When you want to create authority content, the combined lessons of an old poem and a scientifically-proven formula can be very useful.
Together, they provide a valuable system to help you quickly and easily create authority content and convincing business presentations.
The concept was framed in the following words penned over 100 years ago by poet and writer Rudyard Kipling (perhaps better known for creating ‘The Jungle Book’).
“I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who.”
Rudyard Kipling
It turns out that Kipling is more than just a master of pretty words.
Create Authority Content Based on Scientific Research
More recently, extensive academic research into effective communication has come up with a similar formula for success.
And it shows very clearly why most business communication and persuasive marketing fails to have the desired impact.
After studying the learning style of different people for more than 25 years, educationalist Bernice McCarthy developed the 4MAT teaching system to reflect the four different types of learning style that she identified. The system works just as well for communication and marketing.
In brief, it splits people into four types:
‘Why‘ people: need reasons and relevance before they will listen.
‘What‘ people: information junkies; want to know all the facts.
‘How‘ people: pragmatic and practical; they seek usability.
‘What If‘ people: visionary, interested in the future possibilities.
Most of us have elements of all four types but usually one of the four ‘buttons’ is particularly ‘hot’.
For example, you can provide a ‘why’ person with all of the facts you like but they will not even listen unless you satisfy their ‘why’ first.
If you are giving a presentation or writing a marketing leaflet, the only safe assumption is that your audience will contain people of all four types.
Where Most Marketing Messages Fail
And that’s where most marketing messages fail – they don’t pay enough attention to all four buttons. Most often communication misses out the crucial first button – giving people a good reason ‘why’ they should pay attention.
If you don’t hit that one, many in your audience won’t even listen to what you have to say. Typically people rush straight in to the facts, the features – the ‘what’ part. While this is important, it is not enough on its own.
This is not a new problem – legendary advertising man John E Kennedy wrote the classic ‘Reason Why Advertising’ on this subject around the same time that Kipling wrote his poem.
And, often, messages are stuffed full of information but don’t make clear how it can be put to practical use.
The ‘4mula’ to Create Authority Content
So, whether you are writing a 200-word letter or a 60-minute presentation, try taking a piece of paper, splitting it into four quadrants, and answering these four questions.
Why should my audience be interested in this message?
Brainstorm as many reasons as possible why people will benefit from what you have to say or from buying your product or service
Choose the best reasons and tell people about them first
What information do they need to make a decision?
Give them the facts that they need
Explain the features of your product or service
How will they use it?
Tell them what they need to do next
Give them an action plan they can implement
What will happen in the future?
Point out the risks they face if they don’t take your advice
Paint a great picture of how things will be if they do as you suggest
Then use that information to write your letter or brochure or deliver your presentation.
The amount of words or time needed for each segment will vary depending on your purpose but remember to give adequate time to all four – and cover them in the above order.
Cover ‘why’ as early as possible – though you might need a brief introduction to your topic first – and make it powerful. Then give them the information they need but make sure you explain ‘how’ they can make it work.
And finally, give a vivid picture of what will happen if they do (or don’t) follow your advice.
Proven Persuasion
As your marketing message hits the mark with a much bigger audience, watch your profits grow
But you can use the ‘4mula’ of ‘why/what/how/what if’ as the basis for creating authority content quickly and easily.
If you choose not to hit these four hot buttons in creating authority content, your message will miss a large chunk of your potential audience and you will lose out on many possible customers.
Or you can choose to use it as the basis to create authority content and see how much easier it becomes to create powerful marketing material and deliver persuasive presentations.
Then, as your marketing message hits the mark with a much bigger audience, just watch as your profits start to grow faster.
(Footnote: Naturally this article follows the formula – it starts with a reason why you should read on (after a brief introduction), it then covers the facts and goes on to explain how you can use the information. Finally, it says what will happen in the future if you do or don’t listen to this advice. It makes writing so easy!)
However you measure the success of your business, it needs to have healthy finances and you need to make the best possible use of your time.
It’s therefore crucial that you pay attention to maximizing profitability and productivity.
Maximizing Profitability
Here are five different ways you can enhance your profitability:
Planning: To make everything happen, you need a clear plan and calendar of activities.
Productivity: It’s easy to be busy but you need to use the time effectively.
Pricing: It’s important to charge enough to make the profit you want.
Predicting Cash Flow: It’s not enough just to make money; you need to ensure it flows in time to pay the bills.
Performance Improvement: You should always be looking for ways to get better results at a lower cost.
Planning
If you want to make the most of your expertise, it’s not enough to have a great idea. You need a plan for turning it into reality.
A good plan is built around three key elements:
Big Picture: You need to start with a clear idea of what you want to achieve. That means defining specific short-term and long-term goals. A plan begins with a clear view of the destination.
Projects: When you know your goals, you can identify the key projects you must complete to achieve them. When you develop projects based on your goals, you are more motivated. To identify projects, look at your goals and identify which major activities you need to undertake now to achieve them.
Priorities: Now that you have specific goals and defined projects, the important part is turning them into actionable tasks and setting priorities. Tasks are usually actions that take a short time – anything from a few minutes to a few hours. One way to identify tasks is to look at your projects and ask yourself what specific actions you need to take now to complete them.
Productivity
When you run your own business, your most important resource is your time. So the degree to which you achieve the best use of your time will determine your success and your profitability. The three keys to making the best use of your time are:
Knowing how much your time is worth: The most obvious way to value your time is by dividing your desired annual earnings figure by the number of hours you want to work in a year. When you think of your time as worth your hourly rate, you might start to earn it!
Making the best use of the limited time you have available: Your day can be split into productive time – spent with clients, creating products, or generating income – or unproductive time – checking emails, answering the phone, surfing the web, or talking to friends, which makes you no money. If you recalculate your hourly rate based on your number of productive hours each day, it will be much higher.
Only doing things that earn the value of your time: Once you know how much your time is worth, you can easily ask yourself if what you are doing is worth your hourly rate. If not, it’s easy to find someone else to do it via outsourcing. Outsourcing can make your day a thousand times easier and more profitable.
Better productivity is one of the keys to maximizing profitability
Outsourcing
Often people who run businesses like to do things themselves – either because they feel they are best at it or because they don’t like to spend money.
When you discover that others are often better at the tasks and will do them more cheaply than you can, it frees up your time to concentrate on what makes you money.
Outsourcing through freelance sites such as Fiverr can transform what you achieve.
Pricing
One of the biggest challenges many business owners face is setting the right prices for their products and services.
Sometimes the best prices will be fairly clear if there are similar offers in your marketplace. However, the big mistake many people make is they don’t charge enough.
That’s often because of the simple mistake of believing that more people will buy if the price is lower. This harms their profitability.
Charging low prices is often a mindset issue where people don’t value themselves and what they can do highly enough.
Often setting higher prices is the best way to increase your profits – provided you deliver value and communicate effectively.
Maximizing profitability and productivity in your business is key to building wealth.
Predicting Cash Flow
As well as charging suitably high prices, you must make sure the money is coming in fast enough.
You need to set budgets that enable you to see when money is coming in and going out. That enables you to define what you can spend in development and marketing.
It’s great to know that you’ll earn $100,000 next month but you also need to know that you have expenses of $50,000 this month!
Performance Improvement
To improve your profitability, it’s vital to monitor everything you do in your business, including:
Time: Monitoring your time helps ensure you spend your day productively.
Track: You need to track every dollar you spend on marketing and advertising to make sure you get an adequate return on investment.
Test: You should always be testing new marketing approaches – whether it’s the headline on your sales page or new advertising media.
Your success in each of these areas will have a big impact on the success of your business.
In addition to profitability factors, having the right psychology is one of the keys to business success.
The easiest way to waste your business time is by starting completely afresh every time you need something new – whether it’s a sales letter, presentation script, or content for your website.
If you want to build your authority and maximize the return on your marketing, don’t try to reinvent things and make them completely new every time.
To get the best return on the time and money you invest in marketing, you need to leverage all your activities in as many ways as possible.
Maximize the return on your marketing through leverage
Leverage is where we make a big impact by applying a small force. For example, the jack that you use to lift your car to change the tire applies a small force to lift a very heavy piece of metal.
In marketing, leverage is taking a relatively small action that adds significant extra power to your marketing efforts. To achieve this, you need to make as much use as possible of the marketing activity you are already doing. And you should reuse your existing material as much as possible.
Here’s an example of how you can leverage one small activity into a major marketing success with a little extra work.
Suppose you are giving a talk to the local Chamber of Commerce, here are 12 steps you can take to get maximum leverage for the work you will put into creating it:
1. Invite your contacts to attend
Asking prospects and customers to your talk is a great way to let them experience you in an informal way.
2. Use your talk as a pretext for research
People are often quite willing to give you their time to answer questions and quite often will take an interest in what you are working on.
3. Issue a press release announcing your talk
The media may even show up and interview you on the spot, or they may contact you afterward. Even if they only put the release on file for future reference, it’s still a great opportunity to promote your message.
4. Follow up with those who attended your talk
People who attended your talk are also in a great position to suggest your name to others. So let them know you are available to do the talk again.
5. Issue handouts, notes, or a summary of your talk
Remember to include your contact information on anything you hand out.
6. Publish the transcript on your website
If necessary, you can rework the text slightly for use on your website or other peoples’ sites – and don’t forget to offer it to the organization hosting the talk.
These 12 steps can help you maximize the return on your marketing efforts.
7. Use the talk as the basis of a magazine or newsletter article
Many organizations that you speak for will be delighted to publish your talk in their newsletters, which benefits their readership with valuable content and gets you additional exposure to their audience.
8. Use the talk content as the basis for a workshop
The content can easily be developed as a workshop – perhaps even as a follow-up for some of the people who attended your talk. You can charge a fee or just use it as an opportunity to get to know them better.
9. Customize the talk to other audiences
Once you have given the talk, you can make small changes to make it work with different organizations.
10. Make reprints of your talk
Issue these to people who attended or include them in promotional packs for your business.
11. Issue a press release after your talk
This can be issued after your talk with details of what you said – another opportunity for the media to contact you.
12. Collaborate with a client or business partner
You can do this either in the talk or in the way you develop the content afterward. This provides a great opportunity to strengthen your relationship with them.
Using this as an example, consider how you can get more leverage from your existing activities to build your authority.
You don’t have to find 12 ways but two or three additional activities – even just one – still give you something you don’t have already for relatively little additional work.
Both authors are experts in the study of human behavior in this field and each has drawn up a list from their research of the things that make a difference.
Here is a summary of Robert Cialdini’s Six Rules of Influence:
Reciprocation: Reciprocation is about how, if you do something for somebody, they will feel obliged to do something for you, or they will at least feel better about doing something for you.
Commitment and consistency: People respond to others who are consistent in their messages. If you are constantly giving the same messages to people and acting in a consistent way, they will respond positively.
Social proof: If people see others doing something, they assume that it must be okay to do it and therefore, they will be happier about doing it themselves.
Liking: People respond much more readily to people that they like, and even to the friends of people that they like. They feel comfortable if they see or like the things that you’re associated with.
Authority: People invariably act more positively if they have respect for the authority of the person who is giving them information.
Scarcity: People get so much more interested in something if they feel that it’s about to run out.
At first glance, it may seem like offering a product or service that appeals to a wide range of people will generate more sales than one geared toward a smaller group. But the fact is this concept rarely pans out.
Trying to satisfy everyone leads to all sorts of problems:
Uncertainty over business strategy makes decisions difficult.
Inability to stand out makes it harder to attract customers.
Lack of a clear reputation gives people no reason to be loyal.
Marketing campaigns are inconsistent – so less effective.
Yet most businesses seem to follow the approach of trying to satisfy everyone.
So perhaps it’s not surprising that only a handful of businesses last more than five years.
But the world is changing fast. The Internet is affecting the way people think and buy – even if your business isn’t online.
People increasingly realize they can find someone who meets their needs exactly in virtually any field.
Choose the right niche where you are the first choice for your ideal clients.
The truth is: you stand a better chance of becoming an acknowledged leader in a more targeted niche than in a larger, broad field.
The good news is that, whatever market you are in, there is something special about your business, which means there is a niche just for you.
No matter how ordinary you think your business may be, there is enormous potential under the surface that a strong positioning will unleash.
The key to becoming the authority is unlocking that potential by deciding the right niche.
Deciding the right niche
The simplest way to define a niche is that it is a group of people (buyers and potential buyers) who have something in common – such as where they live, hobbies, political views or health.
The secret of finding a successful marketing niche is that it should be small enough to dominate and large enough to support a successful business.
Think Head & Shoulders shampoo. It focused on people with dandruff instead of competing with all other shampoos and came to dominate that market. If it had sought to cater to everyone, it would probably not have been so successful.
Having a clear niche means being able to identify exactly who your customers are and what they have in common.
But having the right niche isn’t just about finding a group of people with something in common.
7 keys to deciding the right niche
Here are 7 keys to deciding the right niche:
Reachable market: If you want to sell them something, you need to be able to identify them and contact them.
Recognizable want: People will generally spend more money on things they want rather than things they need.
Identifiable gap: You need to identify a part of the niche that is not currently being served well and where you can offer something better.
Good fit with your strengths: It will be easier to dominate a niche if it suits your personal or business strengths.
Proven market: The best markets usually have some existing competition so that there are proven buyers.
Adequate size: There should be enough profit potential, opportunities for repeat sales and prospects to build long-term relationships.
Able and willing to spend money: Customers should have already shown they will buy your type of product or service.
If you want to attract more ideal clients, you have to make sure that your income does not depend on how many hours you work.
No matter how high your hourly rate, you can only work a limited number of hours and you can only be in one place at a time.
In order to make more profit, you need to find a way to package your expertise so that others will pay for it without you having to be there in person.
How to package your expertise to attract more ideal clients
Create a White Paper or Special Report: May be either a free report offered for lead generation or a very low-cost report selling for $7 – 27 that makes it easy for people to sample more of what you can offer.
Write a Printed Book: Imagine you meet two consultants at a convention. One hands you a business card, and the other gives you a signed copy of his book. Which one is likely to win more clients and charge higher fees? There’s no doubt that people who have written books have instant authority status. Yet, with on-demand publishing, it’s now quite easy for anyone to do this.
Write an E-book: For people not ready to produce a published book, there is a faster option of producing an e-book for sale online as an instant download. E-books are very fast to produce and are usually much shorter than printed books. However, because of the instant access – and usually because other bonuses are added to the purchase, the sales price is often much higher with prices of $27 upwards.
Create Audio and Video Programs: Technology now makes it very easy to produce an audio or video delivering valuable information, either as a special recording or as a recording of an existing event. These can be quickly packaged and sold at relatively high prices, either as an instant download or by mail using low-cost fulfillment services.
Develop Premium Products and Services: Combining various elements such as e-books and video allows you to create a higher value package selling from $47 – 97. Adding more elements such as personal contact can turn it into a $197 – 497 package and more.
Develop a Membership Program or Subscription Newsletter: Another way of delivering information is through subscription-based membership websites dealing with a specific topic. You can also deliver membership value offline through a subscription newsletter, perhaps with added services such as a monthly CD or software.
Create a Coaching Program: Books, audio, and video typically provide information in a very general way so there is often demand from people for personal advice on how to apply the information to their own situation. This opens the demand for coaching which can be delivered online, by telephone, and in person. This allows you to create an advanced program, selling for $997 or even several thousand dollars.
Run Live Events: Personal coaching is typically only delivered to one person at a time but seminars and workshops are a method of delivering the same information quickly to a much larger group. While the revenue per head may be lower for this approach, the large numbers of people that can be covered make it very attractive. This can be done at live events or through teleseminars and webinars.
Run Training Programs: Some organizations may want the expertise delivered to larger groups of people in an interactive way through training programs and will pay significant fees to have this done.
License Your Expertise to Others: If you can structure your expertise so that it is easily turned into a system and taught to others, you have the opportunity to license them to deliver it without your presence, leading to the prospect of licensing fees and other revenue. You can also do this through resale rights, white labeling, or even franchising.
Create Software and Apps: Software and smartphone apps can be created at relatively low cost but have high value.
Develop VIP Services: Some people want specific solutions for their own situation and this can open up opportunities for very significant fees. This can include consultancy and “done-for-you” solutions. There is always a certain percentage of people who will want to buy your most expensive option.
Coaching is a great high-value way to package your expertise
You won’t maximize your income just by creating a $50 e-book. But equally running a few high-ticket seminars will not give you the best possible income either.
You probably won’t use all of these techniques but the secret is to find the right mix of different ways of packaging your expertise in multiple ways to deliver maximum profit.
Many of them will work well together. Someone attending one of your seminars may buy a book or audio product and then later return for consultancy or coaching.
The choice of which is appropriate will depend on your personal skills and preferences and the market demand.
How to create your packaged product
The secret to making the most of these opportunities is finding the fastest and easiest way to turn your expertise into a packaged product. Here are some ways of doing that:
Write it: If you have the skills and the time, you can write your own book or program. This doesn’t have to be time-consuming and where it does not need new research, it can be done very quickly. You could quite possibly produce a valuable e-book and have it on sale within a few days.
Record it: For those who don’t have the time or inclination to write, the information can be recorded. The easiest way to create a product is by recording an existing event. This can then either be transcribed into a written product or sold in exactly the same format as it was delivered.
Buy it: In many cases, you will be able to buy content that has been previously created by someone else. This could be in the form of existing material that you are then licensed to deliver. You could also buy ‘Private Label Rights’ to someone else’s material, where you can then edit it and sell it under your own name.
Have it created: Another option is to develop a specification of what you want and then pay someone else to create it on your behalf.
Whichever option you choose for creating the product, the secret is to repackage and represent it in as many ways as possible for maximum return.
To reach more of your ideal clients, you need to be able to package your expertise in various ways to reach different audiences and to get away from earnings based on the actual hours you work.
Which of these 12 approaches would best help you reach more of your ideal clients?
Would it be easiest and most effective for you to produce it by writing it, recording it, buying it, or having it created for you?
Check out the other resources on this blog for more information on how to package your expertise to attract more of your ideal clients.
