Your Upline is Full of Sh*t. Cold Messaging Won’t Build a 6-Figure Business. Do This Too!

Social Selling Simplified - Ashley Shaw

Let’s start with what most Network Marketers are up against…

When you first get started, if you’re sharing what you’re doing there’s typically a short period of success. This is typically because you’re likely sharing with your “warm market,” so to speak- which is your friends and family, or people you already know. You will probably see some traction from that, so if you’re being told to share your story and you’re seeing traction- it’s easy to think that that method works.(Now on the other side of this, sometimes a warm market is the hardest to sell to… because it’s not like you’ve become an overnight expert in whatever you’re promoting.) If your goal is to build a 6-figure business, you have to look at the scalability of what most uplines are telling you to do. (Most often, that advice is to cold-message people.)I used to work in the network marketing industry selling knives for a company called Cutco. I LOVED the product! I was in high school and there was no way I could ever afford my own set of knives like that- so becoming a distributor and getting a huge discount so I could purchase my own kit and talk about something I loved was absolutely the way to go for me. That’s what’s genius about network marketing. Here’s the problem: I was told to make a list of everyone I knew and reach out to them. After I did a demonstration for them, I had to ask everyone present to make a list of people I could reach out to and do another demo for. What ends up happening is that warm audience dwindles, and I was left relying on other people or other tools to grow my business.

Suddenly you have no control over the people you need to get in front of- and that’s where a lot of people burn out.

Having to rely on social media and sending individual messages is just like the old-school way of having to go door-to-door. The only way to do MORE of it and succeed is to be able to knock on doors and copy/paste your message even faster. (Yikes.)

If you want a surefire way to build a 6-figure business, you need to be able to plug into something bigger.

In the first three years of my business, I went from $0/month to about $10K/month, but inconsistently. Plus, it took me a reeaally long time to get to $10k a month! Within that next year, it took me just ONE year to go from $10k to $100k/month- and consistently. All I did was plug into a different formula I call the 6-Figure Growth Method!

In fact, I JUST taught a workshop teaching ALL about this on Monday, Sept 19th… but the replay is available for just this week! GET IT HERE!

At the top of the formula is your social posts. Next down is your lead magnet, and next is emails- which ultimately lead to customers.When you’re first getting started, social media is definitely going to be part of your organic growth strategy. This means you’re relying on your posts to be seen by people, but you’re probably not promoting them or using ads when you’re first getting started. You want to build a system that would allow you to start advertising… and that’s when I started scaling. I had a system that allowed me to turn ads on and make money with them.

Here are the three steps that took my business from trying to message people with no control to actually turning things around…

First step:

Create great content that actually gets seen and has great reach.

There’s a difference between posting just to post, and understanding the psychology behind what a post needs to look like and what the job of social media is. There are a few components you need to consider. The first is a hook, which is first line of a caption or on-screen text that draws people in to read more. There are multiple kinds of hooks you can utilize. (This is something I’m covering in my workshop!)Then there are several content themes you can rotate through for your caption. (Also covered in the workshop.)After your hook and your content theme, you need to end your post with a “Call to Action.” You’re putting these posts out as tests to see what your audience responds to. Once you see what’s working, you can start replicating it. This is how I’ve started to see more of my posts and reels go viral- which I’ve come to define as something getting twice the number of views as followers. (For example, if someone has 1,000 followers, a reel that got 2,000 views would have gone “viral” for that person’s account.)This way, when you start advertising, you’ll have a bank of content that you know works that you can boost!

You don’t need your sales to happen via social media. Social media is a vehicle to push them toward your lead magnet.

This will bring them to your second step:

Giving them a free piece of content.

Giving them a free piece of content that will help build trust, values and authority- proving to people why they should listen to you, and getting them on your email list. (They typically need to give their email address in order to download the lead magnet.)

Email will make sure they’re actually going to see your messages, rather than the low delivery rate of social media.

Your third step:

Use your emails to nurture them and eventually convert them into customers.

A couple of years ago, I could make $26,000 in sales from sending just a few emails. There’s no comparison with social media! (Can you imagine making that from a couple of posts?)As you’re building your email list, you’ll want to consistently monitor the open rate of those emails. You can have ongoing conversations and provide ah-ha moments, explaining why you might have a solution to problems they are facing.

Once you start utilizing social media in this way, with lead magnets and email to move people along that “customer value journey,” THAT’S when you have something scalable.

The cherry on top is adding ads to the process! Suddenly you can get in front of FAR more people, but now you have a path you’re automatically leading them down that works on its own.The biggest difference between scaling a business and not being able to is how many people you can talk to in a day. If this is something you’re missing in your business, you’ll definitely want to check out our Authentic Marketing Funnel Membership, which was designed to provide all of this for you! We created it so you wouldn’t have to create all of the necessary content yourself- posts, reels, emails, lead magnets, etc…and we help all types of health, beauty, and wellness network marketers actually scale their businesses. Take a closer look at it here!

Key Takeaways From This Episode:

• The secret to having a 6-figure business is whether or not you have a system that is scalable.
• Relying on DM’s is like going door-to-door.
• Use social media to test what content your audience responds to, and repeat more of that.
• Drive your audience to give you their email address in exchange for a free, valuable lead magnet- because the email list is where you’ll build relationships and make sales.
• Once you have this system in place, you can utilize ads and watch it grow!

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

My book, F*ck What Your Upline Said.My Free Workshop Replay: “Your Upline is Full of Sh*t. Cold Messaging Won’t Build a 6-Figure Business. Do This Too.”

WHERE WE CAN CONNECT:

• www.ashleyshaw.ca
• Ashley Shaw – The Fitness Leader Institute
• @theashleyshaw
• Join the Facebook Group: Business Bootcamp for Fitness Coaches

Don’t forget….. If you loved this episode, screenshot it and share it to your IG stories and tag me @theashleyshaw. I would love to connect with you!