When you launch your new offer, the first time you enrol, we know what that’s going look like, right? It’s likely to be a soft launch, it’s likely to be; reaching out to tell your warmest contacts about the new thing, maybe you will do a live event, I’m sure there will be a flurry of social media activity where you talk about it, maybe a flurry of emails where you contact your list about it, and you make those exciting and all-important first sales.

But then the serious business is filling this program month on month. You don’t have to enrol every single month if you don’t want to, but most people do want sales every month, right? So that’s why I focus on monthly enrolments. That kind of cash flow – consistent monthly cash flow – does not happen by accident. It absolutely does not happen by accident, and that’s why I want you to design a promotion and sales cycle.

They’re going to look very similar because they’re all going to contain the same elements over a similar time period, but the specifics of the subject matter, and how long you require to do something, and what kind of event you decide to run, are going to be unique to your business and what works for you, what works for your energy, what you like to do, what you want to do, and what your current level of resource is like. You get to set the pace.

I’ve used the example of a six weekly sales cycle. That’s what I aim for in my business. It works for me. Some people teach to do it every month. To me that feels a little bit, a little bit frantic and you may even decide that you want to stretch it out to an eight week sales cycle.

The important thing is, is that you get back on the cycle every time you fall off. It’s by going through it over and over and over again that you develop a standard process, a procedure that you can repeat whenever you want to sign new clients. Some of you have already launched enough times or run enough live events that you have assets created now. You have landing pages that you can copy and repurpose. You have emails that you can copy and update and adapt. So every time you do it, the process gets a little slicker, right? It gets a little bit more rehearsed. It gets a little bit elevated every single time you do it. The standard process, a procedure that you can repeat whenever you want to sign new clients.

Another key, key critical part in this process is the automations. They’re not going to do all of the work for you. That’s not their purpose. Especially at the beginning, like when you’ve just set them up, are not going to bring you the number of clients you want. Not when you have a tiny ad spend and not when they are still like pre-optimization, right? They’re not going to convert at high numbers for you. Ultimately, that’s the goal – but at this stage, it’s an added bonus if they convert into sales. Yes, we would love to sign a few clients from those automations but the more important job that they’re doing is growing your audience, and also warming up the people as they join.

So that each time you run this six-week cycle – if your automations are set up – you will have more people in your audience than you did at the beginning of the previous six-week cycle, and they will be pre-warmed. They will already have some understanding of your brand, your methodology, your offer. All of that has been handled by the automation.

This is how your cycle helps you break the feast and famine roller coaster which is a big part of why we’re doing this, right? That’s one of the big benefits of having a profitable, always open group offer is to break the terrifying and exhilarating highs and lows of sales and revenue which really scupper a lot of very small businesses. The thing that really stitches up a small business’s lack of cash flow.

The biggest success indicator in this whole system is lead flow. If you can nail lead flow, which is good fit clients joining your audience, you massively stack the odds in your favour. It’s one of the hardest things to master and it is one of the most important. This makes and breaks businesses, whether you know how to consistently generate leads. How to get people to raise their hands and say, yes I’m interested in this work.

So why do we need a six week weekly cycle? Why can’t we just rely on the automations to do it? Evergreen versus cohort group programs each have their pros and cons, and on the downside for Evergreen is that it’s really tempting to think that you have to be promoting the same thing constantly all the time and that is really difficult to do. It’s really hard work to be in constant lead generation mode. It’s really hard work to be in constant sales mode. Launches are very very draining, yes, but at least they are time constrained!

If you need to promote constantly to fill your group, that does not sound like a good time in business to me. Selling all the time just doesn’t feel great. We need variety and we need to change the pace, otherwise we lose steam, we get this feeling of hitting your head against a brick wall, screaming into the void, and ultimately your audience gets bored of the same message and start to ignore it. But! We do still need leads every month. We do still need sales every month, so what a conundrum we are in.

Because we need those sales every month, ‘not promoting at all’ is not an option either. We need to find a middle ground. That’s what this six-week cycle is designed to do: take the best bits, the most important bits of the launch process, and combine it with the most efficient, effective pieces of evergreen marketing as well.

When we get this right it means we have inbound leads – people reaching out – from automations and your content strategy, and you have a repeatable, reliable, system for deepening your relationship with your audience, which will be growing and changing every time you repeat the six-week cycle.

The first part of the cycle, which we’re not getting deep into today, is the automations. And what do I mean by that? I mean, “what happens when somebody joins your list.” That could be from the Thank You page, the email welcome sequence, nurture emails. It’s the invitation to join your Facebook group and what happens there. And this will be largely hands-free once it is set up. It’s a crucial part of the process, but it’s not something that you need to attend to every six-week cycle, once it’s set up.

The automated piece is really, really important. It does a lot of the heavy lifting for you in terms of selling to people who are ready to buy. So if you have a validated offer, if you have an offer that people have bought, but you haven’t got the automations set up yet, let’s talk about that. It’s definitely something to look at. It will serve you really, really well over the long term.

Don’t get me wrong, it is a hefty, chunky piece of work. It’s kind of daunting to undertake. It’s not something that you can just knock out in a day or even a week. But if you have that piece working really well, and it’s all converting, and you’re running ads at the top, you can actually skip the six-weekly sales ritual because you have so many calls booked, client signed just from the automated marketing.

Even once you do have all those automations in place, you probably are still going to keep doing all of the other pieces of this ritual, at least for a while. Then you have a process that you can run anytime you want to see what you can do to boost your sales figures for any particular given month.

The next piece of the six-weekly cycle is, things that you do daily and weekly, which I’m not going to go into a lot of detail on. But this is the part that most people are kind of on top of. So it’s like the social media content semi-consistently, you know a few times a week. It’s your nurture strategy. It’s your hand raiser posts. It’s the DM conversations that you’re having, the sales conversations that you’re having, the market research conversations that you’re having, its deepening connections and relationships. It’s networking.

And then the third piece of the ecosystem, is really what we’re here to talk about today which is the monthly or six-weekly cycle. Now let me see if I can give you a link. If I’ll drop the link in the group. It’s just a blank calendar, which you can update the date in the first cell of the first row. It’s the spreadsheet, all of the rest will automatically adjust. So what you will be left with is a blank year to view calendar with one square for every week of the year.

Okay, so the first thing to do will be to go through add to the calendar in any commitments you know you have. Like if you’re traveling, or you decided that you don’t work in August when the kids are off school, Christmas and Thanksgiving, just block off those weeks where you’re not available for work. And then go through your calendar and in every six-week block, we’re going to have a sales period and a live event.

The biggest mistake that I see people fall into – I have fallen into it many, many times – is setting up all of the rest of these pieces, setting up the automations, setting up the daily and weekly content strategy, but forgetting to actually promote. Because we have pushed back against the idea of promoting all the all the time what we end up doing is promoting it maybe one day a week, or two or three days a week but mixed in with a whole lot of memes and other kind of unfocused content, so in effect we’re just not promoting it at all, and then wondering why we don’t have sales.

So out of your six week block, two weeks are going to be dedicated to actually selling an offer. Not engagement, not lead generation, not connection, actually selling. For me that usually looks like a week of selling in the DMs, and then a week where I’m all over my socials. Sometimes they take a bit longer; this is your calendar, you can change the dates, you can change the amount of time you give to the different elements, but I want you to be sure that you are actually promoting your thing. That you are asking for the sale. That you are selling your shit for at least 10 to 14 days out of every six weeks.

There are lots of resources in the teaching library about what that looks like. For most of you, it will be a similar strategy to mine, which is a big focus on lead generation and getting people into DM conversations, sharing a Google document with people who raise their hands. But if you are unsure about any of what needs to be a part of your two-week promotion cycle every six weeks, we can talk about that on our calls, and there are lots and lots of trainings that I can direct you to.

Now you’ve got a six-week cycle, you’ve taken out two weeks which are going to be your promotion, enrolment, signing clients, asking for the sale period; and the other thing I want to appear in that six-week block is some kind of live event. Could be an hour-long class, a half-day workshop, a three-day challenge, a five-day challenge, a Facebook group, a Zoom call, small group Voxer coaching—there are so many options. It’s one of the best bits of launching, being in relationship with your audience, and sharing energy before sales and conversions. And the automations that you’ve got set up are just providing the foundation for this. They have pre-warmed your audience.

If you’re doing live events without having lead flow and automation – you don’t need that kind of pressure on every live event to convert. That’s why we have the automations in place: to support, and underpin, and add fire to everything else that we do.

What is the subject for the live events? You’re not going to lose in business by running the same event over and over again. You’ll just get better at it. And you’ll be amazed at how many people in your audience actually do want to attend the same workshop twice.

Equally, if you get inspired to teach something else, you can switch it up! You still have the benefit of all the marketing assets that you created for previous events, and you’ve saved yourself a great deal of time in being able to update and repurpose. Obviously, the quickest and easiest thing to do is to do the exact same thing again, but it’s still easier to update than to be building it from scratch.

The first time you do these things, whether it’s building a registration page, or an email automation, or running a live event, or promoting an offer, the first time you do it is always the most difficult and every subsequent time it gets a little easier, a little bit quicker, and and it gets better. Because you’re reviewing, updating, and refining it, in line with your deepened understanding of your business, yourself, the soul of your business, your audience, the market research that you’ve done, what’s happening in your industry – it just gets better by doing over and over again.

We’re very familiar with the concept of allowing ourselves to be a beginner. We also need to allow ourselves to become an expert.

Now, out of six weeks, you have two blocked out as promotion. One week is labeled as the week in which your live event is going to take place. And obviously, you’re also going to need to promote that live event, so the week before the live event is going to be promotion, you will sell it just like you would sell a paid offer. You will sell it in your DMs, and you will sell it on your social media.

So now, out of six weeks, four are taken up. There’s two weeks promoting and delivering a free offer, your live event, and two weeks promoting and signing clients to your core, profitable, evergreen offer; and there’s two weeks left over. Obviously, there’s some preparation to do ahead of both of the promotional weeks, and sometimes there’s going to be some overlap, so you will be preparing content for one thing while you’re promoting another, and that I find is why having this visual cue is really useful.

Also, in those two “clear” weeks, we know they’re going to get filled right, like client delivery is happening alongside our marketing activity – obviously we’re not doing one or the other – so having those two clear weeks means you can catch up if you’ve got behind, there is some wiggle room with dates, sometimes we just need to rest and lean out a little bit from being in the energy of promotion and marketing.

So just imagine, tell me, what do you think would happen to your business if over the next 12 months you ran eight live events and did eight enrolment periods? Even if you shoot for that and end up doing six, or even five… however many you do, you’re going end up having a really big year in your business, in terms of developing marketing assets, in terms of learning, growing your audience, interacting with your audience, the number of leads you have in your business, and ultimately of course in the number of sales you make.

It sounds like a lot, I know. The first six weeks are the hardest. After that, you have the bones created, so you’re just adding to, refining, optimizing, getting better at it.

So, I just want to quickly tell you the three places that people get stuck—it might be four, I’m not sure. I think I’ve touched on most of these.

One place where people get stuck is they’re just doing the weekly actions, just posting content and wondering why they’re not getting clients. They might even be posting promotional content and still not getting clients. They’re ignoring audience growth and the whole automated nurture piece. So, they are missing the opportunity to sell to people and engage them when they are most interested, which is right after joining your audience.

Not investing – energy, time, or money – in top of funnel. To get to a six-figure business is rarely going to come purely from organic marketing. And if it is, there’s going to be a consistent strategy for collaboration, for getting in front of other people’s audiences. It doesn’t necessarily mean Facebook ads, but it is likely to mean some kind of investment.

For example, I know that there are now pay-to-advertise Facebook groups. It might be contracting somebody to seek podcast appearances for you, strategically with an eye to audience growth. It could be paying somebody to do your PR for you. There are options, but they all require investment. And honestly, slow organic growth is a great deal of hard work for not a lot of gain.

We talked about the pitfall of not actually doing the promotion. Like, you’d think it would go without saying, but we can get so close to our business, and so focused on doing an individual piece, like setting up one piece of the automation, that we can just let weeks go by without actually doing any concerted promotion, which is obviously going to show up in your bottom line.

And then, I just think it’s a real missed opportunity when I see people who are not doing live events. That is the part of launching, of live launching, that is really fun and that really works. It creates buzz, live energy. And whether we’re talking about a live event or talking about a promotional period, there’s a real benefit to giving it a constrained time period and a narrow focus for a short period of time, so rather than seeding the idea of a live event, or rather than having a kind of diluted promotional period for your paid offer, to have short periods of intense focus.

Everything that we’re doing here is about optimized marketing, so really just paying attention to the pieces that actually move the needle in your business, which are not beautiful sales pages, gorgeous graphics, lovely websites, fancy funnels – when you’re a sole entrepreneur without the benefit of a team or a large marketing budget, we have to just focus on the pieces that are most strategic, the pieces that deliver the greatest profit per hour of your time, essentially – that’s what we’re talking about.