Ditching Hourly

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I've got an audio excerpt from an answer I provided on my YouTube channel. You can check it out at thejonathanstarkshow.com and it'll redirect you to YouTube if you're into watching videos. Otherwise, you can just listen to the audio here on the podcast. Enjoy. Hey, Jonathan here. I've got a question from Andri Haydash who says, if someone decides to focus on a specific niche like dentists and their portfolio and testimonials include a lot of pieces from various niches from previous work, should they still put it on their website and social media? Yeah, this is a tough question. So, you know, you've got all of this previous work, portfolio, testimonials, case studies, and that sort of thing, but it's real generalist. You sort of did anything for anyone who had a checkbook and you had some good results and that's great. But if you can't somehow tie it into the new niche, let's say dentist, if you can't make a case for it, if it seems really disconnected, then I would probably either leave that on its own website and start a new niche website or just take it off of your website or perhaps kind of marginalize it in the navigation, kind of hide it somewhere, maybe keep it online somewhere if someone was asking for a referral or something like that, or they wanted to talk to someone, a reference, that's what I mean. So it feels like you're throwing something away, but honestly, it's probably just going to serve to confuse the new buyers in your new market. So your ideal buyers in this new market, let's say it's dentists and you really believe in that, if you really double down on that, it's just going to be confusing, you're driving traffic from those sorts of people to your website, it's just going to be confusing if they get there and all the testimonials are from like a plastics manufacturer and a knitting outlet. So it just like, yes, we understand that you do good work. The reason for a testimonial is that you want to build trust in the new audience, you want to build trust in the dentists in this case. So adding these like, hey, he did such a great job for us or she did such a great job for us, isn't necessarily going to build that trust if the kind of people for whom you did that other work don't resonate with the new buyer. See what I mean? The point of the testimonials is to build trust and if they're from the wrong kind of people, it's not going to build trust from you. This is another way to put it. So what do you do? That's a big question. So what I would do is reach out to three people in this new ideal market. Maybe you already have one, maybe that's how you know it's an ideal market because you have one past customer, but whatever the case, the idea would be to do some sort of very short term pro bono or inexpensive beta service for one of these people in this new industry. And I am strongly against working for free and working on commission, all of these things, I'm strongly against it. Look at this as a marketing exercise though. This is an opportunity for you to work with someone or hopefully up to three people in this new area on an extremely short term thing. Maybe you do a half day strategy session with them or maybe you agree to audit their online materials or their backup strategy or whatever your area of expertise is. You have a connection with three people in this new space. You offer them a pro bono or very inexpensive version of this beta service and I would be 100% transparent with them. I'm looking to double down on this space. I love working with folks like you. You are my ideal buyer and I want to create some products and services that map to real problems that you have. I haven't done that yet, but what I want to do is build a little, I don't want to call it a portfolio. You basically want to create a productized service for these folks and deliver some positive results to them in a really short timeframe. So, you know, maybe a couple of hours or a few hours across a week or two. And the deal is with them, you're not giving this to them for free. It's not for money. It's an exchange for feedback about your marketing and sales materials, feedback on the delivery of the productized service and pricing guidance around, you know, that you do the thing with them and then you'd say, you know, would you have done this for $1,000? You know, if you were going to recommend this to your friends, do you think $1,000 would be a fair price or $10,000 would be a fair price or $200 would be a fair price? But you bounce an idea off of them after they've received the service, received the benefit and say to them in advance, if you enjoy the service, if you think it was valuable and beneficial to your business, I would love it if you could give me a short testimonial. So again, don't think of this as doing free work. If someone came to you out of the blue and said, hey, we want you to do some design work or...

build a web app proof of concept for us and we're not going to pay you for it, but we'll give you equity. I would never do that. So don't look at this as free work. This is beta customers, it's market research, and you're getting paid in feedback, testimonials, and especially the pricing feedback. Once you do that, you can add those brand new testimonials to your new site and move forward with a much more cohesive positioning statement. All right, hopefully that helps. I'm Jonathan Stark. If you have a question, you can go on YouTube, Twitter, or LinkedIn and hashtag AskJonathan, and we will find your question and add it to the queue. See ya. Would you like to learn how to get paid what you're worth? How about selling your expertise and not your labor? We work through all of this together in the pricing seminar. Pre-registration starts soon, and you can sign up to be the first to know when early bird pricing is announced at ThePricingSeminar.com. That URL again is ThePricingSeminar.com. Hope to see you there. Hey, Jonathan again. Do you have questions about how to improve your business? Things like value pricing your work instead of billing for your time, or positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space, or maybe productizing your services so you never have to have another awkward sales call or spend hours writing another custom proposal. Book a one-on-one coaching call with me and get answers to these questions and others in the time it takes you to get ready for work in the morning. Best of all, you're covered by my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If at the end of the call you don't feel like it was worth it, just say the word and I'll refund your purchase in full. To book your one-on-one coaching call, go to JonathanStark.com slash call, C-A-L-L. That URL again is JonathanStark.com slash call. Hope to see you there.