One of the key ways to stand out from other experts and attract more of your ideal clients is to publish your expertise in a range of different media.
An authority appears to be everywhere that someone is looking for information about their field of expertise.
Your ideal clients should find you in Google searches, on YouTube, on Amazon, or just in a trade publication or local paper.
The key to attracting more ideal clients is to share some of your expertise with your audience by publishing valuable content.
Authority Content Creation
There are five key elements to making publishing easy and effective:
People and Purpose
Presentation
Preparation
Publication
Publishing Plan and Repurposing
People and Purpose
The first step in the process is being clear about who your audience is and why you are creating the content. It’s too easy to think that it’s just about getting your content out there. You’ll get far better results when you know who you are talking to and why you are talking to them.
In the post in this series on Positioning, we talked about knowing your ideal clients and creating a “persona” of them. One of the advantages of doing that is that you can have these personas in mind when you create content so you need to be as specific as possible in identifying who you are talking to.
For all the content you produce, you should be clear about the purpose.
The purpose of publishing content is almost always to make people want to contact you and find out more.
That means it has to provide enough information to impress them but you don’t want to give them so much that it answers all their questions.
One of the best descriptions of doing this is from the internet marketing expert Jimmy D Brown. He says you should provide information that is “useful but incomplete”. People should feel they’ve got value from what you publish but it should encourage at least some of them to follow up for more.
Presentation
There are many different ways to publish your expertise but it can broadly be split into five different categories:
There are many different ways to publish your expertise
Blogs and Articles: Short articles on specific topics that appear online or offline – may be on your own website, someone else’s blog, an online article site or a printed publication.
Special Reports: Short reports on specific topics that may be given away free either for lead generation or sold perhaps at a relatively low cost to let people know more about how you can help them.
Video and Audio: Video is becoming one of the most important ways of demonstrating your expertise and authority – perhaps through a short video on YouTube or a longer clip of a live event. Using audio – including podcasting – is another way of doing this.
Events: Taking part in events is another way of becoming an authority such as being a guest speaker at a live event or hosting a webinar online. Most people don’t like to speak in public and this can be a great way to stand out from the rest.
Books: One of the most effective ways to stand out from your competitors is to be the author of your own book. It’s now relatively easy to do but still, few people take the step. Being introduced as the author of a book on your topic immediately establishes your authority status.
The actual process for creating content is broadly the same, whatever media you plan to publish in.
Clearly you’ll take more time over a 200-page book than a 200-word blog post but the general approach and structure should be similar. However, as we’ll discuss shortly, you’ll want to use the same content in many different ways.
You don’t achieve authority without sharing some of your expertise with your audience.
Preparation
For most people, the biggest challenge in publishing and content creation is deciding what the content should be and then creating it. If you follow the right process, that should not be difficult.
One of the most useful systems I’ve found for creating authority content is the 4-MAT teaching system developed by the educationalist Bernice McCarthy which reflects the four different types of learning style that she identified in her studies.
The system works just as well for communication and marketing. In brief, it splits people into four types according to their need for information and satisfying the needs of all of them helps you create valuable content:
Why should my audience be interested in this message?
What information and facts do they need?
How can they apply what I am saying?
What if they do (or don’t) follow my suggestion?
Often people make the mistake of spending too much time on the “what” and “how” and not enough on the “why” particularly.
When you are publishing free or very low-cost content, you usually don’t want to go into too much detail on the “how”. That’s the part you get paid for.
Rapid Content Creation Formula
That provides a good overall structure but how do you turn this into valuable content and fill in the detail? I do that using what I call the Rapid Content Creation Formula.
#1: Opportunity or Obstacle
The first step in the process is identifying clearly what is the issue you want to talk about.
Example: Better Time Management.
#2: Overview of Solution
Next, you choose a formula for providing the information you want to deliver. Some of the easiest and best formulas are:
Common Questions
Mistakes
Steps
Tools
Secrets
Tips
True Stories / Case Studies
Example: 7 Tools You Can Use to Manage Your Time Better.
While that could be a great title, that’s not necessarily your title. At this stage, it’s merely a framework for creating your content.
In this stage, you simply list out the sections. I’d usually recommend five to seven but it can be more especially when the content is longer.
These headings could be bullet points in a blog post, chapters in a book or segments in a live event.
#3: Outline
Once you have your overview in place, it’s time to fill in more detail. But don’t rush to simply write the content. You want to build a framework or outline to work from.
I see this a bit like a tree – in the first step, you see the big picture of the tree. In the second, you add the branches and now you are adding twigs to each branch.
Each twig is an item of support information to back up the heading. It can be, for example:
Stories
Examples
Case studies
Specific information
Research
Quotes
Independent opinions
Checklists
Actions
Illustrations
Comparisons
Questions
The number of these you want to add under each heading depends on the total amount of content you have but three to seven would be a good guide.
(Notice how the number 7 keeps coming up. We talk about this more in a separate post on the “magical number seven.”)
At this stage, you are just adding them in note form under each heading.
#4: Organize
Now that you have pulled all the information together, you want to make it look or sound good – you are adding the leaves to the tree.
Depending on the type of content, this may be a writing/editing exercise or you may be organizing it into a presentation.
#5: Output
At the final stage, you have everything ready and you can go live with it either as a publication or a presentation. At this stage, you’ll want to ensure it all works together and give it a great title that makes people want to read it or watch it.
I’ve found this formula works for virtually any type of content, whether it’s a short blog post or an event covering several days.
Production
The secret is finding the fastest and easiest way to get your expertise out of your head and into a form that it can be published.
Here are some ways of doing that:
Write it: If you have the skills and the time, you can write it yourself.
Record it: For those who don’t have the time or inclination to write, the information can be recorded, transcribed, and edited.
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. You can get easy access to freelance writers at sites such as Fiverr or Upwork.
Publishing Plan and Repurposing
To get the best results from your content creation, it needs to be done backed by a plan or calendar.
Planning helps you make the best use of your time.
That enables you to make best use of your time and to maximize the results you get from every element.
You certainly don’t want to be creating something new every time. The secret to making success easy is finding as many ways as possible to repurpose the same material.
Every piece of content you create can be altered slightly so that it can be used in many different ways.
For example, you can:
Chop: Cut a larger piece of content into smaller elements.
Combine: Add different pieces of content together to make a larger package.
Convert: Make some changes to turn the content into something different.
Construct: Use your content as a basis for creating something larger.
When you use these approaches, the same content can work for you over and over again with just a few simple tweaks.
ACTION PLAN TO PUBLISH YOUR EXPERTISE
Answering these five questions should help you publish your expertise more effectively to build your authority and attract more ideal clients.
What topic(s) could you write a short special report on to demonstrate your expertise in your field?
What topic(s) could you cover in a short book or video series to help demonstrate your expertise to new prospects?
What topic(s) could you write a longer book on to demonstrate your expertise?
List the topics for five educational videos you could post on YouTube.
Look at some of your existing published content and identify how you could chop it up into smaller pieces of content or combine several to create something larger
The 5 Keys to Being Seen as an Authority
This is one of the five keys to building your authority as shown below.
Positioning: Identify your ideal clients and how you can best help them so you can attract them easily
Packaging: Offer your advice, skills, and knowledge in a way that makes it easy to attract a large number of high-paying clients
Publishing: Demonstrate your expertise in a wide range of ways so that people can see how you can help them
Promotion (Lead Generation): Take steps to attract more of your ideal clients to you instead of having to chase them
Persuasion (Conversion): Turn more of your ideal prospects into profitable long-term clients
Click on the links above for more information on each of the elements.
It may have a crazy name and it may lack the jazzy marketing of more recent publications.
But his ideas have been repackaged by others and now form the basis of expensive coaching and training programs under different names.
The truth is many people could have saved a lot of time and money by reading this book – and of course, implementing his ideas.
In my own experience, I feel I could have saved myself the weeks of time and thousands of dollars I spent learning NLP, hypnosis, and other aspects of personal development if only I’d read this book first.
Though clearly, I’ve learned a lot from the other sources, I feel Psycho-Cybernetics summarizes and explains the mental aspects of success better than anything else I’ve seen.
One of the factors that makes Maltz stand out is the combination of his expertise in medical matters with a deep understanding of real human psychology.
Maltz was a plastic surgeon who puzzled over why some of clients with physiological disfigurements immediately felt better after plastic surgery, while others continued to have psychological problems despite the physical problem being taken away.
Everyone has their own take on a book. But I thought it was worth sharing some of the key points as I saw them.
Key Points from Psycho-Cybernetics
1. We get what we focus on
The word cybernetics comes from the Greek word meaning the ‘steersman’.
The key to Psycho-Cybernetics is that the brain steers us towards a specific outcome based on what we think about and how we react to feedback from the world around us.
This is an inbuilt servo-mechanism that can operate as an automatic success mechanism or as a failure mechanism – depending on where we put our attention.
The automatic mechanism depends on regular feedback to keep it on course.
The mechanism therefore works best if we give it a clear direction by setting specific goals.
Without a clear sense of direction, it will not operate effectively.
2. Self-image determines success
While what we focus on is important, our success in getting there is determined by our self-image.
But the reality is that how we feel about ourselves is based on what we think others think – not what they actually think.
Taking control of your self-image is key to success
Our self-image is vital as it controls what we are capable of and it imposes limits on our achievements that are usually artificial.
What happens is that we magnify non-existent or unimportant flaws in our imagination and we literally hypnotize ourselves to be unsuccessful.
What we need to do instead is take control of our own self-image and learn to become successful.
We need to learn to look at the facts in a situation rather than what we believe to be true. For example, if you think everyone is laughing at you when you are speaking, how do you know that to be true?
We need to learn to use feedback to make small adjustments in our forward progress rather than using it to hold us back from success.
In fact, we often hold ourselves back from future progress by spending too much time focused on events from the past that we cannot change.
To succeed in the future, we have to learn to stop giving power to the past.
3. We create the future we imagine
The principle here is that we tend to focus all our attention and worry on what could go wrong in a situation.
But the fact is our minds cannot tell the difference between imagined outcomes and real outcomes.
So future success exists in our mind before it becomes real. The same applies to failure.
We have to learn to put the same energy and thought into imagining a positive outcome that we currently do into imagining a negative one.
We need to learn how to ‘worry’ about success by thinking about it all the time – rather than worrying about failure.
The truth is fear, worry, anxiety and lack of confidence exist in our imagination of the future. They are not real events based on fact.
So the secret is to spend time focusing our minds on the positive outcome. In Psycho-Cybernetics, Maltz suggests that the way to do this is by setting aside time to run Mental Movies where you actively picture a positive outcome.
Instead of focusing your attention on worrying about what might go wrong, take time to actively picture what it will be like getting the outcome you want.
Picture the outcome you want happening consistently – whether it’s applause at the end of a presentation, getting the order from a sales call, getting compliments for your work, or winning that tennis match.
You have to make it exist in your mind before you bring it into reality.
The key to success in any area of life is learning to run positive mental movies.
Obviously, some of these ideas appear in other books. But what I like about this one is that it seems to cover every angle, it is based on real case studies from Maltz’s time as a surgeon working on people’s physical scars, and it provides specific actions you can follow to apply his recommendations.
Incidentally, I particularly recommend the updated version edited by Dan Kennedy.
To become seen as an authority, you need to package your expertise in a way that makes it easy for your ideal clients to invest with you and to pay higher prices.
When we talk about “packaging” your expertise, that doesn’t mean you have to put it in a box and deliver a physical product.
However, most experts make the mistake of talking about the process of what they do or using a label like “coach” or “consultant” which doesn’t usually give people any reason to invest with them.
Presenting your services in that way is a bit like a restaurant telling you they serve food or listing the ingredients and equipment they have in their kitchen without offering any more information.
You need to be able to present what you offer in a way that encourages your prospective client to:
Decide to buy
See the extra value in the price you are charging
Try you out at a level appropriate to their immediate needs
Stay with you longer and upgrade to higher-value services
Dan Kennedy, one of the world’s leading experts on marketing for entrepreneurs and small businesses describes this as creating a “widget”.
A widget is a package of products or services that people can identify in their minds and therefore see how it could help them.
He says that the ability to package your services by consistently creating the right widgets that appeal to your ideal customers is one of the most important business skills.
“The ability to package your services to appeal to your ideal customers is one of the key business skills.”
So there are five key elements to packaging your offer effectively:
Proposition
Presentation
Pricing
Profit Ladder
Production and Delivery
Defining the Proposition
The first key to packaging your offer is defining exactly what you are offering to do. This follows partly from your positioning but clearly, you can have a range of propositions to offer as part of your positioning.
The key is that you need to define your proposition in terms of the results and transformation you can deliver.
For example, if you are a coach, you may struggle to attract clients by trying to convince people of the general benefits of coaching. It’s much better to talk instead about a specific service that delivers a desired outcome such as:
Attracting more clients
Meeting your ideal partner
Speaking with confidence in meetings
People then find it easier to see the value so they are more likely to buy.
Deciding the Presentation
The presentation of your offer is what you put in the “box” and how you describe it.
Again, it doesn’t have to be a physical box – although it may include physical elements – it is simply a way of presenting less tangible services in a way that people can get their heads around and understand how it might benefit them.
The five key elements of presentation are usually:
Personal Contact such as meetings or coaching
Written material like books and reports
Audio / Video with more detailed information and guidance
Resources such as spreadsheets, checklists, and recommended service providers
Services that deliver specific solutions
The exact mix of those will depend on your business and the price being charged.
One of the keys to success with presentation is to ensure it links with the proposition – usually by giving it an appealing name.
For example, if you are a coach, you could try inviting people to an initial meeting or you could instead create a package featuring your book, several worksheets, and an initial meeting and call it the Ultimate Goal Setting Workshop, linking it to a specific result you offer.
Find a way to show people exactly how you can help them.
Similarly, you could offer a coaching program or you could offer a 12-month Personal Transformation Program with a range of different elements included.
The key is that you need to find a way to enable people to understand exactly how you can help them, what exactly is included, and how they will be transformed.
By the way, the fact that you offer services in a packaged way does not mean you don’t continue to offer many different solutions. In the same way, a restaurant may have a weekly special offer that attracts people, and then many order something entirely different when they come in.
The key is to make the initial purchase decision easy and to build from there.
Pricing for Success
There are many different ways to package the same solution and the key to success is being able to find the best mix of ways to present your offer.
If you want to make $120,000 in a year, there are various ways of doing that. For example:
Sell 1 person something that costs $120,000
Sell 10 people something that costs $1,000 per month
Sell 1,000 people something that costs $120
Sell 10,000 people something that costs $12
All of these (and many other variations) are perfectly feasible business models, depending on your offer and your market.
The secret is to find the mix that is right for you. Ideally, you want to be able to package your expertise in several different ways so you can reach different markets and also give people different ways of trying out your services before they make a major commitment.
Somebody may buy your $12 book today and then be a customer for a $20,000 consultancy project in a few months.
Creating Your Profit Ladder
The approach to organizing your offers can best be described as a “profit ladder.” At the bottom end of the ladder, you have lower-cost offers where people can try you out with a small purchase and you are likely to make more sales.
As you go up the ladder, the investment and the commitment required increase. At the top, you have your VIP customers – a relatively small group buying your top services. You can break down these steps in any number of ways but there are five key stages:
First Step: A way for people to begin the relationship with you – this may be a free report or an initial consultation for example
Easy Purchase: A simple decision that turns a prospect into a customer such as a small project or a low-cost product
Upsell Process: A system for moving people on as quickly as possible to larger purchases and longer commitments
Ascension to VIP: A range of higher-priced offers for the best clients
Services: Doing things for people rather than advising them
The keys to success are that, as quickly as possible, you should get people on the ladder (investing something with you) and then move them up the ladder using a planned system.
As you go up the ladder, the investment increases
This is sometimes also referred to as a product “funnel.” The concept is the same but one drawback with the funnel concept is that it can focus too much on just getting people into the funnel – whether or not they are likely to be ideal clients.
The fact is it is often better to start by focusing on the small number of people who will pay high prices – and at the very least to get people buying something as quickly as possible.
While creating a high-priced offer takes more work, the potential return is much greater so you can often reach your objectives more quickly. But the key is to have the right mix so that you can deliver the right range of offers. The reality is that some people always want the biggest package you have available and others will always stick to lower-cost options.
A successful business caters for both. But often the best approach is to build your business around the smaller number of people who buy your highest price offers as that is where most of your profit will come from.
Producing and Delivering Your Package
When it comes to delivery, one factor to take into account is that some people prefer to write, others prefer to speak and some are more comfortable giving personalized advice.
Some people would rather sit at home one weekend and write a 20-page report, while others would prefer to get up on stage and do a live presentation.
Choose whichever method is the most appropriate and comfortable for you.
We talk more about this in the segment on publishing.
ACTION PLAN TO PACKAGE YOUR EXPERTISE
Answering these five questions should help you package your expertise in the best way for your ideal clients.
What elements could you put in a starter session for prospective new clients (free or paid for)?
What name could you give this session to make it very appealing?
Define the proposition for at least one low-cost package you could offer – focusing on the transformations it provides
Identify what elements you could add to this to make its value significantly higher
What elements would you include in a VIP package for your ideal clients?
The 5 Keys to Being Seen as an Authority
This is one of the five keys to building your authority as shown below.
Positioning: Identify your ideal clients and how you can best help them so you can attract them easily
Packaging: Offer your advice, skills, and knowledge in a way that makes it easy to attract a large number of high-paying clients
Publishing: Demonstrate your expertise in a wide range of ways so that people can see how you can help them
Promotion (Lead Generation): Take steps to attract more of your ideal clients to you instead of having to chase them
Persuasion (Conversion): Turn more of your ideal prospects into profitable long-term clients
Click on the links above for more information on each of the elements.
It might be hard to accept but the truth is that your ideal clients don’t love your business as much as you do.
If you don’t have a unique positioning, they don’t care how great you think your company is or how long you’ve been in business.
You won’t be seen as an authority in your market.
Your ideal clients want to know what sets you apart from your competition.
They’re not interested in cute slogans that offer no obvious benefits. They’re interested in what’s in it for them.
That’s why, to establish your authority, your business needs a unique positioning that clearly and concisely gives prospective customers a reason why they should choose you.
Your positioning needs to cut through the clutter they already have in their mind and all the new information that is coming at them every second.
“Sharpen your message to cut into the mind. … You have to select the material that has the best chance of getting through.”
Al Reis and Jack Trout
So try to put yourself in your prospective customer’s mind and ask yourself: Why should they buy from you?
Ultimately, this is about finding a unique quality in your business and conveying it clearly. The last thing you want is to try to promote your business and attract customers just by saying, “Buy from me” or, “We’re better”.
Defining Your Unique Positioning
You don’t want to be one of those business owners who don’t have a clear, articulate answer when asked about their business.
One of the pioneers of positioning was advertising legend Rosser Reeves.
“Each advertisement must make a proposition to the consumer. Not just words, not just product puffery, not just show-window advertising. Each advertisement must say to each reader: Buy this product and you will get this specific benefit.”
“The proposition must be one that the competition either cannot, or does not, offer. It must be unique – either a uniqueness of the brand or a claim not otherwise made in that particular field of advertising.”
“The proposition must be so strong that it can move the mass millions; i.e., pull over new customers to your product.”
Rosser Reeves, Reality in Advertising
In other words, it should sell – because it is something your prospects really want.
In short, his message was to find one thing that lifts your product or service head and shoulders above the competition, distill it into a memorable concept or slogan, and then repeat it constantly.
To have a clear positioning, you need to identify something special about your business, for example in terms of one of the following:
Promise e.g. guaranteed outcome
Benefit e.g. better results
Product or service e.g. unique features
Market e.g. only for teachers
Price e.g. lowest or highest
Endorsement e.g. from trade association
Guarantee e.g. money-back promise
Location e.g. geographic area
Whatever you identify has to be important enough to get consumers clamoring to buy.
A unique positioning will set you apart from your competition
As Reeves would say, it has to sell!
You need to find your most marketable point and then create an irresistible positioning around it.
A profit-pulling positioning will:
Identify with a clear want from the marketplace
Set you apart from your competition
Give people a reason to buy from you rather than a competitor
Provide the basis for a successful and growing business
Reflect your own strengths and passion
Be difficult for your competitors to copy
When people think of what you sell, you want them to think of you.
You want to create awareness for your business so that when an individual needs what you offer, they choose you immediately.
You don’t want to just exist in the marketplace; you want to be the company of choice!
A strong and unique positioning will allow you to attract more of your ideal clients and build strong relationships with them.
If you want to position yourself as an authority to attract more ideal clients, you need to know who will give you money for what you do and have a good reason why they should give it to you.
Your “positioning” is a crucial step in the process of attracting ideal clients. Yet, many people don’t take the time to define this.
They often just have a feeling that people will buy what they offer. So perhaps it’s not surprising that so many businesses fail in the first few years.
To be successful, you need to do more than attract clients, patients, or customers.
You need to attract people who are going to invest with you, get results and hopefully be fun to work with.
When you have clearly identified your ideal clients, patients, or customers, you’ll find it’s easier to:
5 Key Questions to Position Yourself as an Authority
There are five questions you need to answer to successfully position yourself as an authority.
Who are your ideal clients?
What big problem do they have that you can solve?
How can you best help them?
Why should they buy from you?
Where can you find them?
So let’s follow these steps one by one.
# 1: Who are your ideal clients?
One of the big mistakes most people make in business is they try to be something for everyone.
When you want to be as successful as possible, it can easily seem that trying to appeal to a wide audience will generate more sales.
But the fact is this rarely pans out.
The truth is: it will be easier to position yourself as an authority if you focus on a specific market.
So you need to define your target market as specifically as possible, taking into account:
Demographics: This covers identifiable and quantifiable categories like age group, gender, education level, income group, geographic area etc.
Psychographics: This reflects how they think and make decisions. It can be harder to define but ultimately more useful than demographics. It includes things like what’s important to them or their interests and lifestyles.
So ultimately, when you define your ideal customer groups, you’ll find it’s a mix of demographics and psychographic. For example:
New business owners in San Francisco
Mothers of young children who want a career change
Men over 45 who like golf
# 2: What big problem do they have that you can solve?
There are generally two reasons people will voluntarily spend money on something:
They want to solve a problem
They want to make their life better in some way (including their family’s life or their business results)
This applies whether you are selling to individuals, business owners, or larger organizations. To make the sale easier, your task is to find out what your target market wants and then give it to them.
You need to get inside their heads and find out what’s on their mind.
What’s the big problem that keeps them awake at night?
What’s the big dream they really want to achieve?
Some people buy because they want to solve the problem and others buy to achieve the dream. So you need to think about your offer from both perspectives.
For example, one person may see their situation negatively: “My business is struggling to attract enough clients”. Another may be more positive: “I want to double my profits next year”.
Based on this information, you can define your service using a sentence that begins with “I help people who…”
“I help people who don’t have enough clients” OR
“I help people who want to double their profits next year”
It is not enough to know that they have a problem (or that they want to achieve something). You need to know that they want to change the situation and that they are willing to spend enough money to do so.
One of the things you want to do is find out what people are searching for on Google and what they are discussing on social media related to the topic. Build a list of the top keywords people use on Google and of the questions they raise in social media and popular sites such as Amazon.com.
# 3: How can you best help them and provide a transformation?
Once you’ve defined exactly what people want, you can work out the best way to give it to them. You need to be able to show how you can transform their life or their business.
You need to be able to show how you can transform their life or their business
In doing this, you have to take into account your own strengths and capabilities so that you can match those to what people want.
If you are still seeking to define your area of expertise, it usually comes down to one of three things:
Advice: What do people most often ask you for help with?
Skills: What are you particularly good at?
Knowledge: What have you learned through books or experience?
When you have clarified the area of your expertise, there are two parts to defining how you can help people.
The first is specifying what you do. For example:
“I create marketing plans…”
“I offer an online training course…”
That’s where most business owners stop. They focus on what they do. But the reality is that people don’t care what you do. They’re only interested in what it means for them.
So the second part has to focus on the outcome for them. It’s often useful to start with the term “…which helps them to…”
“…which helps them to generate a large list of prospects”
“…which helps them to overcome their fear of speaking”
It’s useful to be as specific as possible about the outcome or transformation. Often you need to go beyond the obvious and talk about what it means to them on a deeper level.
# 4: Why should they buy from you?
Your prospects and clients could almost always go somewhere else to get the help they need. So you need a good reason why they should choose you.
Do you know why you are the right person to help your ideal client?
If you can’t think why people should choose you, you need to find ways to change what you offer so that you stand out. Here are some factors that could make your offer right for them:
Your specific expertise and knowledge
A guaranteed outcome
Serving a specific geographic location or market segment
Personal service or coaching
Getting this right can help you break through the clutter in the most saturated market and become the obvious authority.
When you’ve completed these four steps, you should be able to combine them and write a short statement defining your positioning such as:
“I help new business owners in San Francisco who are struggling to attract enough clients. I create marketing plans to give them a huge list of prospects. They choose me because I give a guaranteed outcome.”
# 5: Where can you find them?
A key reason for defining your target market is that you need to know how you are going to reach them
A key reason for defining your target market is that you need to know how you are going to reach them with your message.
That means you need to know where they hang out, what publications they read, and who already has access to them.
Without knowing this, you cannot create marketing campaigns to get your message across to them.
If there are not already people advertising in this market or places where people come together, there may not be a market here anyway.
ACTION PLAN TO POSITION YOURSELF AS AN AUTHORITY
Answering these five questions should help you clarify the right positioning to attract your ideal clients.
Who is your ideal client?
What are the big transformations they want – problems solved or achievements desired – where you can help?
How can you help them achieve these transformations?
Why should they choose YOU rather than someone else?
Where can you reach your ideal clients through your marketing?
The 5 Keys to Being Seen as an Authority
This is one of the five keys to building your authority as shown below.
Positioning: Identify your ideal clients and how you can best help them so you can attract them easily
Packaging: Offer your advice, skills, and knowledge in a way that makes it easy to attract a large number of high-paying clients
Publishing: Demonstrate your expertise in a wide range of ways so that people can see how you can help them
Promotion (Lead Generation): Take steps to attract more of your ideal clients to you instead of having to chase them
Persuasion (Conversion): Turn more of your ideal prospects into profitable long-term clients
Click on the links above for more information on each of the elements.
When you want to attract more ideal clients and dominate your market, the key factor that will determine success from failure is not strategy or ideas – it’s having the the right authority mindset and psychology.
Purpose: You need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve.
Passion: It will help if you are doing something that combines your strengths and your interests.
Pride and Confidence: You need to be ready to promote yourself and your business.
Proactivity: It’s no use just having ideas, you need to take action.
Personal Development: You shouldn’t try to be good at everything so you should focus on being the best possible at what’s most important.
Purpose
Imagine turning up at an airport and trying to buy a ticket without knowing your destination.
This may seem a bit crazy but it’s actually the way most people run their lives and their businesses. And that’s a key reason so many don’t achieve the business success they should.
So, to improve your authority mindset, it’s important to take some time to decide what you want the future to look like.
Define Your Outcome: You need a clear vision of what you want to achieve. This is like the picture on the front of the box when you are doing a puzzle. It gives you clarity on where you are heading and this will help drive you towards achieving it. To have a clear vision, think about how you want your life and your business to look in three to five years and sum it up in a sentence or two.
Set your Objectives: When you have a clear vision, you need to identify specific objectives – goals or milestones – on the way to achieving it. Make your objectives exciting enough to motivate you. To help you identify objectives, look at your vision and ask yourself what you need to achieve this year (or month) to be on course to reach them.
Picturing Success
The visual element of the authority mindset is important because many people waste a lot of time worrying about what might go wrong. If they put the same energy into picturing success, they would get much better results.
In his book Psycho-cybernetics, Maxwell Maltz talks about sports people running successful outcomes through their mind many times before the event. You can do the same in any area.
It may seem a little crazy but rehearsing positive outcomes in your mind before you undertake tasks will improve your results.
Maltz also points out the importance of self-image. People with a success mindset believe in themselves.
Many unsuccessful people have a poor self-image because they base it on what they believe others think – without any evidence of what people really do think. This self-image prevents many people from achieving the success they are capable of – yet it’s based on perception not on reality.
The right authority mindset is key to success.
Passion
It’s been said that if you do what you love the money will follow. Indeed at least one book has been written about this. It would be great if that applied to everyone. Working in a field you enjoy makes it easier to work hard and get great results. However, developing the authority mindset is not just about doing what you love.
In the book Good to Great, Jim Collins highlights that many of the most successful businesses have a clear understanding of what he calls their Hedgehog Concept. The Hedgehog Concept comes from understanding the intersection between three circles:
What can you be best in the world at?
What drives your economic engine?
What are you deeply passionate about?
To understand the concept, imagine that you are doing work to which you are ideally suited, which pays you very good money and which you love to do.
For some people that may seem an impossible dream but it simply requires some self-analysis to help you discover where you can achieve the best overlap between passion, profits and personal skills.
Pride
Many people don’t achieve the results they could in business because they don’t have a success mindset that makes them willing to push themselves forward and highlight their own expertise.
It’s as though they are waiting for someone to come along and give them permission to say they are an expert.
The fact is there are no expert police and, with obvious exceptions in certain professional fields, you have to set out your own expertise.
You need to see yourself as an expert that offers solutions that other people will value.
In his book Winning through Intimidation, Robert Ringer talks about the “Leap Frog Theory”. This says you have to be willing to tell people you have specific knowledge and skills. When you do this, you can easily “leap over” the people in the middle who also have this expertise but are hesitant to talk about it.
Too many people are waiting for that “one more thing” they think they need to know before they can claim to be an expert. The trouble is most business owners are so close to what they do that they don’t realize how much they already know. The challenge is to make the leap and claim your position as the expert.
You’ll often find that your clients and contacts rate your expertise more highly than you do yourself.
Proactivity
One of the main characteristics of an authority mindset is a willingness to take action.
However, the biggest blocks on success are the following evils:
Passivity: Reacting to events
Procrastination: Putting off doing something you should do now
Perfectionism: Just needing “a few more changes” to get it right
One of the keys to a success mindset is being able to decide quickly what to do with new information and taking immediate action. At the very least, it’s a good idea to identify a step you can take within the next 24 hours to start making things happen. If you decide to wait, you’ll find that someone else is taking action.
They won’t be any better than you but they’ll be one step ahead of you when it comes to making money and establishing a reputation.
Procrastination is one of the big blocks on success
Personal Development
People with an authority mindset don’t try to be good at everything. But they do seek to master a few important skills that give them an advantage. You need to decide what specific skills you want to master and then stay focused on them so that you become a recognized expert in them.
You should always seek to improve in these areas. So it’s important to spend time enhancing your skills and investing in yourself so that you maintain your expertise. But don’t try to become a master or everything. It won’t work.
To achieve your full potential and build your success mindset, find other people who can fill in the gaps in areas where you don’t have the skills or desire. That’s why it’s important to consider outsourcing certain tasks and to look for partnerships to help build your business.
