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Welcome to Make More Money without Selling Your Soul with me Polly Lavarello, evergreen marketing expert. This podcast is for you if you are an online entrepreneur who is looking to simplify their business to scale.  On this podcast you can expect to hear regular talk about wealth, about selling and about wellbeing. Because I believe these three core fundamental things are pivotal to your growth moving forward.

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Hello, and welcome to make more money without selling your soul with myself Polly Lavarello, evergreen marketing expert and cushy business pioneer.

And today we are talking about how to generate passive sales over the summer. Now, I’m not gonna lie, I have used a bit of a click baity title, because I’m going to be transparent from the get go. There is no such thing as passive revenue. Why do I say this? Well, recently, I was thinking about the fact that people often allude to passive revenue being passive because it can arrive while you’re lying on a sunbed. It can ping as you wake up in the morning. And I had a little chuckle to myself, as I reflected on the fact that you could say that about your corporate salary. You could say that when you’re on holiday and you’re being paid while you take two weeks off. That is passive income. Passive income doesn’t exist, because there’s no income that truly is generated off the back of no effort from yourself outside of investments, which let’s face it, a lot of people aren’t in a predicament to be making right now. I’m not saying they’re not all but if you are in that predicament, that’s it.

Okay. So in online business, I do not like the word passive. However, I’m recording this episode because I do believe in leverageable income. And what I mean by that is there are smart ways to make money. Because initially when people start out in online business, a lot of people are making money with their time. And there is obviously limitations to what you can do with that. To begin with, you can increase what you’re charging per hour, or per package, once you’ve you know, gone from our two packages. But there is still a cap on that, right? I know some people there is always examples of people who have stretched that. But ultimately, generally speaking industry, right, there will be a cap as to how much you can charge for your packages, and for the hours involved. And there also comes a point where you don’t want to be limited to the number of people you can work with because of your hours. It’s a shame for the world, when you are restricting who you can help by the number of hours you have available, you want your impact to go further. Okay, so my first point of this podcast, and there’s three really important points I want to make. The first one has already been established. passive revenue doesn’t exist, but leverageable revenue does. And I want this episode to help you pick it well. Because when people get excited about the idea of oh, I can make money, you know with with offers passive offers, digital offers online courses, memberships, group programs, masterminds. They’ll often throw themselves into whoever has advertised it most successfully, someone will pop up on their feed and say, Yeah, I need an online course. You need a membership. Group programs are where it’s at. Get yourself a mastermind. And people mindlessly throw themselves into whichever one feels most appealing on that certain day.

Whoever’s made the most convincing argument for why now is the time to do that. And this breaks my heart as a strategist. Because quite often, when I host my free discovery calls, and I have conversations with the most talented, knowledgeable, experienced business owners, sometimes they are burnt out because they’re running a membership that just doesn’t pay the bills and the way it needs to despite taking up all their time. Other times they are speaking to me because they have an online course that is doing absolutely nothing. And they have spent hours building it. They’re spending lots of money on expensive software to host it and feeling like does this stuff even work? How is it working for everyone else and not for me? So choosing how to create that leverageable income is really important. And there is actually a formula to it. No, it’s I mean, I say there’s a formula but there is no there is there There is no some obvious things that will help you understand, which is going to be the best route for you. So for example, anyone who’s got a small social media or even medium sized social media following, and a tiny list is rarely very rarely ever, in the best situation to be considering a membership, then because what we know about memberships is they do not sell because they are cheaper. Okay, the percentage of your following that are going to convert your membership is not much higher than our high ticket offer, it often is marginally higher, but it’s not significantly higher. Because ultimately, people are still investing in the transformation that your membership provides. And if it’s not a value to them, it doesn’t matter if it’s 25 pounds, or 250 pounds or 2500 pounds, they’re not investing. And so that is one of the mistakes I see many people make, they throw themselves into a membership, and then find themselves being paid by five members a month at a kind of trivial sum of money that is barely worth the investment that they have to put into it. Equally, as I shared earlier, there are unfortunately, a lot of horror stories of people who’ve taken the time to design all the beautiful canvas slides for a wonderful online course that nobody then buys, you know, back in 2020, these were a lot easier to sell. But the problem, as I often allude to when it comes to online courses is that something like 97% of people don’t complete online courses. And that is a problem. Because then they associate that investment with being a waste of money. And you don’t want to be the person or the brand that’s associated with a poor investment. Okay? You want your clients getting amazing results, right? This is why, as you can probably tell by now, if you’ve been listening to my podcast for a while, why I’m such a big fan of group programs, because if you are already attracting one to ones into your life, the transition to a group program is like, just it’s just barely a transition. It’s simply just a slight pivot of the invitation on the other side, it really gets to be incredibly simple. I’ve got various clients at this stage, who haven’t even created a webinar who haven’t even launched and simply just made it that when someone inquires about one to one, they instead say, I’m fully booked with one to one. However, my next group program is launching in the next month, once I’ve got three people who’ve expressed an interest, it’d be going ahead, would you like to be part of that, and then boom, there is their first group program, or three to five people in there, all paying them not dissimilar to what they were going to pay for a one to one. And it gets to be that simple. Now, of course, group programs are not what we’d consider traditionally passive in the same way, you could sit, consider an online course passive, because obviously, with an online course, you create it, you sell it, you never have to have anything to do with it again. Now, of course, that’s not true. Because online courses require a lot of promotion, a lot of, you know, advertising and various other things which are not remotely passive activities. And actually, in my experience, running ads to and promoting online courses all the time, I actually found has taken up more hours than simply delivering a group program to a smaller number of people month on month. So it’s really important to be honest with yourself about where you’re at in your business. You know, I would never ever say there is one absolute rule for any of these things.

There are certain people who come to me and I look at their positioning, I look at their market demand, I look at their the industry they’re in. And I look at the size of their following and their mailing list. And they are in the perfect position to start a membership. And we ensure that they structure their membership in a way that it’s not too burdensome for them for them to scale it and run it and provide a superior experience for their clients. So it’s not to say memberships should always be poo pooed. But if you are earlier on in business, if you don’t have a big team supporting you. And if you have a relatively small following, then it’s not necessarily the best idea to start with a membership. And like I say online courses can actually be, particularly if you haven’t got established brand authority again, if someone comes to me, and everyone is lapping up their content, they’ve got 1000s and 1000s. Like, you know, let’s say 10s of 1000s of followers on social media, who we’re all desperate for a piece of them, then an online course can get on really well. But again, that’s not the predicament of the average online business owner, which is why I love

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group programs. And what’s so beautiful is you know, obviously that’s why I’ve created my own experience. Never have I evergreen and elevate evergreen for those who have got group programs or those who want to design group programs because I love to support people from that experience of either being reliant on live launches and wanting to get into the Evergreen flow. are all for people who want to launch their first first group program to see that transformation happen for them, you know, what am I never have I evergreen clients just OpenCart. The other day, she ran her webinar, and has already got her first three clients within the space of 24 hours into her new program. And that is just the best feeling her sharing. She couldn’t believe how easy it feels, how wonderful, it feels that she’s so glad she finally, you know, put her offer out there and how excited she is about it. It’s just the best feeling in the world. So yeah, if you haven’t got a group program, and you’re thinking about about passive revenue, I would really encourage you to explore it, I have got various free resources, if you go to pollylvarello.com to explore further what a group program could look like for you. Or if you already have one, and you’re thinking about how to improve it.

Again, there are various resources to support you with that. So my third point I’d like to make so my first point is like passive revenue doesn’t exist, give up on that as an idea. All businesses require some kind of input, whether you know, it’s you doing the work, or whether it’s you managing a team doing the work. It’s you know, there’s never a stage where you just get to lie in a hammock all day and just sit crap as I am sorry. It’s just the truth. However, you know, you do get to design a business where you’re working three days a week, working five hours a day to tell, ask me how I know. And you get to fill your hours doing the work that truly lights you up again, ask me how I know. And the second point is, you know, consider, you know the size of your following and your market positioning when you decide on what your offer your leverageable offer is going to be in the majority of cases for those earlier on in business, I highly, highly recommend launching a group program. And as I mentioned, there are various resources on Polylang yellow.com, that are entirely free, that will support you to dive into that weld even deeper. And then my third point, that’s so so important and kind of wraps up the first two is start with where you are at more isn’t more. One of the biggest mistakes I see people making with passive revenue is the belief that the more offers they have, the more money they’ll make. But that’s simply not true. The more invitations you make, the more money you’ll make. It really is that simple. People are driven by an internal urgency to buy. And you don’t know if that’s going to be today, tomorrow, or in a month’s time. But when you keep on making those invitations, you’re making it easy for somebody to lean into that internal agency and choose you. And the reason why people don’t always do that is because you are not making an invitation that day and somebody else offering something similar does, okay. So make sure you are continuously making invitations. What that means is you don’t need to create loads of different offers.

One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is thinking, Well, I can do this. And I can do that. And I’ve got this specialism and that speciality, and they wrap them all up in different mini offers, and then wonder why they’re not selling. I’ve always said, and you’ll hear this repeatedly throughout my podcast, treat your marketing and your offers like a body of work. Because what that means is when people discover you, they will trust you as an authority in that space. And you will have the Office suite that will support them with the transformation that they associate you with. If you try to be too many things to too many people, you will slow down your sales, it is as simple as that. Look at anyone who is successful in your industry, or in the online business space. And you will see that it’s really easy to immediately understand when you land on their social page, what problem they solve, who they solve that problem for, and that when you go to look at their website, they have a perfectly aligned offer, and probably some little micro offer. That is the first stepping stone. It really does get to be simple. But people have an amazing tendency to overcomplicate it. So please, if sales are slowing down, because it’s the summertime, if you’re thinking about how do I create more sales, let’s go create some really cheap offers. Take the time to slow down to speed up and think about what is the perfect offer you can be offering right now that will put someone in the perfect position to work with you this September to set you up for a really strong final quarter of the year. The people who are thinking most intelligently about their business are thinking this way. They’re not thinking about quick wins. They’re not thinking about you know how to kind of get a cash injection. They are thinking beyond that. They’re recognising that the smaller things that they sell now could be the stepping stone to bigger investments later on this year.

So ensuring that it is the perfect stepping stone. So that is it. My friends. I hope this has been really helpful, helpful, hopeful, hopeful and helpful. I hope it’s been eye opening to recognise where you may have gone wrong so far and how you get to do it better moving forward. You know, leverageable income is phenomenal. It’s why I’m so passionate about group programs. It’s why I’m so passionate about Evergreen. And it really is your ticket to freedom. It’s what enables, you know, it’s what’s enabling me to spend three weeks away in Srilanka this summer. Knowing that I still get to make sales through my funnels, through my ads through the podcasts, I’ve guested on and through my social content, because everything compounds, right, the longer I’ve been in this space, the more inquiries I get, the more sales I make, the more aligned my clients are, it’s just gorgeous. And I want it for you as well, I want you to have that truly spacious business where you’re not worrying about money month to month, where you really get to work with the clients who light you up. It’s all available to you, when you trust in the value that you’re bringing to the table. And you create the Office Suite in alignment with that. And like I say, You do not need to do it all at once, one offer at a time. And my recommendation is to start with a signature offer that people know you for. So start with that group program. So to summarise, what I’ve shared in this episode is a passive revenue doesn’t exist, but leverageable income does, however, please choose it well. Secondly, as it as a guide to choosing it, well consider the size of your following, and your market positioning to understand what people are willing to pay for the problem that you solve, and who you are most excited to work with, and what that should look like as an offer. And then finally, start with where you’re at. If you are overstretched have a small following. This is not the time to be building up five different offers. This is about time, this is time to create one offer that truly lights you up that really excites you, potentially, if needed, with a down sell. But I would focus on that signature offer because when you’re excited about it, your ideal client will be excited about it too. And as I mentioned earlier, if you want some additional resources to support you with that entirely free, go over to Pauline every yellow.com and you will find all the good stuff there. And there’s a roadmap that will support you. There’s also two on demand master classes and there’s various blogs as you could literally binge to your heart’s content, but start with the roadmap. All right, my love’s I shall see you on my next episode, where I should come to you talking to you about my hacks for running a business with ADHD