year I was like, let me just figure out what sales emails need to be in my latches. What do I need to be writing about? What topics do my clients need to hear to buy? What actually goes into that?

I spent a whole year just figuring that out. That’s actually how I created my nine to 12 email sales sequence that I teach now in 200K is just from a year of figuring out like, what are the essential things that need to go into a sales series or a launch.

And then the next year, I spent the entire year getting very specific in the actual words I was writing, learning to communicate more effectively and really be answering the thoughts in my clients’ brain and editing and learning to create the patience to edit so that my clients didn’t have to read a book to buy from me.

Because in the beginning, they were reading a book to buy from me. In fact, that’s what I love about in 200K, I give my students this giant thick book called Million Dollar Copy, and it’s all of the emails I wrote, learning how to get specific in the words I was writing. And you can see it happen over the evolution of a year.

It’s like I was writing books, and then the emails started getting smaller and smaller with less and less words as I learned to do that. And I spent an entire year doing that. But just keep in mind, these two years of study were when I was at $325,000 and $860,000.

That was how much I had made the year before, so the year I scaled to $860,000 is the year I learned the sales sequence. And then when I scaled to 2.5 million is when I started really learning about editing and being specific in what I was talking about.

So right after $150,000, that year is when I really started paying attention to this. I just wanted to tell you all that so you don’t – I want you to be willing to take time to learn these things. I’m going to introduce you all to these topics of course, way before you need them so you know what’s coming ahead, and some of you need to be studying this now and you’ll know who you are as you listen to this episode.

But just know there are new things at every level and at around 100K, 150K, maybe a little sooner is when you really want to start paying attention to this. We teach this to all of our students when they come into 200K, even if they’re just at 25K. And they learn it. It just may not be one of the three essentials that they focus on.

So everybody is choosing something different from that all of the advanced selling teachings. It may not be yours and it may be. Some of my students are like, this is the area. I just know this is what I need to work on to get to my next level. So you know for you when it’s time to really start focusing on your client messaging and selling with your words.

Now, I also want to say that before 150K, I was still writing a lot of emails and posts before then. Before I started studying copywriting. But copywriting is intentionally selling with your words. So again, I will say if you’re not around the 100K, 200K mark, this place, I just want you to know that it plays less of a role than your brain thinks it does.

Just shifting your mind into belief, which is what you learn in 2K, belief in yourself, your offer, and your client, will have you writing way better and selling more without any studying of copy technique, which is an essential piece of your business. When you start selling programs and selling without consult calls and you move into paid marketing, that’s when it really starts mattering.

And by then, your brain will understand how results are created, through your mind, that’s the lesson you really want to learn before learning style techniques for your writing. Because I just want to say another side note that the reason you don’t learn it early, early on, like before you’ve made money or when you’re making your first dollars is because you truly want to get that your thoughts and your energy are what create your results.

And if you work on other things, like if you spend too much time obsessing about your niche and your pricing, or working on copy techniques, rather than focusing on your thoughts and what energy you’re bringing to what you’re doing, you will not learn the lesson that your thoughts are what create clients.

Literally, it’s the difference of what wavelength you’re on as to whether you come in contact with clients or not. You really want to learn that first before you start studying other things. That way, when you do start studying them, you also realize at the end of the day, they’re just words and your brain is responsible how for high quality those words really are.

I like to think of it as like, you want to get the vital pieces down before you start accessorizing, and I think copy is a lot of accessorizing. It’s like, make sure you’re wearing pants and shoes and a top before you worry about what watch to wear. Because the watch doesn’t matter if you’re naked.

Alright, so that’s my little spiel of it’s a fine line. I love to introduce you all on the podcast to 200K concepts and 200K processes and things that we teach. And I love to teach you in 200K, but I just always want to make sure you understand that some of these things are the icing on the cake, not the cake themselves.

So when you start moving into the advanced selling phase of your business, or a little before, we start paying attention to how you’re communicating. And that really is the essence of great copy is just paying attention to the words and the tone that you use and being very intentional with it.

So you’re paying attention to the intention. And any time we start working on copy, we start with very simple fixes first. They make a huge difference. And I’m going to tell you what these three simple fixes are that’s going to elevate your copy immediately. You ready? I know you are.

Number one, you just want to think small and personal. You’re not writing to stadiums of people. You’re having an intimate conversation with one person or a few people. Every time you narrow that down – it’s really like I talk about in 2K, the energy of making 2K today, it’s all about focusing on that one person you can help right now. The same is true even when you’re making lots of money, even when I write my emails now, I’m thinking really small and personal.

Number two is you want to write to your best clients. Marketing is 90% of the people you talk to are no’s and 10% are yes’s. You have to focus when you’re writing to the 10% that are yes’s. And not just the 10% that are yes’s, but the 10% of the best yes’s.

You have to focus on, for example, the 289 people clicking your buy button versus the 26,000 who aren’t. Now, those are my numbers, they might not be your numbers. I think our list is somewhere around 30K now. It’s very small for how much money we’re making.

But we can see how many people click on the buy page. That’s who we focus on. We don’t think about why aren’t the other 25,000 numbers, I can’t do the math that quickly, we don’t think about those people who aren’t clicking. We think about the people who are clicking.

And then of those 289 people who might be clicking, we grab that one person to speak to. The person that is the best fit for me. So even of those 289 people, not all of those people are the best fit for me. Who I would consider my best clients? Doesn’t mean we don’t take them. It just means when I write, I write to the person who will just benefit the absolute most from my program. That is who I speak to.

And it’s very difficult. I have some clients who have really awesome niches, but they have this little subconscious lack happening. It’s very under the surface. Usually they’re not aware of it and they will stop talking to who they really want to work with out of fear that there aren’t enough of those people.

And they will start talking to whoever’s around. A lot of coaches do this with coaches. Coaches aren’t actually their best client, the ones they really want to work with, but they’re around, so they just start talking to them. And then the moment they do, poof, gone are the people who are their best fit.

Or they start talking to people who don’t see the value of their coaching and try to convince and argue with them. I just had one of my students have a revelation. She’s at $300,000 and she had a revelation like, wait a minute, I’ve been selling my mastermind thinking that people don’t really want this.

Like, that’s what we got to start with. It’s very simple. It will have a profound effect. Don’t talk to people who don’t have money. It’s such a subtle slip of the mind when this happens, but you’ve got to always make sure you’re thinking about the person who wants your offer. Not the person who doesn’t.

And then you want use simple, basic language. No clichéd coach speak. I’m going to tell you what that means, but you got to get more articulate. So no take your power back, own your decisions, get in the driver’s seat of your life. It’s meet people, tell them you’re a coach, say the words I can help you. There’s no confusion there.

Like I don’t know what take your power back means, but I know what it means to say the words I can help you. No confusion. So if you just implement those three very simple copy fixes, your copy will be instantly elevated. You will instantly make more money. Maybe not instantly, but you will definitely make more money, you will attract better quality people when you use just those three things.

Small and personal, best clients, simple basic language. That’s it. Now, after you work on the basic steps, you start advancing a little more. So then after you’re really doing well with those three, you start going and looking at your general statements and your general talk, and we start shifting those to specific statements, speaking directly to a specific problem and a specific solution.

I’m going to give you an example of this from the advanced selling book that I teach my clients. So a general thought is, “You can do this. I will teach you how to take your power back over your anxiety.” It’s a general statement with a clichéd coach speak of I will take your power back, or I’ll help you take your power back.

Here’s a more specific thought. “Some anxiety comes from the chemicals in your brain that you have no control over, and you may even need medicine. But half of all anxiety is created in our brain by our thinking, and we have 100% control over that. I will teach you how to manage the anxiety you can’t control and eliminate the anxiety you can.”

That’s a very specific thought. It takes more work and more effort to get to that place. This is what I spent a lot of time on in my second year of learning about copywriting and kind of self-teaching myself is just going from general statements to specific statements.

Alright, so that’s one thing that you learn after you get down your three basic steps. The next thing that’s a little more advanced with copy is actually pretty simple, but it causes my 200K students to want to pull their hair out sometimes, even $300,00 and $400,000 and $500,000. Are you ready?

And this one’s kind of along the lines of clichéd coach speak. But absolutely no fluff. You take all of the fluff out of your writing. Now, you might be thinking, what do you mean fluff? I actually want to read you a passage from the advanced selling book on creating compelling copy.

I have this do’s and don’ts section. And one of the don’ts is use fluff. So I’m going to read you what I wrote. Using words like amazing, incredible, transformational actually makes it seem less amazing, incredible, and transformational. It’s kind of like laughing at your own jokes. Only your close friends find that amusing.

Using phrases like kickass life only makes someone want to kick you in the ass. Not hire you as their coach. You want to keep it simple and small. One transformation at a time. Don’t promise them the world. Don’t ask them if they’re ready to take their life back. No one’s going to be like, “Yeah, I’m going to take my life back on this coaching call today.”

A little sassy in that section. But that’s what fluff is. And listen, when you can’t use your thoughts about your own offer, that it’s exciting and transformational and amazing, when you can’t say exciting, you have to create it being exciting with your words, geared at your clients’ thoughts.

It makes it less about you and more about them. I always say they don’t care what your thoughts are about your offer. They care how valuable your offer is and the specific value it will bring them. That’s all they care about. You could be excited about your new course you created or your brand-new mastermind, or this amazing free thing that you have to offer.

You can be very excited about it, but if you don’t communicate the value by explaining a specific problem and a specific solution, it is irrelevant. It just causes them to either delete the email or scroll past your posts in the feed.

Alright, so just those two additional more advanced copywriting ideas, concepts, using no fluff and going from general to specific, just those two things right there, what it will require you to do is start strategically thinking about your copy as an asset.

Each email, each post being a money-generator. That’s how we think about copy in 200K. Because it takes time and patience to sit down and think of your copy like that and to get your brain out of general and into specific. It’s like the difference of throwing together a salad from your refrigerator when you want lunch, it’s like you know you can just grab some ingredients and put it together and you have food to eat.

That’s the way I think about writing posts when you’re trying to make your first dollars. But then, if you wanted to bake a three-layered cake, it would require at least an hour of very specific attention of reading the directions very carefully, going back over everything, measuring out all your ingredients ahead of time, reading the directions very specifically, preheating the oven, putting it all together, double checking all of your work, watching it to make sure it doesn’t burn as it bakes, pulling it out, cooling it off before you ice it.

It’s like, it takes so much more patience and attention so you have to start thinking of it like an asset to be willing to give it that much time and attention just for those two things. Just to get your brain out of general statements and into specific statements, that’s what it will require.

And really, it’s just about slowing your brain down. Connecting dots, meaning what our brains – the reason we speak in clichéd coach speak, the reason that we speak with fluff is our brain wants to skip over the details to be more efficient.

So things that you know that you don’t think need to be explained your brain will just pass over. It’s like, oh yeah, they’ll know what it means to take their power back. What you actually mean will end up being skewed with your client.

When someone else reads it, they won’t fully understand what you’re trying to say, and a vivid enough picture won’t be painted for them to be compelled to take action. Another way that we compel our clients to take action and to buy from our copy or to sign up for a consult from our copy in 200K is we spend a lot of time thinking about our clients’ thoughts, what they will think after they read each and every single line of the copy.

And then answering what they might think from the first line with the second line of copy. It’s literally one – each line you’re thinking about very strategically. It’s like writing with your clients’ models in mind, speaking to your clients’ thoughts before they have them.

So I write my very first sentence, and then I think about what will be their brain’s reaction to this one sentence, and then the next sentence will answer that brain’s thought. And then the next, and then the next, and then the next.

If you all follow my 200K sales emails, starting November 2nd, actually a week before, but if you start following them, if you’re on our email list, you will see what I mean and how I do that. And just even watching someone else write really amazing copy will teach you a lot about writing your own.

And then the other thing that we do when we go to the more advanced copywriting level is we put together your very specific positioning within the industry, within your niche, once you have tailored down and you have one.

And we use that positioning to guide the tone of your message. Now, even if – I have several clients who are making $100,000, $200,000, and they still don’t have specific niches. They’re still selling general life coaching, they love it.

But even with them, we create positioning and a tone in their message that really makes them stand out over the other coaches that might be in their potential clients’ realm. Or it will just help them, their positioning helps them really stand out to their best clients.

Their best clients will be like, this girl gets me, this guy is speaking my language. Going to start using girls and guys because I keep getting messages, do you let guys into your programs, and the answer is yes.

So we use your positioning to get the tone of your message and then the icing on the cake, remember if we’re baking a cake – I’ve given you lots of analogies in this podcast. If we’re baking the cake, the icing is infusing your copy with your specific coaching philosophies and process.

We weave it into all of your emails, all of your posts, everything that you write matches your positioning, who you are in the industry, who you are to your clients, your philosophies, your process, and then remember, it’s very specific. And it speaks directly to a problem and a solution and all of your language is very clear, written to your best clients, and speaking only to one person at a time.

That’s how we put it all together. And then after you put it all together, you’re going to learn how to properly edit it. In the beginning, I just want you to get it out of you. Just make the salad. But as you start thinking more intentionally about your messaging and now that you’re working with clients, your hardest part is over, you have time to think about editing your work for your client.

Because remember, we don’t want them to have to read a book to buy. So we put it all together, you edit it, and then we put it into your nine to 12 email sales sequence that covers everything someone would ever need to hear to buy from you.

Okay, so now you have an idea of when you start thinking about copy and when not to. When you join 2K for 2K, I do give you an idea of where you need to start your writing and just getting the words out of your brain and start communicating at all.

And really, I just want you to know people want coaching so bad that all it really takes for you to make your first 25K is to just put out words, any words. Because all they’re looking for is oh, here’s a life coach, she can help me, to get your first even 20 people working with you, that’s all that’s required.

People want coaching so bad, they will take you up on even the worst copy and offers that you make. But when you’re ready to start adding in and focusing a little more, as of now, as you’ve listened to this podcast, at least start working on those three simple copy enhancements.

Think small, talk to one person, your best person, and use basic language. And then when you join 200K, I’m going to walk you through those basics and the advanced copy skillsets, shifting from general to specific and connecting all the dots, not just bypassing things with fluff, and answering your clients’ thoughts one line at a time and really using your positioning and your philosophy and your process to attract the person who’s really ideal for you and putting that all in a nine to 12 email sales sequence to cover everything they need to know to buy from you.

And then you’ll learn to edit and sell with your PS. Okay, make sure you listen next to the Get It Done bonus, 25K Cash. I have 200K mastermind student Jewel Hohman, and I’m a little obsessed with her. She’s like, 23 and making money as a life coach. Like $40,000 this year so far.

I think that’s incredible. I’m like, I have so much to learn from her. She’s kind of amazing. Like I feel like, the bravest person I know. So make sure you listen to that bonus episode next. Get lots of inspiration this week and we’ll see you in our 200K open enrollment starting November 2nd.

Hey, if you are ready to make money as a life coach, I want to invite you to join my 2K for 2K program, where you’re going to make your first $2000, the hardest part, and then $200,000 using my proven formula. It’s risk-free. You either make your 2K or I give you your 2K back. Just head over to www.staceyboehman.com/2kfor2k. We’ll see you inside.