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. A question from Play & Repeat who... I'll summarize it. Do you have any tips about how to not be desperate because you have enough leads coming in? I've been at this for a little over a year and I'm struggling. I've gotten buy-in referrals. I always get great feedback and I've been featured by Adobe Behance. We love branding accounts, but it's not enough. Likewise, I mostly attract clients with a very limited budget, so on and so forth. All right, so this person's marketing isn't working. They're not attracting leads, basically. Almost always, and this might not be the case here, but almost always the problem is that the person is being really general about who they want to help, who their ideal buyer is, what their target market is, how they can deliver value to people who are probably in the kinds of situations that people in that space are usually in. Instead, they're talking about themselves, their process, their tools, the awards they've won, those sorts of things. They're presenting themselves on their website and their marketing materials almost like as a resume, like you would to an employer, your job qualifications. It's not interesting. That's not going to attract people. They want to hear about themselves. They want to hear about their problems and how you can make them go away. Almost always, it's helpful advice for someone who's not getting enough leads to keep their business feeling viable. It's almost always beneficial to focus down on a particular segment of the population. You can do that a bunch of different ways. It could be a vertical like dentists. It could be a platform specialization, like you specialize in increasing conversions for Shopify store owners, so Shopify being the platform. Another platform would be FileMaker or Salesforce. You could focus on a psychographic segment, people who are concerned about global warming or environmental advocates or people who run mission-driven businesses or green businesses. You can focus down on... I left out demographic. You could focus down on people who are single moms having their second child or something like that, demographic information that you'd find in like a census. If you decide who your ideal buyer is, who your ideal client is, who you seek to serve, as Seth Godin would say, who you really want to work with, and you concentrate your marketing efforts, whether it's social or lead magnets or blogging or vlogging or whatever, podcasting, if you focus down your efforts to this very, very small pool of people, it's still probably a million people, but it feels really small, then you can actually start to connect with them. You can find ways to help them in a general way for free that's easy for you and beneficial to them because you're focused down on this particular market. You can actually help them with your podcast or blog posts or social media articles or posts, whatever you're doing on social media, and they'll start to feel a benefit from it. And then if you have some kind of way for them to engage with you, maybe it's sign up for your list, or maybe it's schedule a phone call, or maybe it's just send you an email or send in a project request form, submit a project request form. If you have some next step for them to take, then they can start to interact with you in a more meaningful way than just... I'm not saying you do this, but most people do. They just say, I'm great at Photoshop, or I'm great at video production, or I'm great at creating React apps. I'm a front-end developer and I'm great at it. People can't connect the dots very easily. So you have to come to where they are and just pick someone who you would like to help. Maybe it's nonprofit organizations that do over $10 million a year in donations, whatever, and focus in on them. Think of it like a... You could think of it like a campaign. So for the next six months, you're going to... All the content that you create, all the help that you provide in forums, all the emails that you send out, all the podcasts that you do are going to be for particular... For dentists who run a single location. And reach out to them, connect with them, try and help them with your material. And if it's helpful, then you're just naturally going to start a conversation. They're going to see value in you. And if there's a way for them to easily find out more about how they could get more value from you, then you make that frictionless, then that's the way to go. So I visualize this as like starting a very tiny little fire with kindling. You just start a little tiny fire and...

Over time you add as the flame starts to catch and it starts to burn, you put more wood in there and then you start using bigger and bigger pieces of wood. But start super, super small. Try and help people. So pick some people who you want to help. Go out and help them. There's a variety of ways to do that. They're very low effort on your part. And once you start to have that, when you feel traction start to happen where people are reaching out to you out of the blue, they're recommending people to talk to you. In other words, they're making introductions. You're getting referrals from people you don't even know. That's when you'll know that you're starting to get some traction and you're on the right path. So that's what I would do. So short answer to your question is focus down on some ideal buyer defined by demographic, psychographic, platform, or vertical. And do something to help them to start a conversation with them. All right. I hope that helps. I'm Jonathan Stark. If you have a question for me, you can hashtag AskJonathan on YouTube, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Bye. 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.