Direct sales can be an overwhelming monster if you don’t know where to focus your energy. Even though there are only five major components (website sales, landing pages, crowdfunding, subscriptions, events) within those categories are thousands of success paths.

Even just setting up a mailing list comes with hundreds of options from hosting to designing your email sequence. However, there are some major components of every direct sales environment that help foster success.

While I can’t tell you what email platform to use, I can show you the elements you should put in place before you can start scaling your author business.

This stuff is hard and most people run away from it instead of digging in. Just remember, things grow where you exert effort. Additionally, there is evidence to support we find joy where we exert effort.​

That said, it’s really hard to get started with direct sales. There are all sorts of reasons why this is true, but the main one is that you have created a pump, but what you really need to create is a flywheel.

What is the difference? First, a pump.

A pump works by expending force on a level and getting a predictable return from the first pump to the last. It’s a very good encapsulation of Newton’s third law.

We think that building an audience is a pump, but it’s really a flywheel.

In common language, a flywheel takes a ton of effort to get going, but with each rotation, it gets easier and easier to keep the flywheel going. If you want to see a really good primer on this, I highly suggest watching this video.​

When people ask me how I keep doing this work, I tell them it’s actually really easy to keep at it once you get your flywheel going.

Those first pushes are impossible, but eventually, you can keep a flywheel going with a light touch.

When you combine this with a marketing funnel to bring people into your universe, you create a virtuous sales cycle.

If you’re creating a business where you funnel people in and then create a flywheel to keep your business going, it becomes easier over time.

So many people who have been doing this for years are still making a pump. You need to get past the days of putting in one unit of effort and getting one unit of engagement back, and start trying to make your flywheel sustainable.

This is the biggest reason I just can’t ever stop doing this work because I know that it will be impossible to start again.

Let’s dive a little deeper into each of these components.

Building your Ideal client avatar

Before we can start building the elements of your environment, we need to know who will “live” in that environment. These are the “ideal clients” who will find your environment a perfect fit.

Think about penguins. If you bring them to the Sahara, the penguins will have a bad time, but if you put them in the chilly Antarctic, they’ll be happy little buddies. The Sahara is the perfect place for camels and scorpions, though. There are no perfect environments. It’s all about matching the customers with the right environment. We do that by creating an ideal client avatar.

While “ideal client avatar” sounds like marketing gibberish, it’s one of the most important principles to understand if you want to build a career in the arts—or any career, frankly.

An ideal client avatar represents the person who most resonates with your message and is thus incredibly likely to buy your product. It is the virtual representation of your perfect customer.

There are two factors that come into play that help determine your ideal client avatar. The first factor is somebody who has a very high customer lifetime value. The second factor is a person with a very low customer acquisition cost.

Customer lifetime value is the amount somebody will buy from you over the course of their life. Your ideal customer will be the type of person who spends at least a hundred dollars on your products every year. This is a concept made famous by Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired. Kelly wrote a piece on his blog in 2008 called “1,000 True Fans,” which became one of the definitive pieces on building an audience with its claim that if an artist can find one thousand people willing to spend one hundred dollars a year on their work, then they can successfully make a living on their art. Even though I have issues with this theory, I hope we can all agree that generating $100,000 in income would make a very successful year.

Conversely, customer acquisition cost is the amount of money it costs to find a new customer and make a sale. Between tabling at conventions, sending mailing list updates, advertising, and all of the other monetary outlays that come part and parcel with finding a client, the less we spend acquiring a client means we make more money at the end of the day.

Simply put, your ideal client avatar is the person most receptive to your message and the person with whom you most want to speak.

It has to be both.

There will be people you want to speak with who have no interest in your message, and people who want to hear your message that you don’t care about at all. The ideal client avatar is the beautiful merging of these two points.

So…how do we find our ideal client avatar?

First, we must find the type of people who inspire us to create. This will take some deep reflection, but you know there is a person in your life who will love your product more than anybody else. This doesn’t have to be your family. It can be a friend or even somebody you aren’t that close with, though I highly recommend staying inside your close friend circle at first.

Have you thought of somebody? Good. Then, let’s build an avatar.

To start forming our ideal client, we need to test whether that person will be the right fit to buy what you are trying to sell. Remember, just because you want to make products for somebody doesn’t mean your products will resonate with them.

To find out if somebody is a good fit, we have to look at their social media feeds for a while to see what kinds of stuff they like. We need to make sure they are buying what you are selling. If you want to make death metal pins and they are buying fluffy bunny plushes, you are barking up the wrong tree and need to start over.

Once you are relatively confident that they buy the same type of stuff that you want to make, it’s time to interview them. It doesn’t have to be anything formal, but you want feedback about why they buy what they buy. Do they like bright colors or are they more into texture? Does size matter? What is it that resonates with them when they buy something?

After you have that interview, it’s time to make some different products and show them to your ideal client. This is why using an immediate friend or family member is easiest because they will be open and receptive to looking at your product. This is also why it’s best not to pick your mother or anybody who will automatically love anything that you do. You want real and honest feedback about whether you are doing something that resonates with your ideal client.

This interview isn’t about selling your product, but you need to know if they would buy what you are trying to sell. If you can’t tell whether or not they would buy your product, push harder. This is critical research and if you get it wrong then your business will suffer and you will have to start again. You don’t want to build the wrong customer avatar.

Once you’ve done your research, it’s time to rock and roll into mass production, right? Absolutely and unequivocally not.

You don’t want to go into mass production just yet. After you have a good idea that your work will resonate with the right person, you need to find other people who will also be perfect fits for your product. This is the beginning of the ideal client avatar.

Create a profile of your ideal client based on your initial research. This profile needs to be as complete as you can make it. Your ideal client avatar should feel like a real person who lives and breathes. Your profile should include their name, age, ethnicity, interests, personality traits, favorite foods, favorite TV shows, favorite movies, favorite bands, favorite websites, and anything else you can think of to make your avatar feel like a real person.

Once you have the profile created, use it to find five to ten other people who fit your ideal client avatar. Replicate the same process you used before. Interview your potential customers and show them your product just as you like did with the original person.

Some of the assumptions you made about your ideal client will be correct and some will be wildly misinformed. That’s okay. That’s how it should be. Use the new data you collected from these interviews to recreate your ideal client avatar and focus it more clearly. Your avatar will now become more complete and fleshed out because you have five to ten times the research data.

After finding five to ten people who love your product, it’s time to test your ideal client avatar on people you don’t know.

To do this, you need to create a small batch of products. Then, find a craft fair, comic convention, or job fair where your ideal client avatar exists in the real world. Bring your products to this event. Find people who resemble your ideal client and see if they rabidly buy what you are selling.

If they do, use your new data to compile a more complete customer avatar. If they do not, analyze why they are not buying your product, make corrections to your avatar, and try again. The more people you speak with, the more complete and real your customer avatar will become.

The stronger your ideal client avatar, the more you will be able to focus on creating a product for the right kind of person, lowering your customer acquisition cost, and increasing your lifetime customer value. Then, you can use all that data to find more people who fit that profile, which is the key to scaling your creative business.

It’s also a good idea to become a consumer of the things you want to make. I meet creators all the time who don't buy the things that they sell. There is nothing wrong with this on the surface. You are not required to be your own perfect customer.

However, you should go on the journey with the customer, so you can see the world through their eyes. I have run a lot of companies in my life, and the more I used the products I was selling, the more I could understand the pain points of the customer. I understood what the customer wanted because I was the customer.

Surveying your audience is a great way to understand their needs, but there is nothing like the firsthand account of walking around a convention and seeing what catches your eye. There's nothing like reading the most popular books in your field and saying, "I liked when they did that.”

By consuming the books you are writing, you develop a better understanding of what your readers like and what they don’t like by experiencing them yourself.

This kind of research is invaluable to communicating with your customers. It creates an in-depth dialogue. I believe that I sell 10 – 20 percent of my products on passion alone, but it goes deeper than that. People respond to my passion because I'm passionate about the same things they are. They know I have gone on the customer journey with them, seen what was broken, and did my best to fix it.

That last bit is important because no customer journey is perfect. There are wonderful things about every market, but there are also things so glaringly broken it’s frustrating for people. If you understand the joy and the pain of your customer, you can make a product perfect for them, and articulate why it is perfect. That last bit is the most important part of any sale.

Turning a cold prospect into a warm lead

Before we get to your customer’s journey, we have to first talk about why we even need to take them on a journey, and to do that we have to talk about cold prospects and warm leads.

A cold prospect is a person you just met who doesn’t know you from Adam. They don’t know your brand, they don’t know what you offer, and they have no interest in buying what you have to sell…yet.

Cold prospects have no affinity for your product. Until you met, they had no idea who you were as a creative. That doesn’t stop most creatives from seeing this initial meeting as a chance to sell their product. Of course, these efforts are a miserable failure since cold prospects don’t buy products.

This makes complete sense when you think about it in your own life, doesn’t it? I mean, how often do you go from discovering a new product to buying it on the same day? It doesn’t happen very often in my own life.

I usually have to sit on a product for days, if not weeks, before I buy something. I need to groove on the cost and the value. I have to research the company and make sure it aligns with my values. I have to determine that the product won’t turn to dust in my hands after use. My money is precious to me. I worked hard for it and want to make sure I give it to worthy people.

This is how most people see buying products, and it’s why they generally buy from brands they know. When I need a hammer, I go to Home Depot because they are a brand I know. I’m not a cold prospect for them. I’m in their warm lead audience.

Warm audiences are full of people who know and trust your brand; they are the people working their way through the inside of your funnel. They gain value from what you do and are convinced your brand offers quality products. To build the most engaged audience, we need to turn as many people from cold prospects into warm leads as possible.

The system we’re setting up is designed to take a customer from a cold prospect to a warm lead, and eventually into a burning hot ember excited to buy from you.

Mapping your customer journey with a sales funnel

Now that we’ve defined your customer, we need to define their customer journey.

Very few customers will ever close on a deal the day you meet them. Customers need time to get to know you, like you, and build trust with you before they buy your product or service. What you do today is predictive of your success in six to eight weeks.

That’s right.

Your hard work today won’t pay off for nearly two months. This is what hampers many artists from growing their businesses. They give up before they can ever realistically succeed. We live in a world of instant gratification, and success in business is a long-term payoff. Over time, your hard work compounds through the success of your sales funnel.

A sales funnel is no different than a funnel you would use in your kitchen or to put oil into your car—wide at the top with a narrow bottom. Into the top of the funnel goes potential customers and out the bottom comes clients. It’s as simple as that.

There are five stages in my sales funnel. The first stage is that people need to know you exist. This is called the Awareness stage.

At this stage of the funnel, you aren’t trying to find the right clients. You are simply looking for as many potential customers as possible. The rest of the funnel will weed out people who are bad matches for your product, and leave you only with perfect fits. You need to cast the widest net possible at this stage, because the wider the top of the funnel becomes, the wider it will be at the bottom.

Let’s assume you need to talk with one hundred people in order to find one client. If you only talk to twenty people a month, you will not find a new client for five months. In this case, by simply talking to five times more people, you can find a client every month. If you increase that to two or three hundred people a month, you can find two to three clients a month. This alone can exponentially increase your revenue.

The second stage of the funnel is getting people to like you. This is called the Consideration stage.

This is when we start narrowing the funnel down. We need to push out content that is attractive to our ideal client, whether that means sharing comic book pages, short stories, or articles about pandas.

Whatever you share, it should be hyper-targeted to your ideal client. If it is, then people who are interested in the things you are sharing will grow to like you. Meanwhile, people who aren’t interested will drop out of your funnel before you invest too much energy in them.

This is the stage where people fall out of your funnel the most. You shouldn’t be nervous when people unfollow you or unsubscribe from your mailing list at this point. My mailing list has a 31 percent unsubscribe rate in the first couple of weeks of somebody joining. I love that number because it means I’m weeding out the people who don’t care about what I do.

This process of showing people what you do, building empathy with your ideal client, and weeding out ones who don’t care about your message is one of the most powerful tools in business. Unfortunately, because of our natural need to be liked, we shy away from offending anybody. As a result, we try to please everybody and thus attract nobody.

Weeding out people who don’t fit your product is a natural part of business. You shouldn’t care about those people anyway, because they won’t buy from you. Heck, they don’t even like you. Your job isn’t to please people who have no interest in what you are doing with your business. Your job is to connect with as many people as possible and let the right ones self-select to be part of your network over the long haul.

The third stage of the funnel is making people trust you. This is called the Decision stage.

This is the trickiest part of the funnel. Everybody left at this stage of the funnel is in your ideal customer pool. Now, you have to convince them to buy your product. Even within your ideal client pool, there will be people who don’t like your specific take and won’t buy.

Take a car for instance. Even among car buyers, some people want the most reliable vehicle for their family, others want a sports car with the fastest engine. Still, others want the most luxurious ride on the road.

That’s why car companies have multiple brands and models. There are many features people might want, and it’s critical to target the right message to the right customer. If we didn’t have different needs, then everybody would be driving around in the same beige Honda Accord, right?

But we aren’t driving around in the same cars. There are more than a hundred different types of cars on the road, all with different features, sold by different companies, under different brands. They all capture a different part of the market. They all speak to a different type of person.

The same is true with your product. If you create high-end geek chic necklaces that cost $100 or more, then you are isolating yourself from people who are looking for cheap charms, and isolating yourself even more from people looking for an art print, or a comic book.

And that’s natural. That’s good. Heck, that’s necessary to create a sustainable business. This is what finding the right client for your product is all about.

The fourth stage of the funnel is making your customer happy. You have proven you are the right person to help them. Hooray! You’ve got a customer. Now we have to keep them happy so they buy again. This is called the Retention stage.

Notice there are three stages in this funnel before buying your product even comes into the equation. There will be people in your funnel who know you but won’t like you, like you but won’t trust you, and trust you but won’t buy from you.

We can see this play out in our own lives. We all have a coworker we hate but can’t get rid of, or a family member we love but wouldn’t trust with a dollar of our money. We all have those people in our lives, but we also have a friend we would gladly give money to because we know they’ll use our money to do something awesome.

The same is true with your business. Most people won’t buy from you. When I go to a convention, I’m lucky if one percent of people sign up for my mailing list and 10 percent of those people ever buy from me. Even at a convention like San Diego Comic-Con, where I make thousands of dollars, I only sell a few hundred books and there are over 160,000 people in attendance.

But that’s okay. In fact, that’s how a funnel is supposed to work. This year we were set up in the small press area of San Diego Comic-Con, which meant people who came down our aisle self-identified as people who liked independent comic books. That already narrowed the field of potential customers down quite a bit.

From there, all I had to do was engage with as many people as possible so that some of them would like me, and some of those people would trust me, and then some of those people would buy from me.

In the end, by knowing how many people would attend the event, I could accurately predict how much I would make, and next year I can make an even more accurate prediction because I have even more data. This is the power of the funnel. If you understand how it works, you can predict the revenue for your entire business months into the future.

The final stage is about building evangelists who will tell other people about your work. The absolute best marketing comes from word of mouth. When other people talk about your work to their friends, it’s much easier to get others to buy than from your own marketing efforts. This is called the Advocacy stage.

This can include providing referral links, building a strong community, offering giveaways to readers, or generally showering them with love. Most importantly, it involves creating mind-blowing products people can’t help but talk about with other people. This is called network effects.

This is not an effect contained to your buyers, either. One of the best ways to generate network effects is among other creators doing interesting work. You can create a recommendation network through platforms like Substack, Sparkloop, or Beehiiv to cross-promote with other creators.​

A quick story about network effects, and how when one creator wins the whole network wins. Laura Kennedy from Peak Notions was interviewed and spotlighted by Substack.

I love Laura’s work, so I was rooting for her really hard when I read it, but throughout the day I noticed that I was getting dozens of free subscribers to my Substack.

I usually get 20-30 a day, so I was very confused to get 60+ in just a couple of hours. It took me a while to think “Wait, doesn’t Laura recommend The Author Stack?”

So, I checked and her publication had sent me 50 recommendations that day. Laura ended up getting 1,500+ subscribers from that article, and I received over 100 because she recommended my publication. You never know where those surges will come from, but they can be very powerful if you set them up properly.

I have over 100 publications recommending mine, and I recommend a bunch, too. Every month I get 300-500 from it and everyone else gets a bit from me I hope. Nobody needs to do the bulk of the work when everyone is working together.

There is one more point I want to make before ending this section. When you start selling your work, a small number of people will buy from you immediately. This is because you have spent decades building up trust with certain people in your life. Those people have already worked their way to the bottom of your funnel and are ready to make a buying decision the moment you launch your storefront. Once those people work their way through the bottom of your funnel, though, there won’t be anybody left to buy your product if you haven’t built out the top of your funnel properly.

I’ve seen far too many creatives tell me that lots of people bought their book in the first month of release, but they haven’t seen another sale for over a year. This happens because they relied on their existing network to buy their product initially, and once those people flushed out of their funnel there was nobody to replace them. Remember, a funnel is only as good as the number of people you put into the top of it.

Building a sales funnel into your mailing list

While social media is nebulously fine for our mental health, there’s no doubt some people will find it effective to drive traffic into your sales funnel. However, social media shouldn’t be the main crux of your funnel. Your funnel should live on a website, and be mainly delivered by your mailing list.

We are programmed to think of newsletters as spam and mailing lists as evil. They don’t have to be spam, though, and they certainly aren’t evil. If you set it up in the right way, a mailing list is the most effective form of online marketing in existence for building empathy and trust with your customers.

The truth is that a mailing list is only annoying if the information is unwanted. When I think about annoying emails, I think about Target. They send me so many emails filled with promotions and coupons. I hate those! I’m not going to Target just to save thirty-five cents on a bucket of toilet paper!

But that’s just me. Not everybody feels that way.

There are lots of people who love Target. There are people who really, really want to hear what Target has to say. They shop at Target every week. They need toilet paper and are always looking for a bargain. For those people, Target isn’t sending junk. They are sending incredibly valuable information.

That’s how we must look at our mailing list.

It’s not about spamming people. It’s about offering incredible value to the people who want to be touched by your message. Customers love to be touched by the brands they love. If you consistently provide new and interesting information, your ideal customers will gobble it up.

This won’t be everybody on your list or even most people who sign up. Many people who sign up to your mailing list will think it’s spam. They will unsubscribe. Good! I have a 31 percent unsubscribe rate on my initial emails and I love it.

A flywheel doesn’t work if we’re bringing in the wrong people to our funnel, which is why having a good autoresponder sequence is critical to your success; to funnel out the wrong people and engage the right ones.

An autoresponder, or indoctrination sequence, is an automated series of emails your subscribers start receiving after they sign up for your email list. These emails are staggered throughout several days or weeks so that people unfamiliar with your brand learn who you are and what you do.

This autoresponder becomes the main delivery mechanism for your sales funnel. With every email, you break through one of the objections holding people back from buying and help them build a deeper connection with you. Ideally, you would use them to deliver something akin to a sideways sales letter for each of your major series.

You are basically showing off your series over several different emails that rely on different psychological triggers to get people excited to read it.

You should have a different autoresponder for each core product you’re launching and they should rely heavily on these psychological triggers.

There are six essential buying triggers that have stood the test of time. They work in any creative field with any set of potential customers.

Commitment – When somebody willingly commits to joining your community, they are more likely to buy your product. This is the main value to people joining your mailing list, or wearing a button, or even taking a flier. They make a commitment when performing that action. It signifies they are part of your community. The more actions they take, the more commitment they build.

Every time they open a newsletter from you and don’t unsubscribe, they are affirming that commitment. Every time they like one of your tweets or share a Facebook post, they are affirming their commitment to your brand again and again. The more you can enforce that commitment through words and actions, the more likely you are to have an enthusiastic ambassador for your brand—one who buys all your stuff.

Reciprocity – When you do something nice for somebody, they want to help you. That’s just human nature. Knowing this, you need to provide value for your potential customer before you ever ask for a sale. Once you have provided incredible value through advice or some sort of free content, then people will gladly give you money, because you have helped them and treated them like a human being.

Social Proof – Human beings want to be part of the “in” crowd. If you can prove that other people are using your product, everybody else will want to use it, too. The hardest sales to make at conventions are the first ones. Once there are people running around the show floor with your product, other people are more likely to want it, as well.

Your work becomes valuable to a customer because other people saw the value in it already. People want to buy what their peers bought. They don’t want to be left out in the cold. If you can show your customer that people they like and respect use your product, then you are more likely to convince them to buy it, too.

Scarcity – When you limit the available quantity of a product, customers become increasingly likely to make a buying decision in the moment. People believe products will be around forever and that they can always buy it later. When they realize a product is in limited supply, they are forced to make an immediate decision. This works wonders for people sitting on the fence about buying your product and also for people who desperately want your product but need a little push to finally take action.

Authority – If you can demonstrate that you are an expert in your field, people are more likely to buy your product over somebody else’s. This is how you stand out above every other creative doing exactly what you do. They choose you because you are an expert in your field.

To prove your expertise, it’s important to have consistently high-selling products for a long time, and it helps if you’re able to teach other people how to do what you do. Another way is to write guest posts on other blogs, share your work on podcasts, or speak on panels. You can also use platforms like Medium and Kickstarter to build expertise, as the platform’s authority can be transferred to you.

Liking – If somebody has a positive connection to you, they are more likely to buy from you. Think about it: You are more inclined to buy from somebody you like than somebody you don’t care about, right? Of course you are.

The truth is that 10 percent of people will like you, 10 percent of people will hate you, and 80 percent will feel nothing for you. Your job is to focus on selling to the 10 percent who like you while nudging some of that 80 percent from indifference toward liking you.

All of these buying triggers are essential for the long-term growth of your business. They are powerful on their own, but if you can mix them together, you will increase your sales exponentially.

Some of these triggers take time to build into your business—authority and social proof won’t happen overnight. Others, like scarcity and commitment, you can build into your sales funnel today using evergreen countdown timers

Even if it takes time to seed some of these triggers into your business, it’s important to have a plan to incorporate every one of them eventually.

Building your value ladder

Now that we’ve built a sales funnel, let’s talk about the actual sales part. What do we actually sell to people who enter our funnel? That’s where a value ladder becomes an essential component of your environment.

I can’t tell you exactly how to price your books. Pricing depends on whether your work is a print or an original, how long it takes to create, and the mass market viability of what you are trying to sell. You need to research data on comparable products to find out what the market will bear. Luckily, there are places like Etsy, Amazon, and Kickstarter, which are great research tools to find comparable products in your market space.

That being said, I can tell you that there are four types of offers you need before you can enter the marketplace effectively. These four types of offers have been tested rigorously in all sorts of market conditions and always bear out successfully. I have found them incredibly effective in all types of creative fields, from book sales to prints and even informational products.

Offer #1: Freebies – Freebies are critically important to getting noticed in the market. Most people think of freebies as business cards and fliers. While those are important, they’re not the freebies I’m talking about. In this scenario, what you want are nicely created, yet simple to make, pieces that can be given away for free in exchange for an email address.

Your most effective marketing is still an email newsletter. People guard their email addresses with their lives. If you want them to part with their email and join your community, you need to offer them something nice, which makes you synonymous with quality.

These freebies don’t have to be expensive or labor-intensive to make, but they should be of exceptional quality. The key to this is the exchange of free merchandise for an email address. When people give away their email addresses, they are giving away something of value to them, and you should make sure you respect that value by giving them something well-crafted.

Your goal is to provide incredible value for freebies so signing up is a no-brainer. Then, when you deliver incredible quality people will think, “Wow. This is what they offer for free? Their paid content must be incredible!”

Whatever you do, do not give these freebies away without getting that email address. If you give your work away for free, then you are unnecessarily devaluing it. Exchanging your work for an email address, however, psychologically forces the customer to place a value on your work as well, even if that value is only their email.

Offer #2: The Tripwire offer – The Tripwire offer is intended to turn somebody who has been lurking around your store gathering freebies into a paying client. These are low-priced items (under ten dollars) that act as the gateway drug into spending loads more with you in the future.

If your core business is twenty-dollar art prints, then a five-dollar print would be a good tripwire offer. Similarly, if you are selling books, a digital version for five bucks would be a good tripwire offer. If you are selling your services as a sculptor, a quick one-inch statue for ten bucks would be a good tripwire offer.

We’ve all had the experience of joining a mailing list. We keep getting emails for a long time without paying a dime. We think about unsubscribing, but the content is just valuable enough that we don’t. Then, one day the mailing list offers a product that has such an incredible value we have to try it. After that, we are hooked into spending tons of money, because we finally recognize the value of their product and we’ll shell out money for it.

This is my wife’s experience with BetaBrand. She lurked around their mailing list for ages until she finally bought something for cheap. The product ended up being incredible. Now, she spends hundreds of dollars a year on their products. This would not have happened if she hadn’t offered a cheap offer to test their incredible products first.

The point of a tripwire offer is to provide something beautifully made at an incredible value so that people find it a no-brainer to buy your higher-priced items in the future.

The biggest customer transition in your business is convincing somebody to move from a “lurker” to spending even one dollar on your brand. Once they spend that dollar, they are likely to spend much more if you can prove the value of your product.

Offer #3: Your Core Product – Your Core Product is the centerpiece of your business. Most creative businesses price their core product in the twenty to fifty-dollar range, but these core products can be incredibly expensive as well. The Core Product for a car dealership will be several thousand to even millions of dollars.

The Core Product is what keeps the lights on in your business, and it is what you are pushing on your website and through the rest of your sales strategy.

Offer #4: Profit Maximizer – If Core Products are the base of your sales, then a Profit Maximizer is the cherry on top. This offer has a slightly misleading name, as it deals more with increasing overall revenue than strictly targeting profits, but every additional dollar spent on your business should increase both revenue and profit margin simultaneously.

The idea of this offer is to increase the total amount customers spend on your products by adding additional products and services to your client’s purchase during the checkout process. While adding potential clients to your sales funnel is crucial to the success or your business, encouraging your existing customers to spend more with each transaction is a fantastic way to immediately improve your bottom line.

This offer comes in all shapes and sizes. It might be asking your client to add an additional print to their order, or it could be adding additional services like website hosting to your current website design packages, or it could be asking customers to add the digital version of your book to their cart for a nominal fee. All of these offers increase the amount spent by your customers during each transaction, thus increasing your overall revenue.

Of course, the best Profit Maximizers are pure profit. My favorite Profit Maximizer during a Kickstarter campaign is offering a special thanks in the credits of a book. This reward costs fifty dollars instead of twenty for just the book, and it takes almost no additional time, energy, or cost to implement. This additional reward is almost 100 percent profit. Meanwhile, it builds engagement with my audience, because they have become part of the book forever.

These four offers form the basis of any good sales strategy, whether it is in person or online. If you can nail these offers, you’ll bring the most people to the top of your funnel while maximizing your sales when they reach the bottom and become clients.

Profit maximizers: Cross-sells, Upsells, Downsells, and Bump Offers

Because you aren’t getting the same volume from direct sales as you are from retailers, your goal should be about maximizing the cart value of every sale. One of the most important metrics in direct sales is average cart value.​

Basically, when you sell somebody one thing, you want to sell them more things. At the moment of purchase, customers enter “buyer mode” where they are the most suggestible to spending more.

At this point, we want to offer more value to them through cross-sells, upsells, downsells, and bump offers.

A cross-sell is when you offer a wholly different, but complementary product or format to your audience after a sale. So, for instance, if you are selling a bag of chips, a cross-sell could ask customers to buy a tub of salsa to complete the experience. With books, cross-selling could be offering a different series to “complete their library” or offering audiobooks to your customers purchasing ebooks.

An upsell is selling a more expensive version of the same product. So, if you are selling paperback books, offering people a “hardcover upgrade” would be an upsell. Additionally, offering “special edition ebooks” instead of the standard ebooks would be an upsell. Additionally, you can offer more books in the same series as an upsell, as well.

A downsell is initialed when a cross-sell or upsell doesn’t work. Usually, an upsell or cross-sell should be 3-5x the price of the core product, while the downsell should be closer to 1.5-2x more than the core product, and should only be offered after your customer rejects the initial upsell/cross-sell offer. If you are offering your complete library in hardcover for $500, a downsell might see you offering either a portion of or library or your complete library in ebook for $100-$150.

A bump offer is a small checkbox that appears on the checkout page that allows for a “one-time purchase” with a single button click. They happen before the first purchase, and can either be an upsell or a cross-sell.

When you’re looking for a direct sales solution, whatever you choose should have this functionality, Whether it’s Thrivecart, Shopify, WooCommerce, Optimize Press, or whatever you choose to use, this functionality is critical because these offers are almost all profit.

That’s why they are Profit Maximizers. Ideally, 20% of your customers would take the bump offer, and another 20% would take your cross-sell/upsell/downsell offer.

If you can make these numbers work, you are bringing significant additional revenue into your business, and this revenue should be almost all profit.

The Flywheel

Now that we’ve built a way to funnel people into your business, we need to create a Flywheel so our efforts grow exponentially while our efforts either stay the same or decrease.

Earlier I talked about the recommendation engine I built on Substack to help me find new subscribers on autopilot. For the last several years I've strived to create a feedback loop and virtuous cycle of creators that constantly feed each other and help us all grow together.

I used to call this the virtuous feedback loop, but it’s basically just a flywheel. Marketing terms change, but their underlying functionality is the same.

I run group giveaways which are filled with authors who take their craft seriously enough to spend money on marketing, which leads to people who have bigger audiences for me to collaborate with on marketing, which leads to more people joining my giveaways, which leads to more people to collaborate with for marketing promotions.

That is part of my flywheel.

I create anthologies so that I can find more people to collaborate with, which leads to more people doing anthologies, which I get to collaborate on, and leads to me finding new artists to work with, which leads to me being able to create new anthologies, which allows me to find more people to collaborate with.

That is part of my flywheel.

The goal of a flywheel is to attract new customers, engage them, and then delight them with your work.

By creating this flywheel for my business, I am able to build my network and audience with the least amount of effort and minimal downside.

The reason people like this model over the funnel is because it centers the customer experience, and retention, above revenue. If you remember us talking about the customer journey, retention and advocacy were huge parts of any successful business, and the flywheel is a wonderful mechanic to foster that part of your environment.

The funnel model basically functions as a way to bring people through a sales process, but once they buy (or don’t) then they are often dumped summarily into a vacuum of nothingness as if they have no value. However, the true value of a fan is more than just a $20 bill.

They are human, after all, and humans have value for simply existing. It feels really crappy to simply abandon them on a personal level.

It’s also bad business, though. A major component of business growth comes from selling repeat customers new products and services, not solely through finding new business, making a sales funnel suboptimal for continued growth.

However, the flywheel is a bit sloppy. There’s very little direction about when or how somebody enters your flywheel, or how to turn their excitement into revenue, which is where the sales funnel shines.

I believe it is ideal to blend the two. I use sales funnels as a way to bring people into my universe, but once customers finish a funnel, they enter my flywheel, which centers the customer experience for the rest of their time with me.

Conversely, if they enter my flywheel first, there are several ways for them to enter funnels to learn more about specific products. I like to consider all of my funnels to be little more than spokes in my promotional wheel, leading out from my flywheel.

I love how these two mechanics can blend seamlessly together to create a strong customer experience.

I am trying to build ways for people to enter my ecosystem, and then keep them inside my flywheel for the long haul. None of my sales funnels or platforms are the center of my flywheel. They are just onramps. If an onramp breaks, the flywheel keeps functioning.

The success or failure of a business generally comes down to one statement: Do I spend $1 to make $2, or do I spend $2 to make $1?

It can be as close as "Do I spend $.98 to make $1, or do I spend $1 to make $.98?"

But people discount how important it is to drill into the numbers and know whether you are spending money to make money or making money to spend money.

I admit that I am very good at the business side of publishing, but my secret weapon is not building a mailing list or Kickstarter or courses or funnels. My true gift is knowing how to be on the right side of that equation and not do anything that puts me on the other side, no matter how fun it might be to do it.

Marketing is a long-term game in a world where most people want a quick fix. When you get it working, it becomes easier over time, but it is nearly impossible to get started.

The problem with marketing is that most of the bad advice works short term and not long term, and most of the stuff that works only works long term and not short term.

People who hate marketing generally fall into two camps.

1. People who have decided to "dip their toe" into something like ads or mailing lists, but not for long enough for them to actually work. Then, they complain that those things don't work, even though they only did them for like 3 months, or only send an email once a year, and don't even optimize it when they do.
2. People who tried some garbage, saw it work for a minute, watched it flame out, and are now so bitter they think nothing works or that something that works won't work long term. If they are still doing marketing, it's at such a small level that they could never survive. Maybe they rely on newsletter swaps, which only work when stacked with a bunch of other promotions, or they post on social media, which only works...well, pretty much never unless you have a stacked profile, but usually they do nothing.They sure like to tell you what doesn't work, though, and what could never work just because it doesn't work for them.

Successful people do the things that work for long enough for them to work.

How their specific environment functions profitably differs wildly between them, but they have found a process that feeds them instead of drains them. This is where the Author Ecosystem becomes very powerful in helping to determine what pathways are right for you.

​Deserts will have more initial success with ads and launching products at the height of the market because they are tied into the zeitgeist more than any other ecosystem. Grasslands will probably have a blog where they can go deep on a topic. Tundras will likely spend a lot of time building excitement for their launches through giveaways and cross-promotion. Forests might grow a killer community, and Aquatics should focus on expanding into new formats to find new fans.

The trick of marketing is to figure out how to create an environment that aligns with your ideal ecosystem, not works against it. That’s where the phrase “You’re not doing marketing wrong. You’re doing the wrong marketing” comes from at the end of the day.