If you’re going to make Money on Black Friday, start planning for it now
Get your notebook out because this is one is chock-full of money-making strategies for this year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales frenzy.
If you’re going to make money on Black Friday, you’re going to need to create hype around your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales so your people will be virtually begging you to send them the buy button.
Not just for Black Friday, you can use these strategies any time you want to make a sale, launch a new product or promote your existing products.
Black Friday is when retailers cash in on Christmas buying spirit. People are in the mindset to shell out cash and it’s your job to make sure your products are out there front and center. After all, it’s your job to help your people – whether it’s learning how to knit the perfect sweater or helping people get a lower cost on Facebook ads and Black Friday is the perfect excuse for your audience to buy from you.
We’re going to make money this Black Friday in a 3-step approach:
- Create an offer that actually stands out
- Build hype
- And a secret weapon that I may or may not be using this Black Friday
To make money on Black Friday, you’re going to create an offer that stands out
But what if you have nothing to sell? What do you do? Luckily, I’ve got a few suggestions.
Make Money on Black Friday Strategy #1: Affiliate Roundup
Reach out to companies that you want to promote. Let them know what your audience is all about and that you would like to feature their product and ask them what kind of special offers (and affiliate offers they have) before you suggest it to your people. Not only are you making money on Black Friday but your people also get introduced to tools or software that will make their lives easier. It’s a win-win.
You can package your affiliate roundup as a PDF guide or email. Just remember that you can’t put Amazon links directly in your emails (as per their guidelines) but you can put the links in a PDF or blog post.
Make Money on Black Friday Strategy #2: Sell a live webinar, master class or on-demand training
Think of the top five questions you get asked all the time. Create a training that answers those five questions. Ask your audience to send in their burning questions ahead of time so they feel like they are part of the process.
This will be an exclusive live training where people are paying $7 or so to get in on it. You can then leverage this training to offer group coaching and then give them their $7 back in the form of a coupon when they sign up for the coaching program.
A fabulous perk about offering a live training is that you can turn the replay into an “Easy Yes” offer in the future to sell on your Thank You page.
Make Money on Black Friday Strategy #3: Create something small and fun
If you’ve always had a hankering to put out a mindset training or templates or something that’s a little outside of your norm… presell it for a low price. This is exactly what I did with Ditch the Ish last year – which by the way if you hate sales, you’re going to love Ditch the Ish! It’s 12 days of sales and mindset training and if you’re ready to amp up your energy for the holiday selling season, Ditch the Ish is made for you.
Make money on Black Friday Strategy #4: Have fun with your sales
If you already have products or programs available, you can always go with 25% off (yawn) or you can have a little fun and play around with your offers.
I did a “name your own price” deal when I launched Ditch the Ish and used ThriveCart to create a “name your own price”. You can start at $10 or whatever you want for the minimum and let them pay what they want from there. When I used this strategy last year, I also included an order bump for Trello Magic and made more money on Black Friday that way.
This strategy is especially easy to implement if you’re nervous when it comes to selling that live masterclass that I mentioned earlier. Let them name their own price and you can have order bumps or even offer a special coaching session or automatic upgrade for whoever pays the most. The most important thing is to just have fun with it.
Another way to have fun when pricing your Black Friday sales is a free tool called Bump Sale. The way Bump Sale works is that every time someone buys your product, the price increases by $1 or $5 (or whatever you set your pricing to) so it encourages people to buy early.
You could also consider raising the price of your Black Friday offers where the first 5 people get in at $100 and the next 10 get the deal at $150 then $200 for everyone else with normal price of $400.
Reach out to your payment processor or your platform like Podia or Teachable and ask them what kind of fun options you have to play with when it comes to pricing.
Another thing to play with is to offer a different sale item for each of the four days of the Black Friday – Cyber Monday weekend.
For example, you could have:
- Friday: Your signature course at a discount
- Saturday: A discount on another item or program
- Sunday: Buy one, get one free
- Monday: Product bundle (more on that later)
Each item is a one-day only sale if they miss it, they miss it. This also gives you a chance to feature more of your products or programs that your audience hasn’t heard about for a while.
Another way to have fun with pricing your Black Friday sales is to peel off bonuses from your signature course and sell that as a stand-alone offer. This is perfect for you if you already have a lot of content or a signature group coaching program.
For example, I could 100% sell my Five Figure Funnels (a bonus in the Love Your List program) as a stand alone product. I could probably sell that for even more than I sell Love Your List!
What bonus do you have that your people rave about all the time? What is the bonus or extra that they said really was the icing on the cake when it comes to your offer or program or product? Think about packaging that up as a stand alone offer to make money on Black Friday without having to come up with a brand new product.
Another thing you can do is beef up an offer you already have. Say you already have an e-book, you could offer a special Black Friday only offer. You could bundle in that live training I mentioned earlier as a free bonus when they purchase your e-book or give the first 10 people half an hour of your time or offer a website audit as a bonus.
Just think about something that you already have gathering virtual dust on your hard drive that you can add in as a bonus for this shopping season.
Another suggestion for making money this Black Friday is to collaborate with a biz bestie. To be honest, I’m probably going to be doing this one myself.
All you do is reach out to an online biz buddy and offer to do a bonus swap. You would give away something great to their audience as a Black Friday promo and they would give you something to give away to your audience as a promo.
Think of someone who serves your audience but in a different way – so if you’re a copywriter, a web designer would be someone great to collaborate with – if you’re a mom blog focused on creativity and bullet journaling, you could reach out to someone who does meal planning – you’re cross-pollinating your audience.
You keep your profits and they keep theirs but it helps make both offers more appealing AND neither of you have to create anything new – plus, you get a whole new set of eyeballs on your products & programs!
Another approach is to send out physical goods in the mail. When someone signs up for Love Your List, they are going to get a coffee mug on their doorstep in a few days. People love getting packages in the mail and it’s easy to forget about physical products as bonuses when you’re running an online business.
Another angle you can look at when it comes to making money on Black Friday is to offer a massive bundle to your audience. Of all the strategies I’ve been considering this year, I’m loving this one.
To put this one in action, you take content you’ve already created like challenges, webinars, blog posts or worksheets and package them up into an irresistible bundle.
Make sure the quality is there but what you’re offering is quantity. They get X amount of hours of content at an insanely affordable price. For this strategy, it’s all about the deliverables. You can even include some of the things you’ve given away for free that you’ve got hiding out in your vault (I know you’ve got some good ones). Maybe it’s time to let them see those freebies see the light of day again!
Speaking of bundles, another way to have fun with pricing for Black Friday is a mystery bundle.
This works great for physical products too! One of my favorite makeup You Tubers is Jeffree Star. Every black friday, he offers mystery boxes and people go bananas for them. If you’re thinking of going this route, Make sure there is a guarantee in there so if they spend $20 they are going to get at least $40 dollars worth of products or something to that effect.
The main thing about pricing your sales on Black Friday is to just have fun with it.
Maybe you could use Black Friday as an excuse to launch that program or membership offer you’ve been waiting to launch! You can offer it at a huge discount for the Black Friday promo and then raise the price afterwards.This way you have your beta testers in place AND you’ve finally launched it!
Building Hype to Make Money on Black Friday
Now that we’ve talked about all the ways you can make money on Black Friday with your offers, let’s talk about creating hype around you and your business.
One thing I’m doing this year is creating a VIP waitlist for my Black Friday offers (you can get on it by going to katedoster.com/blackfriday). The people on the VIP waitlist will be able to get in on the sales early and I’m giving my wait listers a discount just for signing up.
You can let your VIP list get in on the offer on Tuesday at the biggest discount and then have the price go up a little by Thursday and then on Black Friday, the offer goes to the normal Black Friday sale price.
You can have a lot of fun with this! Plus, you’ll be able to leverage some social proof with people who buy early. Have them tag you on social media, screen shot their wins and use that to promote to the rest of your list when the big Black Friday sale rolls out.
Having a Black Friday VIP waitlist is definitely going to help you stand out.
You can’t create hype around your upcoming Black Friday sales without emailing your people so from now until Black Friday, you’re going to be emailing your list. Don’t freak out if you haven’t emailed your people in forever, I’ve got you covered.
Start today by emailing them 4 free tools or apps that will make their lives easier. That’s how you’re going to get your foot back in the door. Then next week, send them the “One Sentence Email”. What’s that? It’s an email with one simple question:
“How’s everything going with _________ (what your people struggle with)?”
Whatever your main thing is in you business, just ask that one question.
That’s two weeks down and you’re already starting to re-engage your audience! (I told you I have you covered)
Next you want to take some time to sit down and brainstorm about what your people struggle with the most. Write down every single “yea but” question your people are going to have when it comes to your offer…
So if you’re selling meal plans, the “yea buts” might be:
- Yea I want to meal plan but it costs too much money
- Yea but I don’t have enough time
- Yea but I never stick to it
- Yea but, yea but, yea but (you get the point)
Write down every single one – set a timer for at least 25 minutes because the longer you go, the deeper you’ll get on what’s keeping your people from hitting the buy button. The deeper you get, the more you’ll get past the practical excuses people use and get into the deeper mindset issues that people are facing (and that’s where the money is).
In your emails, tackle these “yea buts” for a couple of weeks before inviting them to join your VIP waitlist or letting them know that your Black Friday sale is right around the corner.
Speaking of, I’m a big fan of letting people know what’s coming up, so I’m going to tell people in advance that a big sale is coming. I’m letting them know to get their wallets ready because it’s happening on Black Friday. I’m excited about my Black Friday sales and can’t wait to share that I’ve got something special coming up for my people and then they get excited too!
In the last email or two before Black Friday, you need to start talking about your delivery method. Meaning, if you’re going to sell a group coaching program on how to write your first book, you’ll be talking about how to choose a topic, how to deal with impostor syndrome and the other big blocks that keep people from hitting publish.
Think about all the stuff that you want your new students to have taken care of before they sign up for your program. That is the kind of content you want in those emails to prepare them for your course.
So if your group coaching program is on writing a book, before announcing your official Black Friday sale, you would send an email that said something like:
3 Ways to Virtually Guarantee You Finish Your Book
The one thing that comes up for authors is that they have half-written manuscripts they never finish. I’m tired of seeing amazing authors who have what it takes to change the world and they are too afraid to hit publish.
So here are 3 tips to make sure your book doesn’t die a slow death in Google Drive
1 – tip
2 – tip
3 – Your methodology (group coaching, assignments, meeting people, having a writer’s group)
This way, it’s already in their mind that you’ve got the answer to what’s holding them back and then you introduce your program that shows them everything they need to NOT be one of those people.
In your emails you can let them know that you’ll be talking live about (issue) and they can bring their questions and ask you in real time. That’s a great way to offer massive value and put yourself front and center when it comes to being the answer to their struggle. You’re not only creating hype around your program but you’re also standing out.
Another way to build hype around your Black Friday sales is to tap into your social media network. Let them know you’re going to offer bonuses for your programs and let them make suggestions for the bonuses that they would like to see.
Ask your audience what they are struggling with the most. Post a survey where they can vote on the options that you are considering. Make them part of the creation process and get your people involved.
Speaking of getting them involved, the Monday before Black Friday, let your audience know you are releasing something special and post a pixelated picture of what it is. This is going to pique their curiosity and have them virtually begging you to let them know what it is!
To recap, making money on Black Friday can be easy and fun. Create an offer that you’re excited to sell, stand out from the crowd by packaging your offers in a unique way and build hype through your emails and your social media.
// Tool of the week: Trelloing for Traffic
Trelloing For Traffic – If you’re a fun loving blogger with over 12 tabs open now, who gets easily distracted and is drowning in a piping hot bowl of “I’m so overwhelmed!!”… Then Trelloing For Traffic is for you.
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