Walk With Reid Facebook Live: How To Market Your Services And Set Up Payment Plans
Reid: Hhmmmm.. Good morning everybody! It is Reid Mihalko from https://reidaboutsex.com/ and I’m wearing my sex geek summer camp T-shirt today and when I wear the green t-shirt that means I’m usually giving business advice for sex educators, workshop facilitators, anybody who is like a sex-positive healer or educator or sex positive entrepreneur, how you want it to identify. And I’m trying to make sure that I’m broadcasting on my Facebook page and that way I can hopefully see comments as they come in. There we go, great! I can see comments now and I need to shut off my computer so you don’t hear me hearing myself and Good morning everyone!
I want to let people know that I the reason I’m wearing my baseball cap is I have a horrible bedhead. I haven’t taken I I’ve got to sleep really late last night and the mostly I was working on the email blast for my sex educator email list my sex I call my sex geek pros and I got really into geeking out on the email. And a.. first off I just want to say I just want to thank Cathy Vartuli for all the work that Cathy does helping me behind the scenes on a bunch of stuff and, and Cathy is running again this year. She’s the event organizer for the sex geek summer camp which I’m super excited about and I kind of went down the rabbit hole last night working on an email just kind of talking about that this week in these last couple of weeks in a couple of months have been you know “difficult” air quotes difficult for me as an you know extroverted cisgender white guy running around in America. And so I you know was getting all into the email and feeling all weird about talking about like “deep things” ‘coz I’m supposed to be a fun guy and the golden retriever for our espresso never gets bumped out and that you know I’ve been not struggling in with capital letters but this is kind of worried and realizing like trying to figure out like how to stay grounded? How to take better care of myself? And how to kind of get a little bit momentum so that I can feel like I’m making a difference in the world where things feel like they’re to me not to everybody feel like they’re back backsliding. And you know especially the attack on Planned Parenthood and you know just people’s access to birth control and things like that like for me as a sex educator, that’s really important that people have choice and educated and informed choice and like that that you know if we’re gonna debate beliefs like that we get to listen to each other and have a discourse and agree to disagree sometimes like I’m I live I’m an ex New Yorker. We love to tell people to go fuck themselves and in a weird way as a New Yorker you kind to you appreciate it when somebody says it directly to your face and you’re like, thank you for telling me to fuck off you screw yourself too.
And so like but there’s a difference between being present with each other and then just yelling over each other or are not listening to people at all and being close-minded. And as a geek part of my me in my geekery is to you know when can I catch myself not being open-minded and trying to you know absorb new information. Because that information might help me become a better lover, that information like I didn’t I didn’t know the clitoris have legs and that you could massage you know things and I didn’t know that years ago and so you know I just feel like the world is you know falling apart in a certain way and I’m worried and so I was talking about that last night.
But the business part of all of this is, Hi Jean Marie! Good morning Karen! Or Kerry, Hi! So the, the business part of this for my educators and my you know maybe you’re in a an entrepreneur and this business advice is useful for you it, it this is good advice for just people in general who are trying to help other people and sell, sell their expertise, make a living, pay their bills off of helping people. One of the ways to make things affordable for your fans and followers and customers potential clients is creating payment options and, and the bigger picture is give, I believe and a lot of experts out there who do stuff online believe giving your advice away for free and very structured ways like I’m doing a Facebook live for free and getting it out there and hopefully people will share it. It’ll, it’ll improve people’s lives but give put content out there in ways where everybody can access it or at least everybody who has an internet connection and a smartphone or laptop or you know can sit in an internet café. Put your information out there in ways where people can consume it and then as you go deeper or provide people with more support or give them access to you in person because there’s only so many hours in a in a week that you can actually be with people or be in a certain place for them to, to be in the room or face-to-face with you as you give them more structure more support or more of your actual face time than or you know on a phone call Skype kind of time. That’s where you invite them to pay you so that you can exchange your information with the support that will help them integrate it because you can just you know I have several online courses, I have a business online course for sex educators that you know every once in a while a sex educator who who’s really broke and struggling was like “hey can you help me out?” And I’m like “oh well you know here’s access to the course. All I ask is that you leave comments in it and let me know how it’s going” and I had to stop doing that because I was getting angry because I had done that about a dozen times and no one with the exception of one person, no one out of a dozen left any comments and from what I could tell the times I gave the course away no one ever completed the course. And so you know there’s some psychological studies and stuff like that on, on how to you know people will invest their time and focus in things that they’ve invested in in a capitalistic society that’s usually money but you know if you’re giving you’re putting out your content out there in certain ways for free it’s a great way for people to get to know you and trust you and then you build the support and design into your workshops and programs so that they can win and I like you know setting it up in a way where people it’s accessible for people in in financial ways for them to be able to support my work while I design smartly hopefully ways to support them. And so one of those things that kind of brings us to this places when you’re setting up your programs or workshops and, and charging money for them then you might want to create certain payment plans.
And so the email that I was working on last night was also motivated by the fact that many of not many but a handful of people in my community of sex geeks had reached out and saying “hey, you know I want to come to sex geek summer camp. I can’t afford the one pay option and I can’t afford the three pay option. Is there another payment plan that that you have?” And while the, the advice that every marketer will give you is don’t create a ton of different payment plans because you’re just going to be juggling and it makes more work for you and then you know you might get passive-aggressive to your fans and followers and they don’t deserve that. What, what we did last night was create a 5 pay payment plan where people can you know put $69 down and then do four payments four monthly payments of a 120 so that they can come to camp and, and so let’s spread the whole thing and then I stayed till 3 a.m. writing email and tweaking an email.
But the, the main point I want to talk about just education wise is creating payment plans can be really helpful and useful for your demographics. And yes, it can be a pain in the butt sometimes because you’re wrangling situations I know when I do payment plans myself for things you know that is of course the, the debit card or the credit card that the bank calls you and tells you they have to swap out because of identity theft or something and the and then that payment plan gets, gets screwed up and you have to re-enter everything but I think it’s worth the trouble to help people come to your workshops. I would recommend that you do a, a full pay and then a monthly 3 pay and that you have a shopping cart system that can do automatic payments. Just do automatic payments please, please, please do automatic payments and you know kind of automate things as much as you can and I recommend that you don’t do more than, than three pay. I have done I have done nine pays they are pain in my ass but I was also kind of testing them and then you know the five pay I just think it’s really important when you’re working with demographics. Where people are struggling financially that you give them ways to win and invest in themselves and if you’re going to stretch, stretch something out over five months what can you give them during those five months to keep engaging them in a retention kind of way. In the marketing world we would call it like retention bonus or retention sequence. And then I believe in those five months or in those three months what can you give people to prep them, keep them engaged, keep them invested wanting to come to your event and help them train them in those three months five months or whatever it is so that they arrive at your event even in a better place and can go deeper with you. It’s a little extra work but once you once you start thinking in these ways, you just automatically start doing life like it’s a retention bonus and, and that kind of engagement and when especially when you’re training people for free in ways that work congruently for you, I think everybody wins and it’s and it’s it just continues to get people connected with you and, and you’re helping people. So if you don’t like helping people, if you’re just in this for the money, if you are if you’re if your content is crap, none of this works. None of this works sincerity authenticity being role modelling being human and also striving for excellence like these are the, the spices you have to put into the soup these days you know I was going to run and go to the take a shower before I did my thing and I’m like “No” like I’m gonna do my bed head and put on my baseball cap and, and the and it’s more important to get the vide out than how my hair looks today and my hair has a life of its own often.
So those are the main things. I saw a really great question about sliding scales. So I can’t oh, Anne! Thank you Anne for, for the question. I do sliding scales for my coaching and so I like me personally you get to figure this stuff for yourself. I do sliding scales for my coaching and sometimes for certain kinds of appearances. Like for college gigs, I have a sliding scale and I just ask colleges you know if you can afford more please pay me more because it allows me to work with colleges that have lower budgets. And then I just trust everybody to, to be honest with me and just be real when I do coaching I have a sliding scale and you can go to https://reidaboutsex.com/category/coaching/ and see what that is. And you know sliding scale I just ask people you know “hey pay, you know if you can make, make the bottom part of the scale we’re good” like I already ran the numbers, I know what my life needs money wise to be working well so that bottom end of the scale works really well for me. If you want to pay me more please do. If you really want to freak me out and put me into abundance issues mode then paid pay the higher end of the sliding scale. And then in every once in a while I get coaching you know clients who are like, “Oh, well I am fortunate to have a lot of you know money or whatever abundance and so let me let me freak you out and write you a really big check.” I want you to be dealing more with abundance issues than issues of scarcity. But the reason one of the reasons I can do sliding scale is if somebody can’t afford to hire me one-on-one what I have already in place are a bunch of courses and programs and free information so if somebody can’t afford me, I just point them at my YouTube channel. If they want business coaching and they can’t afford me, they want mentoring, point to my YouTube channel and say just click on the four sex educators’ playlist. Almost all of the advice except for the stuff that I’m implementing like the new stuff, almost all of my advices are already on my YouTube channel. These Facebook live videos will you know I’m saving them on my phone and I will upload them on to my YouTube channel. So a lot of what I’m already doing is out there you just to sit through a bunch of you know however many hundreds of videos there are on my YouTube channel and you know if you have a question you can leave a comment or send me an email but it’s I’m it’s I’m not going to be able to answer it immediately and give you the support that I could if we were doing a coaching call. And when you start kind of building your life in this way and structuring it like at least for me it feels congruent.
Now if you have a lot of thoughts or challenges with you know with a capitalism then then my approach you’re gonna have to tweak but it a lot of the marketing and how you help people and give people access to the tools and skills you have I think even in a non-capitalistic way you can still use that setup where you’re helping people for free as a means of them getting to know you and then they can you know do barter or whatever that is. Note on barter, if you’re going to do barter have them provide their service first and then you provide yours. If I’m, I’m open to other people’s thoughts on that but I’ve gotten burned too many times and that makes me angry at those people. So give that always as the educator always give other people the structure so that they can win and, and that’s a self-care structure so that you don’t get passive-aggressive on folks. If you’re feeling passive-aggressive it usually means there’s something you missed about self-care for yourself or boundary setting for yourself or, or you said yes when really you were a no and you didn’t give yourself a permission to change your mind.
So I hope that stuff’s useful for you. Thoughts on sliding scales. Hi Leanne! Philip! Norelle, Good morning! Good afternoon! Sometimes living in Australia is problematic. We’d love to attend the camp or done online. I’ve done the online but the personal camp would be awesome. Norelle, Norelle? I’m sorry if I’m mispronouncing it you know if anybody wants to bring camp to another part of the world I mean my emails work and I’m I’ll I’m am waiting for the invitations. We just need to figure out how, how to make how to make the money in all of that work but maybe someday sex geek summer camp the business retreat for sex educators will go international. Who knows?
Ummmm… Alright Marissa, Hi! Okay and the YouTube channel is https://reidaboutsex.com/ or http://YouTube.com/Reidaboutsex. I’ll post the link to the email last night if you’re not on my sex geek pro mailing list, I posted the email on my website and I’ll drop the link in the comments but you could also go to https://reidaboutsex.com/sexgeekpro and then just get on the list and then you’ll get my late night sometimes not late night emails.
I think that’s all I wanted to a to cover today. Yeah. Thanks everyone for listening and for putting up with my, my treadmill stuff. Yesterday I also was cleaning up my office change the lighting a little bit and, and what you can’t see is the rest of the mess that is there but someday if someday maybe I’ll give you a tour of the office and then I have a surprise. I’m going to try to get it installed tomorrow for our walk together. Yeah, so I’ll, I’ll let you know how that goes but it’s a surprise.
And, and then last but not least share the video today. Leave a comment. It.. there’s this all everyone’s fond of theirs like a burst of hearts and, and stuff that flows across the screen. So it I’m assuming that’s all you but could everyone like hit like, like or heart or something I just want to see if we can create in real time a burst of these things. Oh look, its working. Oh that’s so cool! Oh well it’s like a, I don’t know why that’s so that’s so cool. I don’t know I’m just a dork.
Alright, oh look it’s like bubbles that’s what it is like tiny bubbles tiny bubbles of love. I know for some of you tomorrow might be a tough day or it calls for celebration whatever wherever you are on the spectrum of, of how you think the world is going today, please do not stop what you’re doing. Whatever your political belief beliefs are there are so many people that are feeling ashamed about their… themselves, their bodies, their desires and we need to help people own more of who they are and learn how to embrace their desires and not feel broken.
So please don’t give up. Please don’t stop being who you are and thank you for being a part of my community. That’s it, Mwah! Bye everyone. See you tomorrow!