My first Black Friday I made ZERO dollars. Now almost 4 years later we are predicting a $20k cash injection. I want you to learn from my mistakes so in this blog post I teach you how you can prepare best for Black Friday!
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This weeks wins!
Hello, my loves! Welcome back to the podcast. I’m your host Danielle Hu.
So last week I did something really scary that I’m really proud of and I want to share with all of you.
I haven’t really been talking much about my other business Anda. So I have an ocean inspired jewelry line with my best friend and last week we had our first few calls with suppliers in Ecuador. We are currently looking to offshore our whole production process so that we can focus on sales and distribution in America. And I had my first business call in Spanish, like completely start to finish in Spanish and it was super scary. It’s the first time I ever spoke Spanish in a business setting and there were so many vocabulary words that I had to learn, but I did it and we got all the information we needed and it just felt so good afterwards, like a sense of accomplishment, proving to yourself over and over that you can do hard and scary things.
I am by no means fluent in Spanish. I took it in middle school and high school. I also volunteered in Peru for a few weeks after I graduated from university and I’ve just been taking Spanish lessons on and off for fun last year, earlier in the year, I kind of took it more seriously because I thought I wanted to buy an investment property in Costa Rica, but decided to change my mind and I stopped my Spanish lessons. But now it just feels really good to have a reason to resume the lessons and continue learning the language for reasons other than, you know, just fun. Like I actually have to use it, it for business. So I wanna take a moment and celebrate because we are constantly proving to ourselves that we have the power to change our upper limits and what we previously thought was impossible or we couldn’t do it.
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All of these things, we have the power to change them to become our lower limit. So going forward, doing business in Spanish, that is going to become more of a lower limit for me rather than this daunting like, oh my gosh, what if I get the numbers mixed up? What if they don’t understand what I want? All of those fears and problems prove to be wrong and figure outable. So if I can do it, you can too.
Preparing for Black Friday 2022
So let’s dive straight in to today’s episode, How to prepare for Black Friday in your business. And I am recording this because years ago when I participated in my first Black Friday, I didn’t prepare and ended up making zero sales and thought there was something wrong with my business.
I was looking at everyone else making five figures in a week and I was like, why couldn’t I do that? You know, like what is wrong with my business? And it’s because I didn’t prepare. So I want to make sure all of you can wrap your minds around what is needed to have a successful launch so you can start executing right away and not make the same mistake I did, which is not prepare and not make sales. I want you guys to have a giant cash injection at the end of the month. Here at The Wanderlover, we are forecasting a five figure week, so maybe even like a 20K week. That’s around the ballpark of what we are expecting to bring in at the end of the month.
And bear in mind, this isn’t my first Black Friday. Four years ago when I first participated, I made $0. And what I did that first year was I saw other people kind of preparing for it and thought to myself, Hmm, maybe I should put something together. So I put together a landing page. I basically slashed all of my products and services in half. So anything that was a hundred dollars, it was now $50. I had a $1,000 product and it was now $500. And I just thought that’s what was needed for Black Friday. And I launched it, I created a few posts and no one bought. So what exactly changed between my first Black Friday launch four years ago and what we are expecting to make this year on Black Friday?
Creating A Warm Audience
First and foremost, I have a bigger audience. For the past four years I’ve been focusing on growing my audience on social media and my email list. So every single day I am building trust and I am growing the number of people who are aware of my brand. If you are not growing on social media or not growing your email list, it’s going to be really hard to launch to people who don’t know what exactly you do. So we really wanna get those marketing strategies in place so that you have a warm audience to launch to and you can start doing that now, like it’s still in the middle of November. So if you don’t have a big enough list or a big enough audience, then what we can start doing is start running ads to grow the number of people who know about your business.
We can do that targeting your warm audience who already follows you and or we can start running ads to lookalike audiences. So people who don’t know you yet, but they are really, really similar to the people who have engaged with your Facebook page, with your Instagram, with your email, with your website, so that when you launch your offers on Black Friday, you are not launching two crickets.
How To Design Your Offers
The next thing that you should really put thought into and prepare at least a week or two in advance are your Black Friday offers. And what I did wrong in the beginning was slashing prices 40, 50, 60% and that is not what you want to do.
So a little backstory, like in high school, I used to wake up early on Black Friday and drive to outlet malls to wait in line and then, you know, hope that there were really good deals at my favorite stores. And it got to a point where most of my shopping for the year was done around Black Friday because I knew that my favorite stores were going to have sales, right? And so for me as a consumer, it’s really hard to get me to pay full price if I knew that if I waited, you know, two, one or two months, they would just slash their prices. I actually still do this, so I have a list of things that I want to buy this month, but now I’m waiting and I’m like, you know what?
I’m just gonna wait a few more weeks and see if all of these shops have offers. We do not want that in your business because if your sale ends when your launch ends, we still want people to pay full price, right? We don’t wanna discount the value of our offers, especially if they’re online. And so instead what we want to do is start bundling our offers. So if they buy something at full price, they get extras. You can throw in a one hour power call, a goal mapping session for 2023, you can throw in some templates or digital products, but you’re not discounting your main offer and they would never be able to buy your add-ons for free anyway, right?
And so we are packaging a really attractive offer. The second thing we want to do as we prepare our offers is to make sure you are grounding a price point that feels aligned to your business and business goals at this time. Instead of only offering low ticket items for 20 $30, really think what is the average order value that I want to bring in and how am I going to sell them? And so let’s say the main offer that you want to sell this Black Friday is priced at $2,000. Instead of only displaying a low ticket offer and your $2,000 offer, you can also simply introduce, let’s say a $10,000 offer to then anchor the 2k and make that your main focus.
It’s going to be so much easier to sell a two K offer when you have a 10 K offer on the same page. So by not even really doing anything except introducing a higher ticket offer, you are now putting in the spotlight your mid-tier offer, which is $2,000. And this is exactly what we are doing for Black Friday. We are anchoring our offers of two to $5,000 by also including a way you can lock in your 2023 prices for private coaching with me, which comes out to nine to $15,000. The prices are going to go up next year, so it’s a really good chance for you to lock in our rates before the end of the year and continue working with me through to the new year.
I’m going to be sharing all of our Black Friday offers on this episode at the end, so you get an idea of what we are offering, how you can apply it to your own business. And if you are interested, just send me a DM and I can actually sign you up right away if you wanna get started and not have to wait until the end of the month.
Creating Purposeful Content
So once you have your warm audience, once you have your Black Friday offers in place, I want you to start creating attention grabbing relevant value-based content the week before you start announcing your offers.
And this is so you are top of mind and people aren’t surprised when it’s like, oh, okay, here’s another creator or coach, you know, coming out with something just to get sales. You want them to know exactly who you are, what you offer. And then going hand in hand with that are your Black Friday social media posts and captions. So you’re gonna have posts and captions to warm up your audience. And then you’re also going to have your specific offer posts and captions. All of these are to drive sales, so you really want to use sales specific copy and conversion driving copy.
We don’t want to make people guess what it is that you have to offer, like a checkout, maybe these like few deals in my bio and see if you are interested, right? None of that. It’s gonna be buy now, lock in your rate, sign up, go to my bio, work with me, let’s get all of this figured out and let’s get all the text down cuz the last thing you want is for your offers to be ready, but then come day of Black Friday, you don’t feel ready because you didn’t write the captions, you didn’t write the email sequence, and you’re just left scrambling and your offers don’t even get out until the end of the day, right? We do not want that.
Next, after your social media posts and captions, you’re going to want to create reals so you can reach a wider audience outside of the people who are already following you. And we want to make sure your stories are created so you can add them to a Black Friday highlight. When people don’t see your stories in 24 hours, they can still go to your profile and tap through all of your sales stories and make a purchase before the end of the weekend or the end of the month.
Preparing Your Email Sequence
Next, we wanna make sure your email sequence is dialed in because emails, at least for me, take a while to write my motto when I am writing anything long form like a blog post or an email draft drunk and edit sober.
So if you need to, you know, accompany yourself with a bottle of wine while you are writing all of these sales emails, it’s a really good idea to get them all prepared and scheduled out for the week of Black Friday to make sense of all of these moving pieces. It’s also really going to help you if you have a posting calendar so you know exactly what to post, when to post and where to post. And once this is all finished, this is just the foundation of a successful Black Friday campaign, we will want to drive ad traffic to all of those warm leads to your Black Friday landing page.
This is going to be the main factor in making sure that every single person who is following you, who is on your email list, they have a chance of seeing your content, even if they’re not checking your profile on social media. Think about it, many, many people follow you, but what percentage of them actually see your posts the day you post them? And this timing is so critical and the more people you can get to view your landing page, the higher chance of success and checkouts and purchases you are going to get on that specific day. And this is why we wanna start prepping for Black Friday weeks in advance because in order to get all of these ad campaigns set up, you need to make sure every single step I talked about before is already done so we can then funnel lots and lots of people to your sales page.
If you are in any of my programs, you’ll know that I encourage you to run ads to grow your email list every single day, especially in November. If you don’t have a really large warm audience, it’s going to be hard to make sales more. So if you don’t have a campaign getting those warm people to your landing pages, right?
So this is why I wanna make sure you have an idea of how you can have a successful Black Friday this month to make this super easy for all of you and to make sure you are dedicating your time and energy to the parts of this campaign that matters the most, I am offering social media posts and captions. So done for you, plug and play conversion optimized four $7 only. They are fully editable in Canva. There are 50 of them for you to choose from. You can use multiple in a carousel on each day to really promote your Black Friday offers. You can find this link in the episode description and as you check out, you also have the option to add on real and story templates. There’s also 50 of those as well as a done for you email sequence so you don’t have to worry about copywriting. There’s also a posting calendar so you know exactly what to post, when’s a post and where to post when to send the emails that are given to you, when to basically post the posts and the reels and the stories that are also given to you.
There’s also an option to add on a Black Friday strategy session with me so we can also plan out your offers and your ad strategy to grow your warm audience if needed before Black Friday. And if you already have a warm audience, I can show you how to create specific Black Friday ads so that your warm audience sees your offers.
Recognising The Significance Of Participating In Black Friday
Before we dive into what we are offering at the Wander Lover for Black Friday, I really want to give you guys some perspective on what participating in your first Black Friday means for your business. So I don’t want you to go into this thinking that it’s a get rich quick scheme, like I’m gonna do it once.
I’m gonna have this big cash injection and that is how I’m going to set my standard and what I expect as results. Like just this one time, do it once. See success thing. That’s the mindset I had during my first launch. And what I failed to see because I was so, so discouraged after, is that we are invested in our businesses, not just for this year. We are running our businesses for years and years to come. So what it signifies when you participate in your first one and you create all of these assets for it, we have created landing pages, offers, posts, emails, marketing strategies year after year, it’s only going to build from there.
And you are opening this opportunity to have these major cash injections. It could happen in your first year, but it’s more likely to happen in your second, in your third, in your fourth, right? You’re gonna have more assets, more brand authority. And if you can go into it with the knowing that when you open up a launch for Black Friday, you can repeat it for years and years to come, then there is really no way to fail, right? And thank God that even after my failed first launch, I continued going with my business. I continued launching year after year, and now obviously I am seeing success. But had I given up, had I had, I told myself that you know, I was a failure and this proved that it meant I couldn’t do it.
Things would be looking a lot differently this year, right? I would not be in the position I am in today.
Why I celebrate EVERY Creation Phase
Knowing this now as a seasoned entrepreneur, I wanna give a recent example of why I celebrate every creation phase. So I recently created a new package for a year long private coaching offer starting in 2023. This is the first time I’m ever offering 12 months of private coaching and I created this product in Thrive Cart. So Thrive Cart is a checkout cart that I use to deliver, to create, to deliver and process all payments for my online products and services.
And simply this creation, I celebrated, I bought myself a gold necklace and even though I haven’t launched it yet, my energy is on the same frequency of aligning with that client who is going to sign up, right? It’s not anchored in fear, it’s not anchored in uncertainty or what if this doesn’t work? I, I am simply celebrating by creating this, I know that with awareness and with marketing, I’m going to fill up these 12 month private coaching spots, right? So in your case, instead of thinking, Oh, what if this doesn’t work, does it even, does it even matter if I participate?
Should I even, I am going to encourage you to just give it a try. Use my templates, be as prepared as you can be, set goals for yourself, but know that in the grand scheme of things, even participating is a huge, huge win. And coming from experience, even if it’s a fail, it doesn’t mean that just the year after you can get thousands and thousands of dollars. So let’s get to work, right?
The Wanderlover Black Friday Offers
All right, so I want to end this episode letting you guys know what we have in store for you and giving you my dear podcast listeners, the opportunity to sign up if any of these offers align with you, just message me on Instagram or shoot me an email.
The first offer we have is for the Wanderlover Business Academy. You can, this is my eight week self-study course for those of you starting from scratch. Maybe you’re at a corporate job and you don’t know which way, which direction to take your online business or you are not monetizing in a way or you are not monetizing and you don’t have the systems to monetize. The Business Academy is an eight week course designed to help you turn your passions into profits online and help you reach your first 5K month in business for Black Friday. I am also offering every single person that signs up in the month of November, a free 90 minute goal mapping session with me where we can decide exactly which business idea to move forward with and create a custom action plan for 2023.
So you’re gonna be able to bounce your ideas off with me. I’m going to offer you some advice. I’m going to offer you custom advice. I’m gonna be able to see your blind spots, and we’re going to create a month by month action plan and that’s all included in our Business Academy Black Friday deal. You can purchase for $997 or you can get started for 397, and I will include the free goal mapping session, which you can book in as early as this week if you would like to get started immediately.
The next offer we have for you is a one hour power call at client pricing. So with all of my private clients and past clients, they are able to book in coaching sessions for half price instead of 9 97. You can book in an hour power session with me for $497. And this is for anyone who has a specific question. Maybe you are feeling stuck in your business and you just want a really transformational and you just want a really transformational one-on-one call. You can pick my brain. This is for you.
The third offer that we have is our first virtual VIP days. I have not announced this yet, but this is going to be a full day where we work together to get you and your business to the next level. There’s only four spots available for this year and what this can look like. So let’s say you are just starting out as an entrepreneur and you’re still in corporate. What we can work on are mindset reframes with someone who has quit their corporate job to build their dream life. We can map out a 2023 timeline for you as well as action steps on what exactly to execute on in your business month to month. This can also look like a day with me if you are an intermediate entrepreneur, but you’re feeling like you’re juggling all the pieces in your business and you’re just feeling so overwhelmed because there’s so much going on and you are doing it all.
I can help you see the bigger picture, plan out the bigger picture, and also how to streamline your business. So you are maximizing output for little input, right? We are going to give you a strategy so that you’re not being constantly overwhelmed and you can make more money as you scale. It’s so important you have this foundation in place so you can grow without, so you can grow effectively if you are an advanced entrepreneur and you just want this VIP day to help you think even bigger. If you’re going through the motions day to day and you’re either seeing income stagnation or you just feel like you’re inside your comfort zone, that I can help you reach the next level for 2023.
So if any of these sound like you and it’s an aligned opportunity, please reach out for a virtual VIP day and for Black Friday you also get access to the Business Academy valued at $997. But you get all of this for, but you get all of this for $5,000 and there are payment plans available. The last offer we have for you, there is only one spot for this. So if it’s one of my podcast listeners, I would obviously love to have one of you in this container. But you can lock in the 2022 rate for three or six months of private coaching before prices go up next year.
So this looks like $9,000 at $3,000 a month for three months or 20 or $15,000 or $2,500 for six months. And as long as you book in your first goal mapping session before the end of the year, you can lock in this price. So if looking for a bigger picture account, so if you’re looking for a business coach who is going to keep you accountable through the holidays into next year, and if you are ready to step into the next level, then please dme, I will send over an application and we can book you in for a discovery call to see if private coaching is the right fit for you.
So these will be the four offers we are launching and promoting during Black Friday this year. If you are interested in joining any of them, just shoot me a DM. And I hope this also gives you insight into how you can structure and package your offers to be the most effective and to invite those, those warm leads in your CO and to invite those warm leads in your community into your programs in an aligned way and in a way that makes you a lot of money as well. Hope this episode was helpful. Let me know if you have any questions. I will probably have resources that I can share with you if you need more clarification on anything.
But I am wishing you a fun filled and sales filled month. Remember, let’s not take our foot off the gas. November and December are huge, huge months for spending. So I really look forward to all the success you will gain in your business this month. Have an amazing week and I will see you all in the next episode. Bye guys. Love you all.
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