Harms: This week specifically we’re talking about an expert business.

An expert business is essentially creating an online business and selling your knowledge, information and your skill set within a package that somebody can now purchase. 

Rather than them having to go to this person, that YouTube video, what they can do is come to one expert who they like, know, and trust and actually purchase what they have to say and what knowledge you have to impart. 

We discussed the economics of that model, what the value ladder looks like, the different stages that you will be selling into and very much where to start.

In this guide we are going to be focusing on now we know exactly what we’re doing within our expert business and what we would like to talk about and the information that we would like to sell. 

The next thing is how do we actually get that in front of an audience? 

How do we build an audience? 

How do we attract their attention? 

What’s the quickest way? 

What’s the most effective way? 

What’s the most powerful way to do that as it stands in the world of online right now.

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How? We educate

Harms: I guess the question that would pop to somebody’s mind would be, how do you let people know that you are an expert within a specific subject and start to attract an audience’s attention around that particular topic? 

I guess the first question I would fire out is how do we do this? 

What’s the first starting point?

Kyle: It used to be a lot simpler. 

It used to be, you would appear on TV, you would appear in newspapers, you would be recognised as an expert and there were gatekeepers, there were publishers. 

There were organisations who decided you are the expert that still exists, if you go on the BBC as an expert in international affairs or something, that’s a huge signifier that you are an expert. However, that’s the traditional publishing route which is still used, but it’s no longer the only way which is great. 

We have the Internet now so people can self-publish, we can put out our own content out there and, increasingly, things like YouTube are outstripping the traditional TV network. 

They’re becoming the most relevant way to talk to an audience and talk to the world as a whole.

Previously we had these gatekeepers who said you are an expert, you may now come on the BBC and talk about this, so it was nice and simple. You either were an expert or you were not expert. 

Now because we have control. 

We, the people, we have control of the ability to publish, so there is no longer this certainty of who the expert is and isn’t the expert. That does allow some people to come in and pretend they are experts and to fake it. 

That’s not what we’re talking about in this guide, those people get found out eventually very quickly because again, the Internet is very open. 

There’s a lot of information out there, so it’s very easy to uncover these people nowadays.

Harms: If you are looking for short-term income and that’s your purpose and you don’t want to build a long-term business because all the philosophies we talk about is creating long-term value and that’s the key here. 

You’ll have a sustainable business that generates income for many years to come. 

If you want short-term income and you are open to transacting your time for money, then check out last week’s guides. 

There is a big list of income generation techniques and it’s 200+ different ways to make money online whilst in lockdown which you can do at home. If you are looking at building an online business and long-term value then focus on this guide, this is where to spend time.

Kyle: In today’s world we have the ability to talk to anybody in the world. 

We don’t need to go on TV. The fact that you and I are talking, we’re in different places, talking to cameras and talking to the world to hundreds of thousands of people, I don’t think we as humans step back and often, think, wow this is kind of a big deal that we can do this. 

So now we have that we need to build authority. 

We need to build trust so that people know that we’re an expert and they accept us as an expert and the quickest way to do this is through education. 

The quickest way is to teach to talk about what it is you know about and to teach people about it.

Harms: There are a few ways, there’s to entertain, make people laugh, there’s create storytelling, some high-level storytelling. 

There’s lots of different ways and techniques you can use in order to almost attract an audience’s attention or build an audience’s attention very quickly. 

Now, a lot of those items also require quite unique skill sets, they have quite a lot of variables associated with them. 

You may say I know my subject, but I’m not a very funny person.

You may not at this stage be able to tap into that part so we’re saying, look, let’s make it as easy as possible to start and choose somewhere which is accessible to almost everybody, which is education, just sharing your knowledge around your expert subject area. 

Which I feel is the key here in cutting through the noise, in fast tracking the process of getting out there. Because you could spend a lot of time trying to put together a storyboard of ways to entertain your audience, but that’s a long process. 

We’re talking about how we do this quickly.

Kyle: Educating and talking as an expert being a teacher and educating fits really well with this particular funnel, which is selling our expertise down the line. If I were to produce content where it’s me falling over stuff and then I try to sell you on the digital marketing course, you might think what’s the connection? 

Also those routes, the entertainment or the interest-based routes will depend a lot on your creative talent or being very hot. If you are a beautiful person it’s going to be easier. Advantage, which is maybe unfair, but it is what it is. 

So people have different talents and what we’re focusing on now is your talent in the sense that you are an expert in your particular field, how do you get that across to people? 

It’s irrespective of where you live, what you look like, how funny you are, how good you are at speaking, those things are not going to be as important as your desire to teach people, your desire to deliver value to other people and to help them.

Harms: If you said what is the number one reason why we are recommending educating, sharing the knowledge with your audience as the first go to step. 

Why does it work really well within this funnel, which is the expert funnel? 

I’d say the fact that you can educate over time, create a trust with the particular person, audience, or the online world you’re speaking with. 

Then once that trust is built and the trust really there is saying, I trust that this person knows what they’re talking about. I trust that they are an expert within this subject, so I trust that the information given is correct, reliable. 

Once the trust is formed or begins to form the final part you now position yourself as an authority in that space, so it’s education, trust and authority. Once you’re an authority now you become the go to person for that particular topic subject, niche discussion and that’s where you start to see later down the line experts pop up on other people’s interviews. 

Experts get asked to write articles, experts get asked for their opinion on what’s going on within a specific space or niche.

All that amazing stuff happens. 

But that would not have been automatic at this stage, you don’t suddenly get a phone call out of the blue saying, we know you are an expert in this space you’ve done nothing to prove that to us, but come and jump on a stage and speak to an audience about that. 

It doesn’t work like that you have to put the work in to build the trust to then position yourself as an authority. 

Once you are an authority figure additional powers open up to you in terms of generating revenue for your business.

Kyle: It becomes easy at that point.

Let’s pick a niche that we’ll use in this guide

Kyle: Let’s stick to the business coach for now and we can adjust it. 

The whole point of us having a specific example is not because we want to exclude everyone else, it’s just a lot easier for us to build up using this imaginary client.

Harms: It’s a case study for you, so don’t think they’re choosing a business coach. I’m going to switch off now because it doesn’t apply to me. 

The steps that we’re going to take you through just swap in your business, your specific area of expertise for that subject.

You will see the flow that we go through where it is not an exact answer. 

It’s, let’s try this, let’s experiment with this, what does this tell us, and as a thought process and a thought exercise. 

You can see the kind of thought process that we go through when going through an exercise like this.

So business coach as a niche, what would be the first things to consider?

Kyle: The first thing we need to consider is not what do I do as a business coach or whatever your niche is. 

It is answering the question what problems do people have and what problems would people come to me with? 

A lot of people when they start a business or really any venture they tend to think about it from their point of view first, we need to flip that around and think about the potential customers, potential clients, the people we are going to be helping, what are their problems? 

What are they dealing with day-to-day that we can help them with?

Harms: Rather than approach it from, I’ve been in business for 20 years and I have worked with this many people, I have this much revenue. 

That is great, amazing for you but what about the other person? 

What we’re saying is put yourself in the shoes of the other person here.

Kyle: We are going to start with the other person, we are going to be empathetic to the people we’re going to be helping because as educators starting from that point of view is going to make a lot easier to bring people to us. 

It’s going to make it a lot easier to build goodwill, build trust and authority, and then, yes, there is a business end on the backend. 

But we start from this place of giving first.

Harms: Any good coach and specifically in the niche of this area, coaches, mentors, you have to come from that place first, because that’s the idea of interacting with your person. 

It’s not to do with you whatsoever, they’re coming to you for the objective skill set that you have.

Questions to consider here are number one, what problem are you solving? 

Number two is how are you intending to help people? 

How are you going to be able to help people? 

Number three is who are you helping? 

If you can narrow those items down and you can get the more descriptive the more specific you can get within those two or three questions there, the easier the rest of the process will be.

Kyle: A lot of the time when we go into a discussion with a client or potential client and we ask what we think is a very obvious question like, who is your market? 

Who are you selling to? 

Who is your customer? So often we get the answer, oh everyone could do this or anyone could buy it. 

They’re coming at it, often from the point of view that their business is so important that really everybody should be buying it and everybody could benefit from this and that’s generally not the case.

Even if it is we need to niche down and focus on a certain part of the market first and then expand from there.

But generally your business or your business coaching for example is not going to be relevant to absolutely everyone and if you go into it with that mindset it’s going to be so much harder to market. 

Whereas if we work out exactly the type of person and the group of people you need to be talking to, your life is going to get a lot simpler.

Harms: What we’re really looking for is a statement, so if you said what is the next step? 

What’s the outcome you want from me describing and getting really specific in this area, what we’re looking for is a very specific statement. 

That is essentially I help these people to become X, we’ll try to put this into a business coaching perspective to give you an example.

So I help these people to become X to learn X to master X, that’s really what we want to pull out of this as a first stage thought exercise. 

We want a strong statement here where we identify who is the focus. 

Who do we want to help, who do we want to become a certain something and then also what are we going to be helping them with. That’s very much where we want to get to in terms of extracting a statement that becomes our focus. 

Getting focused in this massive world of online business and the amount of people that are online is going to be more fruitful than trying to attract everybody. 

For example we just don’t have the budget that Coca-Cola has or a large car company has. 

We just can’t compete with that, so we need to get hyper- focused and a statement like this will help us remain focused whilst we go through the rest of the process.

Kyle: An example here might be I help London based tech start-ups to reach funding or to reach the first round of funding. That would be a very specific statement of what you do, the people you help and what you help them to do. 

Most business coaches if you talk to them will not have a succinct statement like that. 

They’ll say I help businesses to, you know, the operations, financing, personal stuff between the director, sales. HR.

That’s like great if I wanted to make you a partner in my business and I know you can help with these things, fantastic. 

But if we are going to be marketing ourselves online we need to have a very, very strict statement of purpose. This is what I do. I help these specific people to do this.

Let’s say you’re a business coach in the nonprofit world. It might be I help British nonprofits set up their social media with the intention of driving donations. 

That would be extremely this is what I do. That’s it. 

Yes, of course, you’re going to have other skills and you’re going to be able to help with other problems, but when you are attracting people for the first-time people who do not know who you are, we need to do it on this statement of purpose. 

It will be a lot easier from that point on. 

Then they’ll find out you’re multifaceted afterwards. After watching your videos for five hours or having a telephone conversation with you they realise they can help introduce me to private donors, or they can help introduce me to venture capitalists. 

If you include all of that in your first statement it’s too much.

Harms: Your client does not want to hear this can help everyone because essentially if I’ve got a problem, I’ve got a specific challenge I need to have solved, for example, how do I get donors from social media through my charity. 

That’s my challenge. 

I’m not necessarily going to be interested in anything else you have to offer at that moment in time, I would skip past you and skip past the next person until somebody is speaking directly to me on that particular subject. 

You don’t want to go too wide; we’re getting hyper- focused here. That’s the key.

Kyle:  A lot of the time once they identify who it is they’re talking to their audience, potential clients it will be very vague. 

It will be the owners of London based start-ups, that’s still too vague. If I were to ask you how old these people are and you don’t have an answer to that, that’s a bit of a problem. 

We need to know their age, we need to know their social economic background, maybe their gender if it’s a gendered base business. We need to know what they are interested in, what magazines they read, what websites they visit, what skills do they have? 

Are they using an iPhone or an android? 

We need to know this granularity of detail so that we can best talk to the market. 

There’s a free tool which allows us to do this.

The tool is called Facebook audience insights and it’s free. Facebook is a business for marketers and businesses who want to sell stuff to the users of Facebook and as such there is a lot of backend software. 

A lot of backend tools like this, audience insights, which allows me as a marketer or me as a business owner to access information on Facebook’s users. 

I can use this to get a huge amount of information. 

Let’s say I am targeting these London-based start-ups. I might start here in audience insights, at the moment I have more than a billion people in my market size. Literally this is everybody on Facebook. 

Facebook has 1.2 billion users at the moment so I’m not going to be targeting one billion people. It’s a bit wide. Instead I’m going to go to London, England. That’s dropped me down to five or six million people in London. 

In interests I can type in certain interests which would be related to my niche and I can start to see the demographics. In London I’ll put in venture capital. 

So in London there are 45 to 50,000 people who are interested in venture capital, not all of these people will be seeking venture capital, but this is one example of something that’s going to help me get closer to tech entrepreneurs. 

If you knew specific magazines or specific businesses that work in this niche then you’d be able to plug them into interests and get the same kind of information.

This is telling me that already a massive male skew two thirds of the market is male, one third are female. Relationship status, they are very single. This means as a whole this group of people are single very few of them are married, very few of them are engaged or in a relationship compared to the averages. 

Education is through the roof compared to the average London-based Facebook user; they are +228% postgraduates. 

It’s telling me they’re extremely educated and I can see what jobs they have here, and then I can see page likes. This starts to give me psychographic information about who this person is.

I can get huge amounts of information on all the different aspects of their life which I can then start to build into the profile of the person who I will be talking to. 

This is just a very, very, very brief look at Facebook audience insights, what I recommended is you jump in and start plugging in interests because that’s the best way to see the power of this tool. 

I just wanted to show you that it exists and that it is available for you to start getting that kind of granularity, that level of detail about the people you want to be talking to. 

Instead of just saying I’m interested in tech entrepreneurs in London, we can now start to build up a profile, find out where they buy shoes, what magazines they are reading. 

Do they go to the Royal Opera House? Yes they do apparently. 

What kind of level of education massively skews towards postgraduate education, etcetera. You can do this with pretty much any market. 

It’s going to give you just such an amount of detail and power to be able to talk to that space as you move along.

Harms: What we really want to do here is take out as much guesswork as possible and actually focus on what the data says, because the more data, information that we can gather early on, makes continuing to build this business a lot easier. 

If there is no date on our specific niche area that could be an alarm bell to say, is it worthwhile me entering the marketplace that maybe doesn’t exist, or there’s not enough data for. 

That’s one argument, the other argument to say is I’m going to create the marketplace. 

That’s okay, but you’re probably going to need a bit more of a business experience and money to do that. And have been there before and have created a marketplace for yourself before.

This is very much looking at identifying the market that already exists and then entering it and using the data to allow us to do that. 

If we are educating people we now need to know what to even talk to them about. 

Can we take a data driven approach and identify what we can talk to this audience about? 

Great they exist, number two is what do we talk to them about. 

Answer the public.com, what this will do is generate a list of frequently asked questions. These are frequently asked questions in the online world its data pulled from what people are actually asking out there

Kyle: In Google quite specifically. If I was a tech start-up I might go to Google and type how do I get funding for my London-based tech start-up or something very specific. 

Answer The Public will pull out that kind of question and give them all to you.

Harms: That’s where we want to focus to start with, otherwise we fall into this trap of what do I even talk about? 

Start very simple by answering these individual questions from the Facebook audience insights.

Kyle: That gives us two things we’ve got who we’re talking to, we can use audience insights to start to refine that and then what are we going to talk to them about we can get from Answer The Public. 

There are for both of these parameters for who and what, there are a hundred plus different tools. 

We don’t want to give you all of that not because we’re holding back secrets but because it’s too overwhelming. 

We want to give you one thing that works for each of these so you can actually get a move on. 

If we give you five options you’re not going to do anything.

Harms: Then it becomes which option is the best,? Okay now I need to research which is the best one to use. 

Both of those tools we gave are completely free so you can get started there.

We start answering – One question/topic at a time

Harms: Once we know what we’re talking about then the next question naturally, is how do we then capture these answers? 

Sometimes the most common default is okay let me start a blog. 

What it means is I’ve got these questions that Answer The Public has given me. I’m going to take out two to three hours of my evening to start typing these answers and work out how to create a blog and publish it to the blog and fingers crossed somebody reads the blog article. 

That works but we’re talking about where that sits in the tier of how well it works right now.

Kyle:  We are saying, do what we’re doing right now, which is video. 

Blog writing tends to be the default primarily because it became like a big deal 15 or 10 years ago and it was the way and still is arguably, but it is the way to rank yourself in Google so that when people search you on Google, you’re going to be appearing at the top. 

That assumes we’re using Google as our main source of traffic which may or may not be the case. 

We use different tools for different things depending on who our audience is, but the main problem with blog writing is it’s slow and it takes time to write blog articles, good blog articles. 

You can pay five dollars for a 300-word blog article but Google’s too smart for that Google will only rank actually useful information. 

You can’t get away with putting crap up anymore, so it takes time. It might take a couple of weeks to put together a really well structured genuinely valuable piece of information by typing it out.

Why Live video? 

Kyle: Because of this we generally recommend video and there’s a couple of reasons. It’s faster. 

In general, we just speak a lot faster than we do type, I forget the words per minute for each but it’s several magnitudes higher speaking. 

We also don’t necessarily self-edit ourselves when we’re speaking. So yes you have ums and ahs, yes, you have sentences that run on going different directions, but in terms of content volume, you are just producing a lot more. 

Whereas a lot of people when they’re typing out blog articles they’ll write a sentence and be like that is not right and edit it. It just takes so long.

There’s also a technical aspect to that speed in that once you upload a blog article it’s going to take time for Google to recognise it’s there and start ranking your website. 

Google needs to see consistent effort, consistent content going on to a webpage and even then it’s going to take three to six months before you start to rise up. 

It’s not Google’s fault, Google is checking all the websites on the Internet all of the time and analysing which ones are useful, so Google is doing a good job, it just takes time.

Harms: If you look at it in terms of common sense as well, they need to see that people are visiting it organically, is it a useful blog article? 

All of these things are built into their automatic process, so it’s not like you would post something and then it will get up ranked just because it’s new. 

Google doesn’t order its feed based on the newest first, it’s not like a social media feed. 

I think that’s a big factor as well. Why we love video is because it’s the closest thing to being there in person with somebody else, especially with lockdown going on at the moment, many people have defaulting to video calls, video technology, because if you can’t see somebody face-to-face what’s the next best thing? 

It is going to be a video because I can see you. 

All those amazing things that make us human you can see that. But what you can see even more powerfully is what we call an authentic message. 

It is a bit of a buzzword, but you get to see the person for who they are really to a point, because essentially we are in front of the camera and I would say myself and the Kyle you’re seeing now is pretty much us in real life.

There is going to be a certain persona to an extent but what I would say is the closer you can get to authenticity, the greater the connection and bond you will have with your audience. 

The best people out there on YouTube, Facebook, who have a genuine following and they’ve got a genuine audience are so real and I follow people simply because they are authentic.

Kyle and I are supposed to be professional online marketers and digital marketers but we’re also gamers so to some people that might seem weird, so we made a game logo, because that’s who we are. 

Just trying to give you an example of what authenticity means without diving into it.

Kyle: You’ve got video, audio and text. 

These are the three main mediums you can use, video out of all of them just has the most information. 

You have the image you have 30 frames or 60 frames per second, which is like lots and lots of images you have the audio as well. So you just have more information than any of the other mediums out there, and that’s in part why it’s more engaging. 

People prefer to watch video compared to looking at images or reading nowadays. 

Reading online on social media is kind of dead. 

It’s not the fault of people reading per se, it’s because video is just more engaging. It’s a lot easier to sit and watch a 30-minute video or than it is to engage with any others.

So we have the most information. 

It’s most engaging and importantly from our point of view, from a digital marketers point of view because you have the most information going in, you can re-purpose to all of the other formats. 

If I write something if I write a blog article changing that then into an audio podcast I need to sit down and re record it. 

I need to speak to create the next level to create audio. 

If I want to turn my text into video, then I need to do even more work whereas if we’re going the other way around if we start with video, then we can just take the audio out and we already have the audio component. 

Or we can take video and transcribe so we can take what people are saying in the video and we can turn that into text.

Going that way is a lot easier than going the other, so we go from video to audio easily, we go from audio to text easily, going from text to audio that’s hard. 

Going from text to video that’s hard as well. 

We can make our lives a lot easier on ourselves by just starting with the most information rich to medium and then we can re-purpose to the other ones if we want.

Harms: So that’s three main reasons why we think video is the ultimate method one is speed. 

Number two is they actually get to see the real you the authentic you.

Kyle: If you are sitting there right now thinking I’m never going to appear on camera, even though there’s more information, even though it’s more engaging, even though it’s faster, even though it’s the best way to be authentic and be you, I’m never going to be on camera. 

I will just say try. 

I was the most camera shy, the most audio phobic person out there and I got over it. 

I got over myself. 

It’s mainly your ego stopping you at this point and your face is fine. Your voice is fine. It’s only you stopping you there. 

I know there will be people sitting at home thinking, absolutely not I’m ignoring this part of the guide. 

I would say it’s worth the effort pushing through that and being able to produce video because there’s so many benefits.

Platform

Harms:  We will talk about other options because we are not going to force you into doing something, we’re just suggesting and recommending the ultimate way. 

That being said everything Kyle has said is completely spot-on. 

We often talk with clients about confidence, about fear busting when it comes to getting in front of video. 

We’ve worked with some fantastic people who coach people in front of video but as a starting point talk to me and Kyle.

We’ve got lots of tools, tricks, techniques to actually start the process of video, so 100% we feel you, we know it can be a block. 

There’s a starting point, but we will get you there. 

We want to take it to another level without frightening you too much. 

Video is great but the part we want to add which is even more powerful than video itself is a live video. Kyle, why is live video right now using the means we are going to be using the most powerful mechanism?

Kyle: It is a bit boring, it is the algorithm basically, YouTube and Facebook and Instagram and hopefully LinkedIn soon they want people to be doing live video. 

They make it very beneficial for you to play the game. If you do live video, they will make sure you are visible to as many people as possible, whereas if you post an image it’s not going to be seen by many people. 

If you write some text it’s not going to be seen by many people. 

If you record and upload a video it’s going to be seen by a few more people but not compared to doing a live video it’s just the simplest way to get reach, to get seen by as many people as possible. 

Purely because the platforms are YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etcetera want live video.

Harms: To give you some context on how powerful it is, if we take Facebook as an example, a client of ours who does a live video on Facebook will get the same amount slightly less in terms of reach than if they actually spent the minimum advertising budget allowed on Facebook. 

That’s how powerful it is, so you can either pay to get the reach or you can get the reach for free by doing it in terms of live video using that method. 

If you can do live video, you save yourself some cash when it comes to advertising in the first instance, the big first step, with spending some ad budget can actually be taken away completely by live video. 

Now we don’t know how long that benefit will be there for us so at time of filming, it is powerful.

Live video is still relatively new compared to other formats and doing it consistently changes the game and we see that with people we’ve worked with live video. 

Your first one you might get a handful of people watching and these are people that will have never seen you before. Then you might get some more. 

If you do it consistently they’re going to start rewarding you for using their feature on a consistent basis. 

That’s basically a simple, simple, simple way.

Next question we often get is what platforms do I post on? 

Twitch, there’s Facebook, there’s YouTube. There’s LinkedIn, there’s Instagram, there’s TikTok,

Kyle: Snapchat. 

It’s going to depend entirely on who you’re talking to. 

That comes back to the question of who, so previously we’re talking if I’m a business consultant and I want to reach tech start-ups based in London, then the answer is LinkedIn. 

As they’re all going to be on their sites where they are trying to connect with funders, for example, a lot of the venture capitalists are on LinkedIn. 

They’re probably also going to be on Facebook and Instagram, I’m lumping them together because Facebook owns Instagram. 

That will be based on the demographics as these tech start-ups will tend to be in their late 20s and 30s, but we get that data from Facebook’s audience insights. 

I don’t need to make that up. I could go check that.

The basic thing is how it’s going to depend entirely on who you are talking to, and that’s the answer and it depends, unfortunately that’s going to be the answer. 

If you do not really know and you can’t narrow it down then Facebook is going to be the best bet, just because of their massive reach and we saw just there in audience insights they have over a billion users, which is a sizable proportion of the world’s population.

Harms: They are one of the world’s largest social media networks and they are almost like a machine in terms of what you can do. 

You can do blog writing, video production, live video, you can post videos, images. It’s almost a jack of all trades platform because it allows you to do pretty much everything.

But they will have their own limitations as well, so that’s Facebook and just to summarise 

Facebook is very good for interest-based, because if you look at the audience data we saw we’re looking at data based on what people are interested in already, which allows me now to talk into that space. 

If they’re interested in this they may be interested in this. If they’re interested in start-ups they may be interested in business coaching. It’s trying to create that link around interests. 

The other big one that’s worth checking in with if you don’t necessarily know exactly who to talk to at this early stage 

Kyle: For video, which we are pushing, the big platform is going to be YouTube.

The main difference that I’d like to point out and obviously this is not a strict barrier but as you said Facebook tends to be interest-based. Whereas YouTube and Google because remember that YouTube is owned by Google, tends to be more problem-based. I want to learn pottery, you wouldn’t go to Facebook for example, you would probably go to YouTube instead.

YouTube is basically the world’s second largest search engine as it is part of Google and even when you do a Google search you’ll get video results right at the top. 

The video results will go above any blog articles, any websites because they’re trying to get you to YouTube because that’s where more engagement happens.

YouTube has interest-based stuff like gaming, entertainment. But a lot of people use YouTube for solutions to their problems. 

If you think of YouTube as one of the world’s largest problem-solving engines for you as an expert, you as an educator, it’s a really good platform for that.

Harms: If you think about a business coach what kind of things are people asking about, we’ve already got that from Answer the public but essentially we try to talk into that space.

If you think about YouTube as focusing on somebody’s needs, and Facebook as focusing on somebody’s wants.

Kyle: This will also depend on your product and service. 

Let’s say you only work with people who are actually running a start-up, and actually seeking funding at this particular moment. 

That’s a need not necessarily a want. 

Whereas a want or desire might be somebody who is interested in starting up a start-up but they haven’t quite got to that point yet, so Facebook and Instagram might be better for those people. 

The people who have the desire to have a start-up but they haven’t taken that step. 

So if you sell services helping people take that first step, then Facebook and Instagram and the want base markets, the desire base market might be better for you. 

Whereas if you are only interested in talking to people who are already up and running that already have a business, revenue, they have profit, then it’s going to be YouTube.

Harms: There is one caveat here, which is in the ideal world, ideal scenario if your machine is strong enough, we would like you to be everywhere, attracting audiences in every single area possible, but this is all about a first step. 

You may be sitting here thinking I’m not on any platform which is the first place to go to? 

It could be Facebook, Instagram, YouTube just have a look at where you think your audience is. We want you to start and take that first step as well. 

What about podcasts?

Harms: Now we’ve covered live video and whether or not you like it or not, that’s the ultimate way.

Kyle: The big one here right now, of the time 2020. 

The big one now is podcasts. 

Podcasts have been growing for the last few years. We are starting to break through that barrier where it’s no longer a strange thing to do. 

It’s reaching a much larger market all of a sudden. It depends on your format. 

If it’s just you as an expert talking, I’ve been researching this there are very few single person podcasts. The reason why normally you have two people or you have guests is because that conversation style tends to work a lot better in podcasts. 

I’d like to be proven wrong if you know any single person podcasts I’d love to hear about. I was trying to find some and it’s really tricky.

I think within this niche area there’s very few,

Harms: Unless you are already an expert. Some people already have a high profile outside of podcasting when they move over to podcasting it just becomes a different medium for them. 

I’m thinking of Seth Godin. 

But I agree with Kyle, the magic is in being a fly on the wall listening into this conversation, that seems to be what the magic item is when it comes to a podcast. 

Interviews, conversation between friends as if you’re a part of that conversation.

I think that’s where the magic is, I think our recommendation would be to still follow the format of video and then pull the audio for your podcast. 

That would be our preferred method.

A good example of that is somebody like Joe Rogan one of the biggest podcasts on the planet. Tim Ferris is another big podcast, some of his are recorded live videos where he can and then audio.

If you’re saying I’m not doing video in any way, then ideally a podcast will be a great next step. 

Because what audio has is audio and the potential for text which takes us onto the next item which is if you don’t want to do audio for whatever reason the next lowest ranking item would be text.

Kyle: You’re back at a blog. 

There are certain ways to do it. 

You need to make sure it is valuable, you need to make sure your articles are long. 

Generally articles over a thousand words do a lot better. They need to be information packed, it’s going to take you time to produce these and then it’s going to take a while for google to start picking it up after. 

But it does work if you have the time and if you have the patience to go through that process.

As long as you’re willing to commit to that kind of level of content creation rather than a couple hundred words once a week, then you’ll be fine. 

You’re going to have to be consistent, it has to be long, it needs to be valuable and even then you need to wait three to six months before you start to pick up traffic.

Harms: Our preferred method is live video which allows you to pull out some video clips potentially, then that allows you to pull audio which can be converted to a podcast, which then allows you to create a blog article, guide etcetera.

The purpose of today being attracting an audience’s attention, how do you get your message or educational messages out to the world in order to start to get people saying, this person knows what they’re talking about. 

I’m interested in this, let me now follow him. 

That’s the purpose of what we’re trying to build, that attraction, that kind of energy online. 

We used a business coach as an example but that can be swapped in and out for whatever your particular niche is that you’ve identified.

We’ve got a bunch of to do’s which are actionable and you immediately start to do.

Kyle: The first thing is kind of a mindset change, it is becoming comfortable with the idea of becoming an educator. 

Becoming comfortable with the idea of okay, I’m going to have to give away some information and help people off the bat, with the expectation of further down the line I can build a business off this. 

The first to do is you’re going to become an educator, be cool with that. 

We need a mindset change you’re going to be building trust through education, and you’re going to have to get used to sharing information.

Second is you need to have a written statement of what it is that you do. 

Who it is that you help and what you help them with. 

We gave an example of how I help a London based tech start-ups to raise venture capital. 

You need something that succinct, something that rolls off the tongue, something that doesn’t take 20 minutes to explain to people with you exceptions. 

We need something that’s one sentence and that is to be written down, not something that you’re constantly configuring in your head. 

Write down your statement of who you are, what you do, how you help people.

The third one, go and check out Facebook audience insights. 

Go on and have a play around and you can see how much information is there, it’s really cool. Try to plug in some interests related to what you already know about your audience and then start drawing out information. 

Start to build up this picture of who these people are based on that information.

Harms:  The final two take the guesswork out of the equation when we’ve determined everything Kyle has said so far and we’re now going to talk to our audience. 

The best way to do this is actually find out what people are asking so we can then answer their question. 

Use Answer the public as a great starting point. 

Let’s not assume that we know what they are going to be asking because we are an expert in the subject, it’s very hard to place ourselves back to a decade ago when you started this particular subject. 

We can’t assume that we know what they’re going to be asking, so let’s get some proof, data and start talking into that space.

The final thing to do is get comfortable with video. 

The big takeaway from today should be to use video. If I can’t use video for whatever reason, I’m going to create a podcast or some kind of audio technique. 

If I can’t do a podcast then it’s going to be down to a blog. 

We’ve discussed the pros and cons for each of these and we spent a bit of time on video specifically live video, so please get comfortable with that.

Go and have a look at your favourite YouTubers, someone you typically watch on video. 

YouTube is a good place because what YouTube allows you to do is you can sort that YouTube creators video in order of upload. Some of the best YouTubers or video creators have been producing to camera video for a decade now. 

Simple task is to go and have a look at their videos, what they look like, what they sound like, the stuff they said, the vibe, the quality. Have a look at that 10 years ago and have a look at how they progressively improved as the years go by. 

For everybody it’s a step by step by step process.

Kyle: We tend to look at someone like Gary Vaynerchuck and think I’m never going to be able to do that. 

Look at the great lighting and set design, etcetera we’re looking at the end result. 

Go back and look at the first videos and they’re rough. 

Harms: Sadly, we all have to go on that process and the journey to get to a certain level of I am great. 

And even when you get there, there’s still another level to get to. 

The key here is to use that example that case study to be encouragement in order to get started with live video.

What you have learned so far:

• Number one way to attract an audience’s attention online
• Work out what your niche should be
• Best production method to get to as many people as possible online
• Should you use LIVE video?
• What is the order of most effective production methods?

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