10 Principles to Success Online: Vashon Borich’s Rules for Posts People Actually Answer

You post an update about your business and it lands with a thud. No replies, no questions, nothing. Meanwhile someone else in your same company posts what feels like the same kind of thing and their inbox fills up. Vashon Borich, who goes by the Tough Mama inside Team Tough, spent enough time watching that gap to break down exactly what separates the posts people scroll past from the ones people respond to.

As someone trying to build trust with total strangers through a screen, you already know how easily a post can come across as either desperate or hollow. Vashon’s ten principles aren’t abstract branding advice. They’re specific wording choices and habits that change how a message lands, and she built them from watching her own team’s replies go up the moment she started applying them.

Why does talking about your current struggles quietly push people away?

The first principle sounds almost backwards until she explains it: never talk about a struggle while you’re still in it. Share what you’ve overcome, not what you’re currently stuck on. If you haven’t solved something yet, point to someone in your team who has and tell their story instead. It changes the entire tone of a message from complaint to lesson.

The second principle attacks a habit almost everyone falls into without noticing, which is writing from a needy position. Constantly pressuring people to act right now signals that you need the sale more than you care about them, and that pressure is exactly what makes people scroll past. Vashon’s fix is to reframe every message around what the reader gets, regardless of whether they ever respond to you at all. It sounds like a small shift in wording, but it changes whether a post feels like an ask or an offer.

What actually earns a stranger’s trust before they know anything about you?

Three of her principles work together here. Document your successes no matter how small, because a brand new blog or a first lead is proof that you’re a real person figuring things out in public, not someone who arrived successful overnight. Share stories about people on your team who are already winning, because a story about someone else’s progress builds credibility that a story about your own progress can’t. And keep the numbers out of the message entirely. As Vashon puts it, “Facts tell, stories sell.” Specs and figures overwhelm a reader. A story about why you got involved gives them something to feel.

That last point is worth sitting with, because it’s the opposite of what most new marketers think they’re supposed to do. The instinct is to explain the opportunity in full: the compensation, the product, the numbers. Vashon’s argument is that none of that creates the emotional decision that actually moves someone to reply. The explaining can happen later, in the material built for that. Your job on the front end is just the story.

How do you turn your own low point into something that actually connects?

Here’s where the principles get specific about mechanics. Find the problem your target audience already has, the one you’ve personally solved, and hand them the solution you found, packaged as something simple they can use today. Then go a step further and talk about where you were at your lowest, what the actual catalyst was that made you start, and what got you out of it.

People love that. That’s what they want to hear. It’s that, that underdog champion story that look at the movies. That’s how they tell their stories. Use those pain points in order to lure people in and want to know what happened. Did you overcome that monster that was in your life?

As Vashon puts it elsewhere in the session, “Pain points with solutions sell better than all fluff and good stuff and joy, joy, joy, happiness.” That’s a hard thing to accept if your instinct is to only show the highlight reel. But a message that only shows things going well doesn’t give anyone a place to see themselves in your story. A message that names the lowest point, and then the way out of it, does.

What’s the fastest way to make an email feel like it’s written to one person?

The last stretch of the training is pure mechanics. Get on other successful marketers’ email lists, save the ones that make you want to click, and build your own folder of formatting and structure to model, never copying word for word. Add a phone number to your emails, using a free forwarding number rather than a personal line, since a number people can actually call builds trust faster than any amount of written copy. And when you sit down to write, picture one specific person, not a crowd, and write the whole message to her.

That last habit alone changes more than people expect. A message aimed at a group reads like an announcement. A message aimed at one person reads like a conversation, and conversations get replies.

These ten principles are the outline. The full session goes deeper into each one with more of Vashon’s own examples from running Team Tough, plus specifics on setting up the phone forwarding and email modeling systems mentioned above. Create your free account to watch the complete session and download the audio at empowernetwork.com/watch.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

Hi, my name is Vashon Borich, also known as the Tough Mama from Team Tough, and I'm a member of Team Love and Light and the Unstoppable Tribe. If you're watching this today, we're going to be discussing with you how you can apply 10 principles into your life to help you have success in your online business. So let's get started. All right, the title of this presentation and training is 10 Principles to Success in Your Online Business.

All right, so the very first one that is going to help you when you are marketing your business, when you're marketing yourself, and also when you're sharing your story, is never talk about struggles. And by struggles, I mean the things that you're currently going through right now that you have not solved. So every one of us has struggles day in and day out that we go through, but you don't want to talk about them while you're going through them. Talk about the things that you've overcome.

Talk about the things that you've solved. If you have a struggle that you haven't overcome, look at somebody in our group, in the team, in the business who has overcome it, and talk about them and talk about how they overcame it and how you're following their leadership. In doing so, it's going to help you present your story in a more positive way because nobody likes to hear a bunch of negative garbage. Let's be honest.

They want to hear the success and things that you're generating in your life. Now as you overcome those struggles, of course, share them. Tell them you found a solution and that you have come up with ways that they can overcome those similar struggles. So that's number one.

If you do that, it totally changes the tone of your message. All right, the second one, never come from a needy position. It scares people off. So let me explain.

Let's say that you're running an ad on your social media site or something like that and in your ad somewhere you say, buy now or click here and buy my product today or whatever it is. If you're constantly telling people buy, buy, buy, it appears that you're needy and that you absolutely must have the sale and you aren't putting their needs ahead of yours. So you're literally pushing people off by being… By appearing that you must get the sale.

So rather, we're going to talk about this in some of the other principles, share how you are going to help them. Offer value to those folks. Give them things. Tell them that it doesn't matter if you buy from you or not because really what you're aiming for is to give them information that might improve their life.

Doesn't that sound much better than, hey, you've got to buy this from me right now. So… Think about how you're wording things, how you're speaking to people. Make sure that you're not pushing them away by trying to be too pushy in your sales.

The third one is document your successes no matter how small. So when you're first starting out, sure, you're not going to have many leads yet. You may not have any yet. You definitely don't have any sales yet when you first start.

So what you do is you document the things that are good. That are going well for you. So for example, maybe you just got your first blog set up. Share that.

Say, man, I'm so excited. I just learned how to create my own blog. I just got it set up. It's really, really cool.

Can't wait to tell you more as I learn more. So people are going to start watching you and seeing that you're having these successes. You might also share some of the other things that happen, like perhaps you learned a new tool. A new tool that's helping you in your business.

You could share that with them or share how it's helping you in your business. You can also share or document the small successes. When you get your first lead, share that. When you get your first sale, definitely share that.

It doesn't matter if you have not made $100,000 or something like that. What matters is that people who are watching you, when they see those little successes, it makes them realize that they can do it too. That you're a real person and that you're not just instantly successful. Because no one is, and that sends up red flags.

If you see someone that suddenly overnight says, hey, I just made $5,000 on one sale, even though it may happen, that does not mean for most people that it's an attainable goal. They see that as, wow, this is beyond me. I can't even do that. But those small successes help those people.

Yeah. Those people who are watching you and people will watch you for a while, it helps them to realize that they can do it too. All right, let's go on. The fourth one, share stories of those who are having success already.

This has been huge. When I started doing this in my emails that I send out to folks, I instantly started seeing more response and replies to my emails and people asking questions because now I'm sharing stories of people who are having success. That's me. That's doing this business.

That there are other people that are and that are having success. Follow the leaders. Follow what they are doing. Maybe you have somebody on your team that's experienced some great success.

Be willing to share that. Tell a story about them and then share what recently happened to them and how excited you are. And that is so powerful and it's going to lead people to want to watch you because they know that it's not just about you. You're willing to share the success of it.

Yeah. You're willing to share the success of others. All right, here's one that I'm sure a lot of you have heard, but I want you to really internalize it. Facts tell, stories sell.

So if you're telling people the numbers, how much you can make, what the products are, this, that, and the other, all the little details, you are not selling. You're overwhelming them actually. You're telling them what it's about. That does not give you that emotional balance.

That does not give you that emotional buy. People buy because they emotionally feel like it's something that's going to be good for them and help them achieve their dreams. So don't tell all the facts. Let the sales videos that are provided for you tell those facts.

For you on the front end, just focus on telling stories. Share your story. Share why you got involved. Share what are your reasons, what are your dreams.

Share stories about other people. Share people that are having success. Share the type of help that you're getting. Share the new groups of people that you've met at the conference.

Talk about where they came from. Just telling stories is interesting. People are going to follow you more because they love a good story. They want to know that it's real and it's not just a bunch of selling type tactics about benefits and features because that's not going to sell and that's not going to win them over.

Number six, give solutions to problems that your target audience has. Now there are some other training videos that you'll probably see in here that talk about branding and determining who your target audience is. I'll give you a hint. Your target audience isn't everyone in the world.

Your target is somebody that's just like you. So think about the problems that you have solved in your life, that you've solved in business, that you've been able to overcome. Challenges that have gotten in the way of your progress and how you overcame them. And then come up with solutions.

Share those solutions. Put a one sheet together. Create what's called a lead magnet, which you'll learn about in some of the other trainings if you haven't watched those yet. And give those solutions to them.

What's going to happen is people are going to trust you. They're going to see that you have the solution to the same problem that they have and that you've overcame it in your life. And that target audience is going to be the one that's going to be able to see that you've overcame it. And that target audience is going to become a rabid follower and fan of you because you're giving them so much value.

Number seven, share how you turned a pain into a pleasure. So here's something that I've learned when sharing my story. Pain points with solutions sell better than all fluff and good stuff and joy, joy, joy, happiness. So if you're telling about all the happy things that are going on in your life.

You know, maybe you've got some good, good news or things like that. Yeah, that's fun to read for a little bit, but in reality, the pain points are what gets people. So think about where you were when you had one of your biggest struggles in your life. What was it?

What was the catalyst that made you realize that you wanted to start this business? Where did you hurt the most? What was your lowest point? And then make sure it's something that you've overcame.

And then make sure it's something that you've overcame. And then make sure it's something that you've overcame. And then make sure it's something that you've overcame. And then make sure it's something that you've already solved though.

Okay, then you share the solution that you found that got you out of that lowest point. People love that. That's what they want to hear. It's that, that underdog champion story that look at the movies.

That's how they tell their stories. Use those pain points in order to lure people in and want to know what happened. Did you overcome that monster that was in your life? And you'll find that that alone is going to draw more people to you.

You then. Then you'll find that that alone is going to draw more people to you. You then. Then you'll find that that alone is going to draw more people to you.

You then. Then you'll find that that alone is going to draw more people to you. Because suddenly you're real. Suddenly you've overcome something that perhaps they have a struggle in their life.

And you have the solution for it. And you're like the mascot for that problem on how to solve it. Alright, let's move on. You can tell I'm pretty passionate about these things.

Alright, number 8. Model other people's emails. You may not be the best writer in the world. Or perhaps you are.

Either way it doesn't matter. What matters is how the email is treated. It doesn't matter. are formatted you know what what types of how do they draw you through the email so you're probably thinking okay well how do I model other people's emails well what you do is you get on as many lists as you can of successful marketing people they don't have to be in the same business that you and I are but find people out there they're easy to find just do a search online or when you're looking in Facebook something will start to pop up that looks interesting get on that list I actually created a unique email address just a gmail free account for getting on people's email list and then I go through that and I and I flagged the ones that drew me in and made me want to click on it and with those emails I save them and then I'll go in and I'll change some of the wording obviously it needs to sound like me and my target audience but I'll make it sound like me but it's still the same kind of format and the links are still in the same spot and everything else and what that does is it's creating a whole bunch of emails that I can use in my backend as autoresponders now this may be going a little deep if you're brand new but there's a way to have emails already pre-built that send out to your audience automatically from the date that they sign up so this is a great way if you're not sure about the email portion yet right now start saving emails that you think are really good and get on obviously get on as many people's list as you can so you can start saving those and create a folder drop them in there and you know that way you'll have a whole bank of ideas for how to word and set up your emails let's go to the next one here's one that's kinda controversial but I'm gonna help make it easier for you and that is add your phone number on your emails I just started doing this over the past few months and I can tell you it's turned around my conversion rate on my emails and here's what I did I don't use my personal phone number or my home phone number I actually went to Google and I opened up a Google Voice phone number if you're not familiar with Google Voice just google it and then you'll come across something called Google Voice which allows you to select a phone number I believe it's only for US Americans right now there may be another way to do that if you're in a different country but I can tell you that by doing this you set up a number and then it forwards anybody who calls that number to whatever phone number you want and they don't see that number so they don't see like my real phone number they don't see my real home phone number or mobile phone the only thing that they have access to then is that Google Voice phone number that I put at the bottom of my emails the cool thing with that too is that you can actually set a time frame for Google Voice in which you don't want to receive calls so if you if you like your your service you can actually set a time frame for Google Voice in which you sleep like I do you need to make sure that at least for me I turned it off so that I can't get calls after 7 or 8 p.m.

because that's my family time and then obviously sleep time and then it doesn't come on until I think it's 7 a.m. is what I set it for so this is a great way to create rapport with your email leads because when you have when you start collecting emails from people and you start sending out email letters to them if you don't have a phone number or a way for them to contact you they aren't going to trust you as much as they would if you had a phone number and I encourage them you know give me a call I will answer my phone if they call if obviously if I'm not there it goes to voice message even Google Voice has voicemail and then I'll call back and you know just check in with them and see if I can help them in some way now I don't recommend being on the phone forever but it's a great way to make that initial contact and get them involved in your business and to realize that you're a real person who's there for them all right the tenth one our final one here comes be personal in your emails and on your social media posts so what I mean by this is when you are sending out a message act like you're typing it or you're writing it to one person the biggest mistake I see is a lot of people will post stuff on social media or in their emails and it sounds like they're talking to a group of people nowhere in there did they actually use the word you or you know it didn't sound like it was to one person it sound like it's to them to you know to a group so change the tone of your emails and your social media posts so that it sounds like you're talking to a single individual and here's what I do this a little secret is I think about my best friend in the whole world and I think that I'm talking to her so when I write my emails and I write my social media posts I pretend that that is going directly just to her and so I'm you know I'm very personal in what I say now obviously you don't you don't want to get too personal if you've got a lot of inside jokes with your best friend because people aren't gonna get them but you do want to make it sound like you're talking to an individual and just by changing the tone and and your posts and your emails you're gonna find the people are more attracted to you and I even get people in my emails that I'll write back thinking that I just send that autorespond email just to them and they'll write back and answer some of the questions that I might have asked in my email and it's just wonderful and I respond back to those folks too because that's how you build relationships so I can tell you that in incorporating these ten principles into your business you should start to see some success coming your way so give it a try add these things to your business let us know how it goes and we'll see you on the next training video take care