22 things you can do now to adapt and monetize your training content.

I have noticed something about trainers.

Most of them have the same frustrations when it comes to sales. As a lead generation consultant, I work with a lot of trainers and hear the same issues over and over again.

Are any of these comments familiar?

“I’m putting a lot of time and effort into sales but not getting any meaningful results.”

“I feel stuck in my career and don’t know what to do to get unstuck.”

“I don’t understand why other trainers have many more followers than me when my posts are just as good as theirs.”

“Not having a big social media following is preventing me from getting opportunities.”

“I don’t really have any plan for how to use social media so I’m just randomly posting stuff.”

“I’m creating a lot of different stuff but feel scattered and have trouble focusing on any project long enough for it to succeed.”

“I can’t figure out how to make money from my content.”

“I can’t be selling and delivering at the same time, so hours are long, and work comes in peaks and troughs.”

“I resent sub-contracting to larger training organisations because they leverage my expertise for most of the revenue, leaving me earning a fraction of my true value.”

“I have a ton of valuable content but only so many hours in the day – how can I develop passive income streams?

If any of those resonate with you (and I bet several do), then you are in the right place. In this post I will share sales strategies you can start using today to adapt and monetize your content based on work I have done with training clients. I have seen them work over and over again for different types of trainers.

They are split into four main sections:

• Your Goals
• Using Social Media
• Making your content sales ready
• Marketing & Sales Process Implementation

There is nothing here you can’t do yourself – if you have the time and inclination, but if you’d like some hands-on help, email me and I’ll be happy to share how we could work together.

Now, on to the strategies, first section is:

Your Overall Goal….

1.You do not need more sales (well, you might); but you must get more of the RIGHT sales.

The first question I ask a new training client is, “What are your goals?” And their answer always includes some version of “I want to get more sales.” That is an understandable answer, but it reveals a crucial strategic flaw.

Because you do not need more sales, you need the right kind of sales to help you accomplish your goals.

For example, if your goal is to work shorter hours by developing passive income streams, having 10,000 random people following you on social media is not likely to get you very far.

However, getting 50 niche influencers to follow you could have a huge impact on achieving your goal.

Your growth strategy should always be tied to your specific life goals – so define them and reverse engineer who can most help you achieve it.

2. Define your Dream Customers and their main Influencers.

Your success in growing sales is directly related to your ability to identify your dream customers AND who they are influenced by. The more specific the niche, the easier it is to find and connect with them the more likely you are to succeed. Your dream customers do not need to be the ONLY people who value your content, they are just the ones who are MOST LIKELY to.

Think dartboard: You get the most points for hitting the bullseye (smallest possible niche), but some shots will land outside the bullseye (non-dream customers) and still get you some points.

So, how do you define your dream customers? Try this.

If I guaranteed you 1,000 people would see your next post, who would you choose to see it?

Would they be male or female? Rich or poor? Married or single? How old would they be? What are their occupations? Who do they look up to professionally and follow online? What would their hobbies be? Where would they live? What are their hopes and fears? Where do they congregate online? What kind of language do they use? How could your content help them?

You would choose the people MOST LIKELY to value your content and whoever fits that description are your dream customers.

Once you identify your dream customers and their influencers, let those definitions guide everything else you do, including the platforms and methods you use to connect and communicate, as well as the content you promote and how you deliver it.

Social Media

3. Pick one platform.

Social media success requires a significant commitment of time and energy —spread yourself too thin and the best results will elude you.

You can achieve success beyond your wildest dreams on any of the main platforms, so, pick your one or two (at most) favourite platforms to use and focus your energies on.

Do set up accounts in your name on every platform and just post a single thing on each directing people to follow you on the ones where you are active.

4. Focus on your Dream Customers & Influencers not your peers.

Only follow dream customers or their chief influencers.

One of the biggest mistake’s trainers make when it comes to social media is to post around topics that are only interesting to other trainers – only post with your dream customers & their influencers in mind.

Do not follow everybody who follows you. Do not follow random people in the hope they will follow you back. The more random the people you follow are, the more difficult it becomes to discover and connect with a specific audience. And do not be afraid to unfollow people – often.

The fewer people you follow, the better your feed will become. The better your feed becomes, the more valuable people and information you will be exposed to and the more likely you are to learn, connect, and discover opportunities.

Who you follow also sends a signal to the social media platform algorithms about your interests and therefore who may be interested in you.

5. Use social media to connect, not to broadcast.

The most common mistake trainers make with social media is to assume its purpose is to promote their content and treat it like a broadcast tool. That is the fastest way to wind up feeling like social media is an overrated waste of time. Yes, you can use social media to promote your content, but it is actually a poor broadcast tool – nowadays the algorithms mean few of your own followers will even see the content you share. On most platforms, you are lucky to get 10% of your followers to see one of your posts— unless you pay to promote them (more on that soon).

The real strength of social media is to use it as a connection tool.

It is a powerful way to connect with individual people, groups, companies, and influencers who you otherwise may not be able to reach. Using it in that way will generate way more value for you than simply blasting out links to your new post or asking people to come to one of your events for the 100th time.

Come up with a list of individual people – influencers – and group topics – that you would most like to connect with, then follow, interact with, and develop relationships.

Taken a step further, you can seek out relationships with people who have their own audience of others likely to value your content. For example, if your content is geared toward Agile techniques a single relationship with a person who runs a huge Project Management group or blog could be a career-changer for you.

The path to getting meaningful attention for your posts is not to just tweet them every day, it is to build relationships with others who are likely to enjoy and share them.

6. Do not waste your social media bio.

Do you know why people look at your bio on a social network? They are deciding whether or not to follow you.

Most likely they clicked your profile because they saw something you posted that somebody else had shared and were intrigued, so they want to learn more about you. But they are not really looking to know who you are — people are more selfish than that (which is not necessarily a bad thing by the way). They are trying to figure out if you are worth inviting into their own feed. The question on their mind is not, “What does this person do?” It is “What can this person do for me?”

Write your bio in a way that answers that question.

Explain the value people will get from following you. Reference your dream customers. Make it clear who your posts are for.

Take a look at your bio and think about how (or if) it encourages people to follow you and makes clear the value they will get from doing so.

Additionally, you should write an origin story – where you started out from, what were the bumps in the road and how you overcame them to be where you are. This helps people to ‘locate’ you and provides a foundation for them to like and trust you.

7. Your social media presence – reality show or magazine?

Most trainers post on their social media channels like episodes of a reality show — here is what I think, here is what I am doing.

That is fine if it is compelling, but in general it is more effective to approach your social media channels as magazine editor would.

Magazines are not about their publisher’s life. Instead, they feature curated content designed to provide value to a specific target audience. Why? So, advertisers will take space and sell their wares.

Not every one of your social posts needs to be about you (and they probably should not be). Take a magazine approach and curate as much content as you create.

Doing so will make it easier to attract an audience and easier to provide value to them more frequently because you do not have to create every single thing you share. Share stuff with credit and drive attention to others — please do not pass it off as your own.

8. Evergreen posts.

This one is not a universal rule because ultimately you need to produce what you are inspired to create, but…

There are major advantages to sharing timeless content on social media as opposed to posting things tied to whatever topical thing is happening today. A great topical post may do well in the moment, but its lifetime value is limited to less than 24 hours.

By comparison, a great post on lessons learned about your specialism has the potential to be relevant forever. That means you can repost it for years to come, adapt it for other platforms, expand or contract on the idea in videos or blog posts, and reap rewards from it forever. It is also likely to get shared by others for a long time (if it is great) and continue to grow in value.

It takes the same amount of time to create timeless content as it does topical content, but the value of evergreen content is infinitely higher.

You can certainly do both, but just keep in mind you will get more bang for your buck with creations with no sell by date.

9. Package related themes.

You know how TV creates recurring characters and sketches that pop up in multiple episodes? Do the same with your social media content.

It does not have to centre around sketches or characters but look for ways to package and brand particular types of posts and then feature them on a consistent and recurring basis.

Packaging your posts will make them feel bigger, strengthen your audience’s connection to you, and may even generate intellectual property you can expand and exploit in other arenas (e-books, webinars, podcasts, video, etc.) later on.

10. Reply and engage.

Comments — and specifically comments on other people’s posts — are the most overlooked opportunity on social media. The action is in the replies. It is in the comments. It is in the engagement.

You will often attract more attention by replying and adding value to somebody else’s social media post than posting your own – and this is especially true if you do not currently have a large following.

Look for opportunities to do this within your dream customers and about relevant topics to your specialism to unlock easy value. Don’t just leave meaningless comments or say “Great post!,” but work out how to add value to other people’s posts in the replies and in doing so you’ll reach a much larger audience than you would on your own.

A few things to remember:

This is not about trolling or getting into pointless comment wars. The goal is to provide value to the original poster and the audience interested in that post.

It is ok to comment with a link to your own content if they are relevant, but this is not just about self-promotion. You want it to be clear you are trying to help other people, not just help yourself.

Do not get discouraged if your initial comments do not generate any responses — that does not mean they were not seen. Commenting is a long-term play and when you do it consistently and authentically, you will see results.

Twitter is an ideal platform for this kind of engagement strategy because most people’s profiles are public, but it also works on just about any platform.

11. Become part of a non-training online community.

One of the best ways to attract new followers is to become an active participant in at least one (or more) online communities that have nothing to do with your specialism.

Pick one of your interests that aligns well with your dream customers and seek out online groups that cover that niche.

Join relevant communities and become an active participant in their conversations. Do not just join and promote your own stuff but look for ways to add value to the community and be active in the discussions in genuine ways. Doing this is a great way to build relationships with people who are likely to value your contribution and over time they will become true followers and supporters.

12. Get yourself a promotional partner (or two, or three).

Here is the simplest tip I can give you: Find somebody with a similar goal to yours who wants to reach a similar audience and team up to help each other.

All you have to do is strike an informal partnership where you agree to promote some of each other’s content to your mutual advantage.

Just make sure you pick somebody whose dream customers matches yours because otherwise their promotion will be to an audience unlikely to value them.

If you choose somebody with an aligned audience, it will drastically speed up your growth.

And if you really want to go for it, partner with several people— the more people you can team up with, the better it will be for all of you.

(Side note: A lot of the content you see going viral on social platforms is heavily boosted by secret “engagement groups” who agree to promote each other’s posts.)

Turning Content into Irresistible Offers

Running parallel to your efforts to raise your profile online, your other priority is to package and position your content so as you can take prospects and turn them into paying customers, then lead them up a value ladder.

Without a detailed understanding of your existing resources, I can only generalise below & hope the significance of the categorisation and price points are not lost on you!

Perceived value is everything here – for the last three in particular, you should aim for an offer feature listing that is 7-10 times your offer price

13. Free content

Just like the post you are currently reading; the purpose is to give something genuinely useful, without expecting anything in return. If putting some or all of the strategies into practise brings you new customers, I am thrilled. If it sparks interest in working with me, I am delighted, because we will begin on the right footing. Note though, I am only giving the ‘what’. I expect to get paid for the ‘how’ further up my value ladder.

14. Lead Magnets

You do expect something in back on this rung, so the perceived value of the content must outweigh the inconvenience for the prospect having to give you their email to get it. For example, my social media post could have offered you a remodelled version of this one titled ’22 secrets that will transform your training business’ – clicking the link would take you to an email capture page that triggers an acknowledgement & a PDF. Alternatives might be an e-book, video, e-learning module, an audio book, or DVD

15. Low Value offerings

Typically priced at £25-40, the purpose here is to offset any customer acquisition costs you may have incurred by mounting a paid campaign. In addition to the items mentioned above you could offer a discounted consulting call or a personal training needs analysis as an introductory ‘one-time’ offer to lead magnet responders.

16. Medium Value offerings

Short courses – £100-800 per person.

17. High Value offerings

£1,000+ per person. Longer and/or courses leading to accreditation

18. Specialist offerings

Masterclasses, Advanced levels, or library/e-learning access via subscription, knowledge communities, support contracts.

The Missing Link – a Sales and Marketing Funnel

“A Funnel? What’s a Funnel” I hear you ask. Well, the term actually embraces everything involved in the process of making folk aware of you right through to them becoming one of your most lucrative clients and probably, your friends too.

What you have done so far with social media and your content is built part of your funnel, but the vital part, the magic element that brings them together and turns them into gold, is the missing link.

A funnel knits together organic & paid online activity, SEO, email outreach, live/recorded/written messaging & content, web hosting, email list management & broadcast sequencing – all tailored to you and your dream customers.

The main advantage is automation does the heavy lifting while you focus on developing and delivering content.

Too good to be true? Well, getting one optimised is a process but simple funnels can be implemented quickly, cheaply and without specialist knowledge – as I will show.

Nevertheless, building and managing funnels is not for everyone and you may prefer to focus on your core skills and interest, so this is something else I handle for clients. If you want to talk about how I can help you set one up or run it for you, let me know.

19. Missing Link Part One – You have invested time and effort, now it is time to add some money.

Do not believe the myth that social media is a free shortcut to an audience — it is not.

It presents amazing opportunities, but those opportunities come with a cost. You will need to earn them.

That cost not only requires significant time and effort, but it often requires a financial investment as well to get where you want to go.

Before you throw up your hands and walk away, allow me to give some context and share the unfortunate mindset I too often see from trainers.

Imagine spending £26,000 to create a product and then refusing to spend any money to market it.

This is what some trainers do, and it is a big reason why they stagnate.

Hypothetically, if you value your time at £50 per hour (equivalent of a £100k annual salary) and spend 10 hours a week creating for a year, you will have invested £26k worth of effort in it.

This is common for any trainer, but many of you will have already invested far more.

Unfortunately, what is also common is for some trainers to balk at the thought of investing money to promote their creations or learn how to get them seen. They think they are being smart and cautious, but it is actually the opposite — they are being foolish & irresponsible.

If something is worth a £26,000 investment of your time to create, it deserves at least some additional investment to be discovered – even if you can only afford a minimal amount.

The trainers who succeed are the ones who take the promotion of their work as seriously as its creation.

If you are serious about building your business, you must be willing to make a financial investment into the promotion of your work and not just its creation.

Give yourself a real shot to succeed. Your hard work deserves it.

Here are two low cost ways to get started:

How to use paid ads to promote your content.

When you are ready to invest in the promotion of your work, one of the best and most cost-effective places to start is by running ads to promote your content to your dream customers.

Pick a piece of content you want to promote and think about the audience MOST LIKELY to value it.

You can get incredibly specific with targeting – here’s a basic overview of Facebook ad targeting.

Every piece of content you promote with an ad should be targeted to the specific audience most likely to resonate with that piece of content.

Do not pay to promote content to people who are unlikely to resonate with it!

Think about the post I promoted to catch your eye, why did it succeed?

(Side note: If your ad content is weak it will not work because even the best ads strategy in the world cannot make up for bad content.)

How to use ads to sell seats on your courses.

You can use this same strategy to promote your courses and sell seats. Let us say you want to sell seats for a Time Management course. You know this has appealed to salespeople, small business owners and managers in the past. So, set up three ads targeting three different audiences, each of whom live within 50 miles of the venue (post-COVID note – Zoom means geography ceases to matter!)

Each ad would include a plug for your show and link to buy seats in the text of the post. If your ad content is good, it will work, and you will sell seats. I know, because I have done this exact thing for lots of trainers and helped them sell lots of seats.

It will also be cheap – you should be able to get views for less than 5 pence per view and get people to click through to the ticket page for less than 50 pence per click. Cost per actual ticket purchase will vary a lot based on other factors, so you will need to test and see how it goes for you.

(Side note: If your ad content is weak it will not work because even the best ads strategy in the world cannot make up for bad content.)

Again, social media ads are incredibly powerful, but they can also get complicated to compose so this is something I often handle for clients. If you want to talk about how I can help you with it and run them for you, let me know.

20. Missing Link Part Two – Opted in Email lists.

This is another topic I could write a whole book about, but here is the short version.

There is no more valuable direct connection to your audience than an email address and the best way to keep them on your list is to give them entertaining and valuable content.

In general, you want to send to subscribers at least twice a month. It does not have to be complicated, but it should not just be promotional stuff. You should provide value to your customers, not the other way round.

And when you provide value to them, it creates value for you.

So far, you have had to earn (with time and/or money) all the traffic to your content. Crucially now, you are not at the mercy of the changing algorithms and Net Giant ‘slaps’ that have wrecked online businesses in the last 20 years. You control communication with a list that, if you have applied my advice carefully and imaginatively, has cost next to nothing to build. It is set to become your biggest asset. On average people in your space earn £1 per email address per month from their existing list! Some do considerably better than that – the perceived value and scarcity of your content is the key here.

To leverage the list, you must build offers, funnel and email sequences for all your Medium, High & Specialist products – keep the tone light, relate to their needs and the training journey they started with you already and they won’t feel ‘sold’ to….

Tell them about your course development plans and invite input to take the risk out of development – share your progress to build interest ahead of course launch & run competitions for early places/copies…I could go on, but I promised the short version!

21. Missing Link Part Three – The drudgery of the numbers will set you free.

No matter how many offerings you have or how simple or your complex your funnels are, there are a few key numbers to track closely:

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Initial Cart Value (ICV)

As long as ICV is =< CAC, you are building your list & expanding your customer base for nothing!

The other metric I mentioned above the relationship between list size & monthly yield.

As presumably your deliverables are proven, variances on the above are caused by only two things 1) Poor posts/adverts 2) weak perceived offer values – both of which can be fixed quickly and easily.

Consider the metrics the last time I ran this post:

I planned to spend $5 a day on it for 20 days. My assumption was if it landed me a single client that would more than pay for itself.

And it certainly has.

The “ad” I ran is really just promotion of a post on my Facebook page.

There were lots of positive comments, people tagging other comics to check it out, and people thanking me for putting in the time to share my expertise with them.

Referencing that the post took me hours to do write also probably helped in framing people’s opinion of what I had created.

Here are the results the ad generated in the first 20 days:

8,030 people reached

1,046 people clicked the link to read the post

108 post reactions

146 post saves (a huge number that shows how the audience valued it as a resource)

38 shares

£0.09 cost per link click

£106 total budget spent

All the traffic driven by the ads triggered additional organic sharing within the community of trainers which drove even more people to read the post.

So, though I paid for 1,046 people to read the article, organic sharing led 3,355 people to read it during that time period. It effectively cost me 3 pence per potential client!

Those are great numbers, but at the end of the day what matters is if all that attention translated to actual new leads and clients.

The answer is a resounding yes to both.

I have had dozens of trainers reach out to discuss working with me since launching this post — a couple have hired me already and a couple more are strongly considering it.

Because I do not mention exactly how I work with trainers or my fees in the blog post, potential clients who reach out do not know if they could afford me or not.

I cannot spend all my time on calls with potential clients who are currently unable to afford my services, so I wrote a simple email response to send to people who inquired about my work.

It is an overview of what I offer, how I work, and what I charge.

I customize it a bit based on a potential client’s initial outreach, but it looks roughly like this:

Hey NAME, glad you found the article helpful and thanks for reaching out. There are a few ways I work with clients:

I do 90-minute consulting calls for a $XXX fee.

I can recommend the tools you need to build your own sales funnel for £XXX fee.

I can work with you to develop and implement a custom overall strategy to accomplish your goals (specifics depend on your needs obviously). This is designed to help you figure out how to use social media and a sales funnel to build your customer base and ensure that the time, effort, and resources you’re putting in are being used efficiently to get you from where you are to where you want to be. It’s typically a two-month commitment for a fee of $XXXX per month but again, it depends a lot on what you need.

You can retain me to manage ad campaigns and funnel development starting from £XXXX (again, specifics depend on your needs)

If those options are out of your budget, send me a couple specific questions and I’ll be happy to give you a little free advice.

Let me know what you may be interested in and we can discuss next steps.

A couple of things to note about this email:

Sharing prices at this point filters out people who will not be able to afford me, so neither of us has to waste more time.

By offering two low cost options, I have created a way for people to work with me who may not be willing or able yet to go for the bigger packages. This offering allows them to hire me and dip their toes in the water, while still being worth my time.

By offering free advice to people who respond with a specific question, I get to help people and reward them for reaching out. It also starts a relationship and they may be able to afford me in future.

This email template makes it quick and easy for me to respond to anyone who reaches out after reading the blog post without taking much time.

22. Be consistent. Stick with it. Think long term.

Ok, I know that was a lot, but we have reached the last tip!

You certainly do not have to follow all the advice I laid out above, but whatever you decide to do make sure you are consistent, stick with it, and recognize it is a long-term game.

It is not about going viral (which is not really even a thing), it is about building something authentic and genuinely valuable. A true customer base who truly cares about you and your content.

These strategies will help you achieve that.

If you feel like you could use some additional help figuring out where to start and what to do, reach out and I’ll send you a version of my email without any X’s!.

Thanks for your interest and good luck!

One last thing…

I spent hours writing this because I want to help as many trainers as possible. I know it is hard out there and it is frustrating to see so many talented people not getting the results they deserve from simply because they do not know how best to approach it.

So, if you found these strategies helpful, I’d love it if you would share this post with others you know who could benefit from it directly or share it on your social media platforms.

Thanks.

Paul Doran