285: Stop Planning a Black Friday Sale. Plan a Black Friday Season

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Most creators don't touch Black Friday until the first week of November, and then they're scrambling to throw an offer together and put a discount on it, hoping that one week carries the whole quarter. That's a lot of pressure to put on three days. 

In this episode Ruth Poundwhite turns the tables and interviews me about how I actually plan Q4, which starts with treating November 1st through the end of December as one season instead of one weekend.

In this episode:

• Why I have my promo calendar mapped out a year ahead, and how that changes what Black Friday even has to do
• The October work that decides whether your Black Friday offer lands, including the warm-up sequence people skip
• Why a pre-sale is one of the best things you can put out in Q4, especially if you don't have much to sell yet
• How to take an inventory of your offers and decide which ones are worth promoting, plus the out-of-the-box offers worth testing
• Using bonuses instead of cutting your prices, and how those bonuses doubled as market research for me
• The sale structures we've tested inside HobbyScool, from a one-offer-a-day week to a twelve day December run to a simple three day flash sale
• What I'm handing to AI this year, what I'm keeping, and the automation that puts a page live and expires it without anyone touching it

Key takeaways:

• Black Friday is a season, not a day. Plan November 1 through December 31 as one campaign and the pressure on any single day drops.
• Your audience has to be warmed up before the offer shows up. If you want to pre-sell something in November, the free gift, the webinar, or the sequence that gets them ready has to run in October.
• You don't have to discount. Adding a bonus to the plan you want people to choose, like the annual or lifetime option, protects your pricing and gets people better results.
• Take an offer inventory first. List everything you have, mark what you want to sell, and give yourself permission to test something new.
• AI can build the pages, the emails, and the images. It can't tell you what your market wants. That part stays with you.

Resources mentioned:

• Black Friday Profit Party workshop, run every October
• Newsletter Profit Club: https://lab.destinicopp.com/newsletter-profit-club
• The Creator's MBA AI Mastermind: https://mastermind.destinicopp.com

 If you want to sit down and build your November through December money plan with me, that's what the Black Friday Profit Party workshop is for, and I run it every October. 

You'll find it inside the Newsletter Profit Club, so come join us at https://lab.destinicopp.com/newsletter-profit-club and I'll walk you through it. It's also included if you're already in the Creator's MBA AI Mastermind.