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Harms: We are very much focusing on a completely new subject.
Kyle: This week we want to talk about how you as a professional, as somebody who has skills as an expert in your particular field, how you can package up that knowledge and build an online business based on your expertise based on your skills and your knowledge.
Harms: If somebody says what do you mean by expert?
Kyle: Even if you don’t think of yourself as an expert, even if you don’t think of yourself as world class, top of your particular field in whatever you do, you are to some people an expert.
People who don’t necessarily know as much as you. You have skills and you have knowledge, which can be monetised online.
Some people whenever we talk about this topic with them they say they don’t have any skills. I can’t do anything.
Generally this is not the case.
Maybe you’ve just finished your GCSEs and you really don’t have any real-life experience, even then, you can tutor people in the GCSE’s you have a skill, you have an expertise you can fall back on.
But generally most people don’t think they’re experts because of psychological blocks.
They aren’t comfortable calling themselves an expert.
They’re not comfortable with what they can do. A lot of what we’re going to be talking about today is unlocking what your expertise is and how you would turn that into a product, you do not need to be the world leader.
You do not need to have a Nobel Prize in your field. In fact if you’re at that kind of level it’s often debilitating.
Those people aren’t very good at packaging up what they know, they’re so detached from amateurs in their field that they don’t know what other people don’t know.
They take it for granted that other people know as much about their field as they do.
If you are at the top of your field. Good for you, you’re probably not the person we’re going to be talking to.
We’re talking about the people who have expertise, they have knowledge, they have skills in which they can pass on to other people.
Harms: Because the common misconception is very simple, I am not good enough to be selling my expertise or skills. Or I’ve not been in this industry for a period of time.
Some people associate it with how long you’ve been in an industry with whether you are not an expert. Some people will add the barrier that I’m not old enough to teach this particular expertise.
As you go through this try not to put up barriers just try to keep an open mind with what we’re saying, and then just apply what relevant items are for yourself and that’s the key.
We will discuss something that is not going to apply to everybody. We’ve spoken about event businesses, yoga trainer’s, personal trainers, coaches, mentors who physically meet people on a one-to-one basis.
We’ve spoken about making money online using the big list, but that also only applied to specific people in different categories.
Harms: Okay Kyle, who isn’t this for?
Kyle: The most obvious one here is for the people who say they don’t have skills, they’re not an expert, I’m no good at anything.
I’m pushing back on that saying you are.
Like the GCSE example, maybe you didn’t get the best grades in your GCSE you’re 15, 16, you’ve just finished and you got A’s. You did well, but you’re not top of the country or anything like that, but you are also head of the basketball team, and maybe you run the school newspaper.
You are an expert in getting good grades while maintaining a high level of sports and community interaction. You are an expert in that particular combination so you don’t need to be the expert in biology, you need to be the expert in okay, I’m really good at biology, but I also run this club. I am sporty and I set up an online business.
It’s in the intersections between different professions, between different skills.
That’s where we can find your expertise, you’re an expert at being you and you’re the only person who is you and you are the one who is an expert at that.
There’s going to be some value there for some people out there which you can monetise.
If you’re thinking I don’t have any skills, I’m not an expert on anything. Nonsense.
The only people this isn’t for are for people who know they are an expert or they found out what they’re an expert at, but they are unwilling to teach other people.
People who have an expertise and are like this is mine and I’m never going to give away this knowledge, this is a trade secret. This is how I make my money; this is what makes me who I am. I’m never going to tell you what it is.
Those people who aren’t willing to teach, those people who aren’t willing to share, then they are the people who this expert funnel is not for.
If you see the world as a zero-sum world where if I do well you do badly, then this is not going to work for you.
We’re only interested in talking to people who have an expertise, who have skills and knowledge and they want to share it with other people.
Understanding that helps everybody, that helps them and it helps the world and if you’re not really on board with that, I would say this guide is not going to click with you.
Harms: That’s okay if that’s your viewpoint, or that’s your model in terms of how you run your particular business or within your expertise, or you may already have an inner circle that you share this stuff with.
But you don’t really want to share this with the wider world.
What I would say is also this applies to people who this may not be exactly for you and Kyle may disagree here, but it’s very much so, does this kind of wealth generation or the way you make money also suit your personality?
Does it suit your style in the way in which you can best make cash?
For example Kyle and I many years ago did a personality test just to work out where we are best suited in terms of generating cash.
Where does our happiness also come from?
Teaching, sharing our knowledge, sharing things, our experiences, case studies. Even if a client pays us thousands and thousands of pounds there will be parts of that which are not very specific to this particular business that we can now share with a wider audience, so that the larger pool benefits.
It is a case of actually we enjoy doing this, we are teachers by nature so often people who teach this kind of subject get a bad rep because the thing that comes back at them is, well why are you teaching this?
Surely you can make loads of money from this, why are you not keeping it a secret?
That goes back to what Kyle says if you are a hoarder of trade secrets and your happiness comes from just making loads of cash in silence, then that is a type of personality.
That’s fine, but Kyle and I get our happiness and what works for us is through teaching the mechanism of educating groups and the online world is really very much the best place to do that.
If somebody is here and they haven’t built an online business yet, but you are wanting instant cash from your expertise, then this also might not be for you.
If you remember the principle is very simple, an online business is still a business and we’re going to work you through the process of building that online business around your expert skill.
But if you’re thinking I’m going to make instant cash straight after today this might not be for you.
We’re focusing on building an online business around your expert niche.
If it doesn’t work for you that’s okay. Again, other sections will apply better.
Kyle: Depending on your disposition, depending on your skills and what you enjoy doing there are going to be different business structures, different ways of adding value for different people.
If you don’t want to be a well-known expert, package up your expertise and knowledge, that’s fine.
We’re not going to sell everything as the way to make money online.
Harms: Why in particular this niche and also there is a scenario going on right now if you aren’t aware, it’s called covid-19, coronavirus. People are on lockdown and if you’ve not been living without the Internet you cannot escape it.
But essentially, we are in a strange time right now and Kyle chooses the topics, so what made you think of doing this because it’s quite timely as well.
Kyle: Quite specifically I have a friend who is a really high-end visual effects, he does graphic work for film and TV really. He’s furloughed. He’s being paid to sit at home and do nothing. And this is a highly skilled individual whose skills are being wasted.
There’s a lot of talent in the world. I think globally now this is just one example, but there’s a lot of talent that is not being used.
People are either unemployed or underemployed, it’s wasted talent.
What I’m suggesting and I think this is a good business model anyway. But right now it really makes sense to take all of that knowledge, take that expertise and start to package it up into products.
We’re going to get it out into the world.
There’s a lot of learners out there at the moment as well because people are sitting at home like, what shall I do, and we will make a bit of money while doing it.
We are going to create a business based on your expertise based on creating a product from your knowledge.
Harms: If you are in the fortunate position where you now have time but your income is okay then great, what we’re saying is at the start of this guide we’re going to be leveraging the idea that we do have time in order to create a product that can generate us an income, even when we go and carry on with our normal day job.
This can be a supplementary income, it can be a bonus income, it can drip feed small amounts income to you as time goes by.
We are not saying just sacking the boss or leaving the work job tomorrow, we’re saying now we’ve got some time let’s leverage it and start to create something using everything we know in the background.
This kind of business is categorised as a buzzword which jumped out in the last, I feel five, six years is an info entrepreneur.
Kyle: I think it’s Tai Lopez who popularised this. It’s the idea of the most perfect product you can produce online is information. Unlike selling a chair or an oven, information is very easy to sell. You can deliver it easily.
Infopreneur is based on this marketing of information because information is the most pure form of digital content.
It is the most pure form of online business that you can set up and as such it has been thrown around as like the thing that you should be doing. Infopreneur or information entrepreneur has become this buzzword around this, it doesn’t devalue the fact that selling information and selling knowledge is still a very valuable thing to do.
It’s just often been packaged up into these get rich quick courses where you are selling information that either you didn’t necessarily make, or you haven’t added much value to it.
You might be selling the same information as a thousand other people and then based on business principles you’re not going to make any money from that.
What we’re talking about is you as the expert will produce something of value and put that out into the world.
That’s going to be the main difference between what we talk about and the get rich quick version of information marketing.
You are genuinely going to have to create something valuable first.
Harms: This is not you’re going to create a product and it’s going to make somebody a multi-millionaire overnight.
Kyle: That is going to be based on the value of the information you’re producing.
You’re going to be creating something valuable, so that’s why we said there’s going to be work involved.
You are going to have to actually create something.
Harms: The other common thing is I have to be selling an information product or package which involves somebody else making money. Now that’s a big misconception because actually no.
What if your information product teaches somebody how to do digital graphic work or digital art on an iPad?
What if you teach somebody how to create this image and be able to put it onto a cover which can then be put onto an iPad cover as an example?
What if it taught people how to become editors?
Ultimately, a lot of things end up with somebody benefiting financially depending on if it’s a job, freelance gig, or a particular kind of business, but it doesn’t have to be.
It can also be teaching people how to speak Chinese; that’s something Kyle has done in the past and continues to do.
The result could be they have a financial gain but also it could be that they learn something new. They get to explore a new idea that they’ve always wanted to try.
I did a calligraphy class live with the lady who does calligraphy for the Royal family so it was a cool experience, but that was more of I want to learn this item as we’re quite curious about it and that was live.
What if that were packaged as a digital item, it would have the same benefit for me.
Think outside the box, think about not only what expertise can you share with somebody to make their money that is not always the case here.
There is plenty of information out there which is packaged up to just teach somebody something.
Kyle: For example Russell Brunson is one of these info entrepreneurs.
He runs a software company called clickfunnels, but his first information product and his information business was teaching people how to make a spud cannon. Which is basically a way to blast potatoes using a big long piece of tubing hundreds of feet, so he went out with his brother and they shot videos about how to use the spud cannon.
There are videos and some PDF plans of how you put the spud cannon together and what type of PVC piping to get from home dep, that kind of stuff. That was his first product.
Is that making people money?
Is that helping people professionally?
No.
But he packaged up information that he had, that he learnt and he made a business out of that. Again it doesn’t have to be professional.
It doesn’t have to be money-related just a lot of courses out there are about making money, it doesn’t mean yours has to be.
But why is this a great business?
What are the advantages of creating a business like this?
Information businesses as we just mentioned are the most pure digital online business and because of this there are some massive advantages.
By pure we mean there are no atoms involved, there are no physical goods.
For example, my first big business was helping people learn to read and write Chinese. The first product I had were these posters, they were huge, they were a zero. It was a metre and a half long and I think it weighed like 4 kg and I had them printed in China, they were being sent mainly to America, Canada, and Europe.
So my first product was this very heavy long cumbersome thing that I had to ship around the world. I made very little to no money because I would sell it for $20 and would cost me $20 to send it to Canada.
I then pivoted into digital goods so I would basically send the PDF of this a zero poster and instructions about how they can get it printed for five dollars at a nearby printshop.
I sold that for nearly the same price, but I wasn’t spending all that money getting it shipped or anything like that because it was a purely digital good. It was a PDF I sent to them and profits just went through the roof because of that.
Digital goods have no costs to manufacture, no cost to distribute, you don’t have your goods sitting in a warehouse accumulating dust, costing money.
So once you create it for the first time there is no marginal cost to sell it and it doesn’t cost you any more to sell a thousand units than it does to sell one.
Harms: Because in a conventional business every time you sell another unit comes with that marginal cost whether it’s labour costs, shipping, logistics, inventory, rental.
If you sell a thousand items, you may have to upgrade your storage centre, even if you’re storing it somewhere else you may have to pay them a higher rent because they’re using more storage. It comes with additional costs, whereas digital goods do not.
Number two is you get a higher profit margin.
If you take the poster example the profit margin essentially is everything that’s left after all of these costs are being put into place. The cost of his time. The cost of the printing, the cost of the packaging.
In Kyle’s example, the profit margin may have been one to 2% left over after all is said and done, as an example, he said he made no money; it could be 0%. If the calculations are wrong here you could also end up on every product sold actually having a loss.
If you take the profit margin of a digital product once it is created the first time and some analytical people may say, let me factor the cost in my pounds per hour against the product, but more products you sell the profit margin increases to the point where, whatever the price is less any e-commerce shop subscription items and you can really simplify this. That is what is left.
So high profit margins are number two.
Kyle: Once you’ve got it all set up, it becomes automatic. I don’t want to use the word passive income but we are going to have to touch on it.
When you do most work when you have a job the value you’re creating and how much you get paid is always tied to how many hours you work.
That’s why we have terms like hourly wage, how much you get paid per hour and even the annual salary I get £50,000 a year, or whatever it is.
These are tied to time and this is a very industrial revolution kind of way of thinking about how we get paid and this is just how we talk about salary.
We don’t talk about abstract numbers; we talk about per hour or per year.
The only way to earn more money generally is to get a raise or just work more hours in the day, but there is only a limit to how many hours we work per day or per week or per month, which means it’s impossible for us to get 10 X or 100 X how much we are getting paid.
If it’s tied to our time because we just do not have a thousand more hours to work.
Instead, we need to be smart.
We need to set up business systems that work independent of us, so things that keep selling even though we’re not there, so we can continue to generate income that is not tied to our hourly rate.
Harms: I would recommend anybody read the book, which is Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich dad poor dad cashflow quadrant, which is the second in the series.
Where Kyle spoke about trading time for money we’re now dealing in the employed sector and the self-employed sector and they have their pros and cons.
The idea is if there is going to be a want to go from employed or self-employed. There’s going to be a desire to do that.
Self-employed yes, you get paid potentially more than employed, you have more control, you have more time freedom.
There’s lots of benefits to that, and it often means you can pick and choose.
If you nail this you can pick and choose who your clients are, what kind of work you like to do.
Over time you can build a brand with this as well, so it does work, but it still requires you in the general part to trade time for money.
What we want to do is get to this side of the quadrant where we no longer have to trade time for money.
Instead, what we’re doing is building a system, building assets. In this case, it’s a digital asset or an online business as the asset which will then pay us, regardless of what time of the say it is. We no longer have to trade time for money.
We are trading our energy to create this in advance which will then continue to pay us ongoing and that’s where the philosophy of passive income comes from. We’re focusing on the business part.
What Robert Kiyosaki has evolved over the time is because when this was written, the online business world wasn’t it. It wasn’t out there.
People weren’t necessarily generating revenue online as a passive income, it was very much property, real estate, stocks and shares, trading was the mechanism. Now online business very much falls into this category in a big way.
Now investing is the final part; it’s not part of this discussion.
But essentially somebody like myself and Kyle had a passive income you could purchase a percentage of that to now create income, which is where your money works hard for you.
Kyle: Using your money to make money rather than your assets to make money.
Harms: Let us put this into context five years ago, Kyle created a digital product which he is still getting paid for today.
Let’s not worry about the amount, frequency but five years ago he created a digital product which he is still making money for.
That’s the part which should sink in here.
Kyle: I created a handful of PDFs and some videos, put them on a website and then this morning I woke up and there was £30, that’s impressive.
That’s just one product, you can have multiple products, you can have multiple online businesses all ticking away and bringing money in, or a lot more money over time.
That’s when you do reach this passive idea.
The problem I personally have with the idea of passive income is it makes it sound like you’re getting money for nothing and you don’t do any work.
That’s not true.
You need to do work upfront, you need to create something of value that people want in the world and then after that point, yes, people continue to pay for that.
Harms: If you asked what is the work that’s required, I would say a nice model that I like to use is and the first thing to write down if you have a piece of paper is this, essentially there’s a triangle and three levels to the triangle.
Level one is getting some knowledge, foundational level knowledge and that’s at the bottom, the base. If you’re looking at an expert online business becomes your foundational knowledge.
Once you know and you are comfortable and you say actually this is exactly what I’d like to do, now you start to specialise.
Specialising will be now getting to know all of the finer details on how I exactly implement this.
The final bit is anybody who has got a successful business will know you need a coach, mentor, somebody to support you through that process or somebody who has been there.
You can get lots of foundational knowledge and you can do that every single week on the BBO show a new piece of foundational knowledge.
Then when you’re ready, you can jump in and specialise.
What sort of business model because yes we’re talking about a macro business model.
Now there can be a business model within that which is going to be based on your expertise. But how can people do something just as a thought exercise to start going and processing this?
What’s a good way for them to start to understand what should be their business model within this category?
Kyle: This comes back to the question of what your expertise is?
What have you mastered?
What kind of information can you impart to other people?
What we’re going to do with the business model is we are going to help people get to where you are right now, and if you start with that in mind, that makes it a lot easier.
I like to think of this as let’s say you are you, you know what you know and you do what you do and a recent graduate from college or university has come to you and said, I really respect what you do, I want to get into your field, what do I do?
Imagine you’re meeting that person for coffee and you have an hour to chat to them and that’s a conversation that a lot of you can have.
If you mentor or coach, or even if you give advice in any way you’ve probably done this already. All we’re going to be doing is taking that basic conversation that hour spent with the recent graduate over coffee, giving them a bit of advice we’re going to take that and package it up.
We’re going to turn that into a product for anybody out there who is interested in learning what it is you know. Anybody who wants to get to where you are and have success in whatever area you have expertise in.
I think that’s the easiest way to think about the basis of this business model is, we’re going to be answering questions, we’re going to be helping people solve problems and help them get to where you are now.
Think of it that way and we’re going to make a business of that.
Harms: The next question that comes into play is I have had that discussion; I know what my expertise is. I’ve nailed it.
If we now assume that somebody knows what their expertise is, they know what they would like to share with the world and create an online business for, what does that look like as a product? It’s not quite a service yet.
We’ll get to service later, because if you go back to the advantages of this, we want it to be digital. We want high profit margins. We want the low cost of inventory holding all those advantages that come with this.
We want that in place, so we’re starting with a digital product.
Kyle: The main thing here is you need to be delivering information, you need to be teaching, you need to be showing people how to get to where you are.
So we’re educating.
There are different formats we can use for this. As mentioned before, it could be an e-book, checklist, a video course.
There is a very classic digital information product ladder, so you start with very easy to consume, free or low-cost information.
Generally for this you’d use a blog, you might be posting on social media. Nowadays, it might be a podcast, so it’s free, it’s a way to get people interested, you’re starting to give away information and it’s easily consumable.
Not yet the basis of the business, but it’s a way to get your message out to the world and start getting noticed, that’s the first part.
After that you want some form of product which allows you to encapsulate all of that free information you’ve been putting out in the world but make it more consumable and more actionable for the people who want to learn from you.
Generally, the first step would be an e-book, but I’m talking about a short e-book not a 300-page book. I’m talking about a 50-page guide, or a package of resources and a checklist.
Something just to get people moving, again this will be low cost.
This is when we’re talking about $10, $15 but you can sell it to a large number of people, it’s an encapsulation of all the free stuff you’ve been putting out there, but in a much more concentrated form for people who just want to get on with it. They want to take action.
A short e-book would be the traditional way to do it, but it could also be a short course, I’m talking about a one- or two-hours video course which you record once and then you get it hosted on a website.
You charge $20, $30 for.
That’s another way to do it.
First we had free stuff then we had a low-cost item. Then we’re going to have our core full paid offers.
This could be a full course that might be seven, eight, 10 hours more video course, there will be a book. This one is a proper book. This might be a couple hundred pages.
These will be the two core ones, but then you might want to start sprinkling in services at this point.
It might be things like consultation and mentoring, speaking at events etcetera. The basis on services is because they are reliant on your time and access that means that you have to charge more for them.
Whereas a lot of experts would start with consultation and mentoring we’re putting them at the back end of our value ladder and charging a lot more for them.
Because we have low-cost digital products beforehand. Then you might have premium offers so people have had the core offer which might be the video course or the book, then you have premium offers like mastermind which would be a small group of people all with the same goal.
They are brought together and maybe you jump into that group; you help them with their goals.
You might have things like retreats where you take the people who want to learn from you and you go on a physical retreat somewhere.
This is tied to your time and so these are very high costs and then you have things like membership sites where people are paying a monthly subscription, and for that they get some kind of access to you.
They get some kind of exclusive content and these are all premium offers.
Harms: Let’s assume now this is the scale and this is also the scale of the work. On the left is easily consumable and requires less work from you in regards to time, that’s the process here. In terms of revenue that you’re going to get from that, that will also be low revenue, it could be free to very little.
On the other extreme, it means that it’s more difficult for the person to consume i.e. you’re probably going to have less customers in this area here and it does require more work from yourself, but the income goes through the roof in compared to this side of the value ladder, or this classic model in terms of presenting your information and packaging your information up.
This process also helps guide people to put it into action.
Now those who want to interact with you, get access to you and benefit from your premium products that is the final step here.
Now it’s going to be more people here and less people here.
Typically that’s the way this works. For example, if we take Kyle’s digital poster if at some point somebody wants one-on-one time with Kyle to learn Chinese within that specific business that would be over here, but the short actionable guide that they purchased from him was his digital poster.
Kyle: The free and easily consumable is the A4 poster that you can download and it has the Chinese radicals on, it’s like the Chinese alphabet.
That’s not true, but it’s similar enough. Free. You had to give me your email address and you got this PDF great.
The short actionable guide was a video series I created about an hour and a half long, it’s called first week in Chinese and it’s basically saying you’re learning Chinese, these are the things you should be covering in the first week to get a grasp of how the methodology of how to learn Chinese.
That was a couple of hours and I think it was $17, and that’s the short actionable guide.
The full information product is the sensible Chinese character course it is $97. That’s about seven or eight hours of video and teaching you the methodology for learning Chinese characters.
For that particular business I did not stack any premiums offers on. But as Harminder says, it would have been consultation, mentoring, the mastermind some kind of membership program.
Maybe getting people into a room teaching them these techniques, etcetera. Much higher costs and lower numbers and that business falls into this category here and it’s extremely powerful.
That’s the focus.
Let’s say you are our favourite niche yoga teachers.
The first free and easily consumable might be a set of YouTube videos you have, so totally free, people can check out what you do.
The basics on YouTube great.
That’s what yoga with Adrienne does and she has built a multimillion-dollar company based on first giving away free information that’s free and easily consumable.
Short actionable guide might be, you like what we do, maybe you want something more structured so here is a 30-day program, a 30-page PDF which has the beginners course and you charge, let’s say seven dollars.
A small amount of money but it’s the first product that people buy and you start to generate a bit of cash. That’s great.
The full information product might be a video course, it’s different videos to what are available on YouTube, but this is 30 hours’ worth of videos to guide you through a 30-day process of getting started in yoga and it costs $47.
Harms: If your theme is mastering moves it could be mastered the 30 most important yoga moves there are.
That will be the full information product someone can buy.
Kyle: Then the premium product would be now that you’ve built this reputation as this great yoga teacher, now you can actually tour the country or even the world and host sessions based on this and your charging.
I imagine quite a lot of money for people to attend the sessions and to learn from you.
So at that point, yes, maybe you are using your time, but the revenue per hour is going to be huge because people trust you, they like you, they’ve purchased your products and that allows you to command a much higher price.
Harms: This is a classic example but that is now you’ve built a business and you’ve got a following and you’ve got a fan base, or how you want to describe that community that will want to purchase your premium product.
That can be whatever you’d like it to be.
It could be individual access. It could be group access.
It could be online only, you could do what Kyle did within one of his businesses, which was to say there is no premium product here because I don’t want to exchange my time within this category.
I’ve built an online business that creates a passive income and remember the warnings we’ve associated with that because he’s done the work up front, it now has become passive.
So that part is whatever it is to you.
If you were to take one thing away it would be what is my expert business that I would like to create online that I’m going to do the work for, that I’m going to have the passion in and the enjoyment and the love for this excellent business I would love to build online?
That’s the focus.
Kyle: The question is what can I help people with?
What problems can I help?
That whole chart you’ve just seen you are basically answering the same problem but with different levels of detail along the way.
The problem might be I want to maintain flexibility and I want to learn yoga, how do I learn yoga?
The free videos are a way to start off, the low-cost guide about mastering the downward dog is a way to expand on that moving up into a full video course you pay for, and even if you really want to go for it the live sessions.
Harms: I think if you have that joint combination which is number one, is helping it has to come from that place first, which is helping answer someone’s problem and then the other intersection is what do you actually enjoy doing, like doing, have a skill set and expertise in now you’ve got that common thing which is somebody who wants to pursue their passion.
What they love in life. I think that’s getting closer now to that place, rather than just creating products for the sake of it, which yes will make you money, but it’s just creating and answering someone’s problem where you may not generally be the expert in here.
Because there are lots of people out there who are very good at repurposing information and selling it as if they are the expert. We’re staying away from that area as well.
Kyle: If you are going to repurpose information make sure you add something to it, you need to make it easier to consume.
You need to teach it in a better way because, let’s be honest, the information is out there. Information is very easy to find, so any individual or any company who thinks they have this secret information that they can’t tell people, the information is there if somebody really wants to find that information they can piece it together from YouTube and books.
What you are offering is not just information but a way for people to make their way through the information.
This is a common mistake as well, whenever we talk about digital products like this putting your expertise into a product people are like, I need to write a book and then they rush off and they write this 300 page ebook which they then give people in exchange for an email address on the websites.
Imagine I’m on my phone and I found this thing I’m interested in learning about, so I signed up and got this free ebook. I now have a 300-page ebook on my telephone, am I going to read that?
Am I going to move forward?
Am I going to progress with learning about this skill from this expert?
No.
It’s too overwhelming.
You start small, still delivering huge amounts of value, but it needs to be consumable and then you work up to something like an e-book.
If you are thinking about rushing off and drafting up an e-book we are going to show you how you ease people in, which also means that this is great for you.
You don’t need to go and spend six months writing a book, you can start with much easier to produce much faster to produce pieces of value first and then we escalate further.
Harms: If you approached Kyle and I and we both presented you with the same topic that we’re talking about now, but the first interaction we had together was I gave you a 300-page ebook, and I said you’re going to learn everything you need in this 300-page ebook.
It is free. I just want your email address. Whereas Kyle says I’m not going to give you a 300-page ebook what I’m going to do is spend an hour with you on YouTube and just talk to you about some of the starting points of creating an online expert business and info business that you can create and make money from in the future.
Who would you select?
My gut feeling would be Kyle.
Because I need to go on this path of discovery to see if it’s for me.
If the people you’re actually selling your product to actually get to this point, after going through this process whatever you’re teaching them, one of the best feedback mechanisms for your teaching is if they actually do it.
They implement it and they’re super pleased with their output and even the ultimate mechanism is they go and surpass your teaching and go and do something even better, or even different to what you are doing.
That’s the whole spread of art and culture which is amazing.
That’s where we want to get people to rather than just hitting them and overwhelming them.
The quickest way to get people to pay attention to you online
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Super guide on creating a community/tribe around your expert business
Harms: Today we’re very much focused on tribe.
We are working through the process of the BATON system.
It’s a system where you put an idea, service, product through the process and ultimately makes you a profit.
We’re moving onto the next stage, which is okay, people are listening to us amazing, how do we get them to go from listening to liking, trusting, and knowing us a bit more in order to maybe think about transacting with us.
Transacting can be purchasing, it can be giving to a charity, it can be coming to see you speak live, depending on what your informational product is going to be around.
We spoke about emphasising the use of a digital product to start with.
Harms: What is a tribe?
Kyle: We are using the term tribe which has a lot of meaning specifically based on the definition by Seth Godin.
Seth Godin is an Internet marketer who has been around longer than most internet marketers. He was there in the early 2000’s when internet marketing was a new thing.
He’s been there through the light and dark of internet marketing, he’s written a number of really good books but the one we’re talking about in particular is tribes.
We’re borrowing his concept of a tribe and specifically he gives the definition of tribe as a group of people who are connected by an idea and a leader.
We’re talking about bringing together this tribe, community around us based on the ideas we’ve been putting out into the world and getting people to interact with each other.
To interact with us and deepen that level of connection, trust and them moving people along towards the offer stage.
Harms: One of the things that comes up in discussion is what you mean by tribe?
How big does this need to be and that’s something we often get. We spoke about the idea of identifying an audience size for one million people.
That’s a nice indicator to say there’s a market size that exists that potentially you can gain some customers from, the people will listen to you and then you can start to introduce your idea, your business into that market space.
But what we’re telling people is you don’t need that million.
Is that right?
Kyle: We start with an audience of around a million, that’s a good rule of thumb for reaching out to the wider world when nobody knows who you are, nobody knows what you do going to about one million people is about right.
Because you can reach that number of people without spending too much money online.
If you go for a billion people, or hundred million people you need a budget, it requires cash to get to those people. We start with an audience at one million but what we’re talking about now is the tribe.
Of those million people most people aren’t going to care about what you do, people have other things going on in their life.
Maybe your message is good for them, but they’re not necessarily going to resonate with it at this time. Maybe they’ll come back to you in a few years’ time.
But right now of those million people not everyone is going to be interested and that’s fine. The internet and the world is a big, big, big place and we do not need a million people, or hundred million people to make our online business work. Instead when we’re talking about the tribe we’re talking about starting with that million people and filtering it down so we have a thousand people.
If we get 1,000 people we’re good to go.
Harms: We’re starting with the concept of this is a new business we’re not going to throw hundreds of thousands of pounds at in terms of marketing spend.
There are companies that do that, but that’s not the purpose of this guide.
The other question is okay one thousand people is that enough?
Can I make a business off that?
Can I make money off that?
How can you explain this to people?
Kyle: If you think about selling those thousand people one item then maybe not. Maybe it is not a solid business for you to have here, but we are talking about a value ladder, a process that allows us to sell to the same people multiple products or services.
So at that point once we look at the long tail of those thousand people it becomes a lot more profitable.
Yes, if you’re selling them a one-dollar ebook and you have 1,000 people that’s $1,000, that’s limited.
We’re not talking about that, we’re talking about continuing to provide value to sell services. With a thousand people you can still build a very sustainable and profitable online business.
There’s another article, so Kevin Kelly he is not quite as famous as Seth Godin but is still influential. He wrote an article a long time ago about one thousand true fans. He is talking about exactly this, that the internet is a big place and there are a lot of people out there but you do not need to capture the attention of a sizable chunk of the internet, you just need the tiniest percentage.
If you have a thousand people.
Yes, if you send them a one-dollar e-book that’s only $1,000.
What if you get them on a subscription offer though and say $7 per month or £7 per month. For each of those people seven dollars is not much, but if you have one thousand of them paying that consistently then you’ve got $7,000 per month coming in.
Suddenly that’s a sizable income.
Harms: It allows you to really hone this business that you are creating.
Kyle: But to those one thousand people it is not much money.
It’s a small purchase for them but it adds up to you. If you take it to a $30 a month offer, if you have those thousand people paying you that $30 a month, that is $30,000 a month.
Harms: One thousand becomes more realistic, rather than, I’ve got to get a million people paying £7 per month, so the thousand makes it more realistic and more tangible in terms of achieving this particular goal and also just simply realistic.
That’s where we want to get to.
However, there is a warning here, which is to even get to that thousand people requires some work, because often you set out to think one thousand people will come easy.
No it requires work, and what you do within that work is what we’ve been talking about this week.
Often we find solo entrepreneurs or freelancers or creative experts working around the £30 mark region because they don’t have the scale or the economy of scale.
Or they don’t have the desire to have the economic scale of Netflix and Amazon, so there are pros and cons to lots of different pricing strategies. But the focus here is a thousand true fans.
Harms: The next part we want to move on to is Kyle, you mentioned the concept of a tribe being connected to you and following essentially you, the idea, the concept of something which is like-minded.
Let’s hone in on the idea because Kyle mentioned with a million people they’re listening to your message, but when you’re honing in on the thousand true fans you’re getting them to hone in on the idea and you.
Now there’s a focus and a connection to the idea and you.
The audience is great and that’s where you’re going to have to create the content machine, when it comes to the tribe this is what really makes a difference because, ultimately, we’ve sifted away the people who may be curious.
There might be people who are vaguely interested or just scrolling through the newsfeed, but now within the tribe they’re very much aligning with us and what we’re talking about.
Which is the focus around the idea.
Kyle: We have to remember we are moving people towards a sale as this is still a business.
We are using our expertise and knowledge to educate people.
Yes, absolutely. That’s all about giving. We are moving people towards sales and that requires building trust.
Without trust, we’re not going to make that sale, and if we do have trust that sale becomes really easy.
Whenever we offer, people tend to lap up because we’ve built this good will and trust over time. The tribe is where what you’re saying needs to match up with what you’re doing, you need to have congruency, extreme consistency between what you’re putting out there, your educational content and then how you are delivering to your tribe.
The message we’re putting out to the audience is fine but once they start to interact with you it’s not just a broadcast they’re actually going to interact with you.
You really need to nail down how you are interacting, how you are showing up in the world because that’s why they are in the tribe.
If you suddenly diverge from that people are going to leave.
Yes you might have people coming in from the audience and they join your tribe but they get there and you’re something else, you’re doing something else.
There is a mismatch of values, mission, and all that excitement and goodwill, will evaporate very quickly.
The idea that you base your tribe around is going to be so important and you might not know what is straightaway.
As you start to shape that tribe and communicate with the thousand people, you need to start thinking about the core of that mission and those values.
I know it gets a bit floppy at this point
Harms: But this is important to your tribe, their vibe, the way they interact with you will be a true reflection of what you are putting out there.
So if your tribe is just repelling you that’s a reflection of you. If the tribe is sticking to and saying everything you’re saying is in value alignment with the whole message consistently so far, then that’s also a reflection on you.
Whether you piss them off or whether you get them to love you, whether they like you, whatever it is, it is going to be a reflection of what you are putting out.
One of the dangers is to blame the audience to blame the tribe and say this is not the right kind of people, they’re not the people who are going to buy from me.
Actually that’s going to be a reflection on you.
Just keep that in mind as we work through this process because if we can get a consistent value alignment with the people that we’re serving, or we hope to serve with our informational product.
Then we’ve got a perfect match.
Now the next thing we spoke about was very much focusing on selling and the idea that this is a business, yes it’s great to share a positive message with amazing people, but ultimately we need to generate revenue for this, pay the bills, all of those survival things.
Plus then flourish, and this is a great business to really flourish in, in the sense that you’re selling your knowledge, value, your wisdom with an amazing informational product. Which is a great place to be and a great place to serve people as well as.
Kyle: It’s a nice way to get paid as well. If you’re creating something that’s helping people and you get paid for that, so much is coming together at that point.
You’re getting paid for doing something you enjoy doing.
You’re getting paid to help people. It is wonderful.
Harms: What we don’t want to do in terms of the sale is we don’t want to jump from the idea and start to sell to people immediately.
What we don’t have is the likeness, the trusting, them knowing us.
Instead we want to focus now on the tribe and almost go value overload and focus on serving, giving, helping that particular community.
The focus right now is not to take money or offer a sale and this will happen naturally.
The expert funnel is very much based on trust and education and becoming an authority,
Kyle: Direct selling does work; it depends on the niche.
It can work in this niche too but it is not the way we’re teaching. It is also expensive. In terms of examples probably one of the best is Tim Ferris.
He wrote the four-hour workweek, he talks about online business, passive income, setting up businesses which work while you don’t work.
Which is what we are aligned with.
The main thing he does on a day-to-day basis is a podcast. He is just putting out content all the time, he has great guests. They are long form podcasts.
What he is doing there he is not giving it out from the generosity of his heart, he has sponsors and ads etcetera.
But the big win there is you putting out gigantic amounts of value and people are listening to the value.
They’re joining his tribe whether that’s via a newsletter or other ways of communicating with him.
He is providing giving, giving, and giving, and when he does publish a new book he will talk about it on the podcast. He will sell millions and millions of books as he has built up that goodwill over time.
So that’s the ask.
Rather than splitting his time between here is a product now pay me, instead he is giving and overloading with value and once a year when his book comes out it’s like, if this stuff is of interest to you I’ve got a book summarising a lot of it and if you’ve been listening to me over the last two years, you’ll probably be aligned with what’s in it. And then his book will probably be in the bestsellers list for six months.
It’s a different way of doing business as it’s not tied specifically I’ve worked now you pay me. Instead it’s give, give, give, give and then a massive explosion of people.
That’s the model we’re going to be using with the tribe.
Harms: Anything he wants to sell he can sell. That’s the position of authority and expert level he has positioned himself in the marketplace, so that’s where we need to understand this from.
Because you may still not have identified exactly what you want to sell.
What’s your perfect item at this early stage?
It’s an informational product. If Tim Ferris said live hacking 101 as an informational product that would sell like crazy.
There is no limit on it as it is a digital product, but it would sell out if it was a physical product. That’s the level of an expert we have.
Again we don’t need to have a million plus download podcasts.
We just need to maybe have one where a thousand true fans listen to again and again and again because now a percentage of those will purchase what we are selling in the offer stage.
Kyle: We can scale this up into the same level as someone like Tim Ferris, obviously it’s going to be dependent on charisma and other much higher skill levels.
But we are laying the foundations for that kind of build, whereas a lot of people will try to jump straight to level.
Harms: Just to finalise that point scaling is the network part of the BATON model, so we don’t miss that out, we just don’t dive into it yet because we have to get this part done first.
Kyle: We discussed the idea of the philosophy of the tribe.
Harms: We discussed the foundational element of what is a tribe.
Why we’re building the tribe, what kind of numbers are associated with the tribe to get started, to get going. Of course we can scale and get large, there is no cap on whatever you want to do, but we are here to help you get started.
Now let’s get practical with it and talk about some practical ways. In today’s world online digital world what does a tribe look like? What’s the best way to create a tribe? Communicate with a tribe? We want to shift from philosophy to practical.
Kyle: There are many ways to move people from an audience into a tribe.
All of these can be useful, but we recognise you have limited time and energy. If you have to choose one thing to go with it’s easier to do that and you can bolt on the other methods later.
Kyle: The first classic here is an email newsletter. Whenever you go to certain blogs and websites there will be a pop up saying, signup you’ll get this free gift and join our newsletter or join our newsletter.
This is digital marketing 101 and it works.
Once you have someone’s email address that gives you permission to deliver and email straight into their inbox with your content, your sales message with whatever you want. Because they have given you your email.
If you were to send out spam emails without getting that consent your email would get shut down very quickly, but by getting somebody to come to your website and say yes.
What we are doing here is permission marketing.
You need to get somebody’s permission and once they’ve given you permission, you can market to them.
With email delivery and email servers in particular this is part of how email is built. If you send too many unsolicited emails your email address you are sending from and your email server will get slapped, it will just get shut down.
Google will stop accepting those emails and they will not be delivered.
We’re not talking about that; we’re talking about getting people to your website and getting permission to send them emails and then sending them the newsletters.
Harms: When we say right now is the time to send them a newsletter or an email campaign, what we want the focus to be on is again I’m going to anchor back to this constantly is, we’re not sending an email to sell them something.
We’re continuously reminding them of the value that we are providing or providing value directly by the newsletter.
The newsletter itself is a piece of art, a piece of work that requires to be done. If you’re going to craft a newsletter that is a full-time business for some operations out there, whereas if you are doing what we said yesterday, you’re doing Facebook lives or YouTube lives.
Whatever platform best suited you.
Now once you shoot live you now have a recording which lives on your page or your group or your feed, your YouTube channel.
We can leverage this item, this piece of value and share it with them in the inbox.
If they click on it great.
What we’re doing instead of selling them is just reminding them or making our valuable content accessible to them.
That is very different from saying I’ve got a new informational product come and buy it. It is a different challenge.
If you look at Tim Ferris he’s got an email newsletter called five bullet Friday. It’s five bullets which are links of useful things out there.
Some of those links include his content, his podcast, a book he is currently selling. He may be an affiliate partner with somebody whatever that is, it will feature on that list.
That’s an example of a valuable email versus just selling hard. So that’s email and it is classic. There are also some cons in the current climate.
Kyle: Every time we buy something online, every time we sign up to a blog and get a newsletter it just increases the volume of emails we’re getting.
I probably received a couple hundred today. I don’t read all of them and what’s happened because we now receive so many emails, most of our email software, email programs will filter it out.
Now you don’t want more email, so Gmail filters them into different tabs now.
You have an inbox where people will actually tend to read emails in their inbox, if you get into the inbox great.
But most newsletters, promotional content will fall into the promotions tab or maybe into the social or notifications tab.
It depends on how you set it up but there is already this prefiltering which means that if you are running a newsletter, more and more, it’s not going to be going into your inbox.
Which means more and more it’s not going to be read and not effective as it used to be.
Harms: The discussion here is not whether that’s a good thing, bad thing it’s a terrible thing for marketers.
Especially if somebody has come to you and given you the permission to send them your valuable newsletter or article.
But we’re just presenting the fact that, that is the case right now.
We can use lots of tools, tactics, and techniques to try to get into people’s inbox, but they are exactly that.
How long will these tools work for and tactics work for, until Gmail changes it.
Because I don’t see them changing the promotion tab back to normal anytime soon.
What they are also wanting to do is, rather than a business benefit from your inbox they want a business to pay them advertising so that they feature at the top of your inbox.
That being said we spoke about the great things and the strategies to implement which is we prefer you go value orientated and I did mention the fact that it’s more work for people.
A newsletter is a hard task in its own sense, but there’s also another disadvantage with it which is, it’s a one-way communication.
Kyle: When we are moving into the tribe ideally we want yes, communication from our tribe members.
We also want tribe members to communicate with us.
This is when it starts to be a community and tribe members communicate with one another, which means it’s not all about you all the time.
It is a community that’s growing organically around the idea. Yes, around you but that doesn’t require you to manage every single interaction. With email that doesn’t happen.
Email is broadcast, it’s me talking to you, and that’s it. It’s not a good way to build a community.
This is the equivalent of me standing on a box and yelling at people saying, hey, this is what’s important, I’m not listening to hear what they say back to me.
Think this is a more important problem with email newsletters apart from technical things.
Harms: That being said, it is a strategy that can work. We’re not recommending it as the strategy.
However marketers continue to get results from them, you’ve just got to be a bit smarter. Let’s assume somebody does want a newsletter and would like to communicate with their tribe in that method. We use this within our businesses.
We communicate and provide information to our tribe via a newsletter within some of the businesses that we operate.
We’re not against it, we just want to make you aware of the good and the bad as well. If somebody wants a newsletter what’s the best place for them to start?
Kyle: The place you shouldn’t start is a software called Infusionsoft. It is now called Keap.
It has a really good affiliate program so a lot of people will recommend it to businesses starting up because the person who recommends it gets paid a lot. Infusionsoft is historically being promoted a lot by people like myself and Harms, I’m telling you not to use it because it’s extremely expensive and it has too many features.
It is very powerful.
But if you are just wanting to get a newsletter you do not need 80% of the features.
If you are a big e-commerce site with lots of customer segmentation remarketing etcetera, it’s great.
Right now you don’t need that and it starts at $150 a month, so it’s too much.
The free and low-cost alternatives to start-up purely just for newsletters are Mailchimp and Awebber. I personally prefer Awebber as it’s cleaner. Mailchimp is the more popular one and they’re fine.
Something a bit more advanced we personally use Drip.
It’s like Infusionsoft but much more cost-effective, much simpler it’s more modern.
Harms: That’s email marketing in a nutshell.
The next thing is another place to create, to host, to have a tribe be a part of and that place is a forum. Forum is another classic internet place and where a tribe lives.
They often live on websites, there are websites as well, which operate completely as a forum.
What are your thoughts on forums as a place to create, build a tribe.
Kyle: Forums are pretty old school.
We now have things like Reddit which is like a forum on steroids. It’s a nest board. It’s a place where I can post a message and people can respond to that post and discussions start and that’s how a community can form.
Unlike newsletters a forum allows for interaction. So an email newsletter is me talking to you that is it.
A forum allows me to post something and you can all comment on it or other people might post and then they can talk amongst themselves.
You have a lot more community than you do with a broadcast email.
Harms: Community increases and the way for people to interact increases because the advantage of a forum compared to email is, they can now conversate with you.
If you were a business coach it could be the best HR practices. That will become a topic of discussion within the bigger discussion or the bigger niche, which is business coach. You can get even more granular and talk about different kinds of cases within HR challenges, so that’s the kind of way it would be structured.
The advantage is people can now respond because most email newsletters don’t really work functionally with a reply mechanism.
Some do, but most are saying here is a newsletter read this and love this, but I don’t want to speak to you, you can’t really reply to this newsletter.
Whereas a forum opens the door to a response.
Kyle: One great thing about forums is they have become like a resource because a lot of people who are interested in the niche topic will be discussing it and the forum therefore becomes almost like a fossil record. Here is what we’re talking about and here is the discussion underneath.
That’s quite interesting.
One problem with that is because it is so permanent and forums do live for a very long time. People are a bit more careful about responding to a forum.
You tend to have one or two people dominating which is fine but because some people are a bit more cautious.
But it slows down the communication.
Harms: The other thing in regards to slowing down communication is the fact that if you respond you just don’t know when others are going to have that dialogue with you.
Kyle: Forum discussions tend to happen over weeks because you post something and someone will respond the next day.
It’s like trading letters, which is fine, it’s just quite old school and if you want to create a buzz and a lot of excitement to your community forums are a bit slow for that.
Kyle: What we’re covering next is something which is almost similar but polar opposite from a forum which is the idea that we can now chat instantly via some of these messenger apps.
Again, it’s been around for a long time now.
Those chat apps have evolved to live basically in any kind of platforms that exist. So Facebook messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram now have its own chat mechanisms internally.
YouTube has a kind of chat mechanism.
In terms of messaging apps they are probably the most popular.
Again let’s tie this back to building the tribe.
What we’re talking about here is having a place for people to communicate. What some people are doing nowadays is getting people into chat Software.
WhatsApp would be the most well-known example. There’s lot of WhatsApp groups popping up right now like local support groups.
Harms: I am in industry specific WhatsApp groups.
Some of them are small in the context of a thousand true fans, but they’re large in the context of people in this group are very much in this group.
They are all interacting, reading comments. I’m in a couple and the smallest is about 25 people, the largest around 200 people and it’s an industry specific one.
It originally started not so much around an expert individual, but instead off an idea around that particular niche and topic.
So going back to the tribe concept people are flocking or talking via WhatsApp messenger group around an idea and then within that naturally pops up some experts that’s going to happen over time.
Kyle: That’s how we recommend you do it because you’re host the party, you’re the person inviting everyone into the group.
Because you’re hosting the party you’re one of the experts, the leader of this particular group. so everyone else is there that puts you into a really strong position.
If you’re also the expert, then it’s a very powerful tool to combine that community.
Harms: One of the big advantages of a WhatsApp group compared to what we spoke about so far is the ability to speak to people is instant.
You can have a conversation instantly and you can support and serve your tribe very quickly.
Or certainly there is a great indicator that people have read it so there’s a nice response mechanism there as well.
Kyle: Which is why many businesses are moving away from email towards things like chat messaging apps.
Also why Facebook purchased WhatsApp, they’re not doing anything with it yet, but I wouldn’t be that surprised if we see sponsored messages. Unlike email we read our messages, we read chat messages whereas with email we do not.
Because of that a lot of businesses are moving towards marketing via messaging just because it has more attention.
This is why chat messaging apps have more high levels of engagement, higher levels of actually reading the messages than you would with email.
Harms: One of the disadvantages with that speed also comes a disadvantage which is if you take a forum post.
It’s there, it lives there, it’s going to have a life. Somebody has curated that response whereas a chap is almost instant. It’s replying from the automatic part of our mind.
Sometimes the responses become less important, less significant, and also can lead to less serious discussions.
One of the challenges we have in the Slack group is whether or not it is industry specific, if it goes off on a tangent where everybody is trying to be the funniest person in the group.
That’s just one of things to be aware of with your WhatsApp group because it doesn’t have a great mechanism of managing the group.
Part of that is the easy ability to instantaneously drop a message.
On a forum for example if somebody said something funny you probably wouldn’t bother to type lol.
Whereas on a messaging app even though there are 200 people there you might type lol. Which is a small interaction and on a messaging app fine but if you were to do that on a forum or something a bit slower, it would be a waste of space.
So discussions do disappear very quickly. Plus, it’s a lot to deal with this.
The main problem with WhatsApp in particular is that you are all in one channel and let’s say somebody starts a discussion about small business taxation and you actually want to know about that.
Then somebody else posts a picture of a cat playing the piano and everything goes off on that tangent.
It is very easy to get derailed by the sheer volume or for the valuable stuff to get hidden underneath the sheer volume.
We use Slack which is a messaging app which is still primarily used by businesses, tech start-ups, younger companies who need instantaneous communication via messaging because email is not really used.
Slack is a tool that was built specifically for businesses but it is accessible by anyone.
The main advantage is that when you have a slack channel, you can set up different channels within it. You could have different topics within your one slack workspace.
Which is very different to WhatsApp. WhatsApp is all in one place and it’s utter chaos, Slack allows you to segment off different chats.
You also have control of who can post what, how much you post and you have access to these tools if you need them.
There’s a lot more power whereas with WhatsApp you do not get that.
Harms: Okay so we spoke about WhatsApp or simple. The advantage is it’s quick, it is one large discussion, it is a very familiar tool as most people are using WhatsApp. You may want to take them from your WhatsApp group to your Slack group.
That’s one of the options, because Slack is another beast altogether.
The disadvantages we spoke about now slack for example, is more of a professional tool where I think of this as the next level to a forum.
It’s professional large companies using it, entrepreneurs use it, start-ups and this allows you the ability to manage focused discussions within specific topics.
Importantly it is free.
It probably comes with a learning curve and most people when approaching something new there is naturally a bit of resistance.
You want to create a chat environment where you have some organisation, you have some calm amongst the chaos of conversation.
Because it’s okay to chat to ten people but when you’ve got a thousand true fans in your tribe it’s going to get very busy, very quickly, so something like Slack very much helps.
Kyle: We have talked about messaging apps which are a fantastic way to build your tribe. It’s not the actual method we’re recommending as our top method. The top method is using a Facebook group.
Using a Facebook group for the majority of you building an expert business is going to be the number one method. We talked about Facebook as the best general way to get out to a large audience because it has the most people on it. It has 1.2 or 1.3 billion users.
This means that it is very easy to get people into your group, there is a lot less friction. Facebook groups now have amazing functionality, they have been adding lots of cool new stuff.
Two I want to highlight is the ability to go live straight into a group.
If you’re already during live video as part of your audience work, you can also do live video into groups.
You can start to do different content for the people who have opted into that group.
Harms: It’s like live broadcasting to a specific targeted audience and it is incredible.
Unlike your Facebook page, your Facebook personal profile very often, the way it currently works your group members will get a notification that you’re going live.
That notification appears right on the phone screen and that is extremely powerful.
That has now allowed you to cut through all of the noise online and get straight to somebody’s screen and tells them you’re live.
There is another thing called social learning units, which is quite new but an incredible tool as well.
Kyle: Normally in a Facebook group you post things and as time goes by, that post slowly goes down the page, whatever is new or the most active will be at the top.
Social learning units allow you to make a more structured learning environment, which is useful if you are an expert. You can put in curriculum material let’s say I’m bringing people in based on education.
I’m able to put them into a group where there’s a structured course of five videos they can go through.
Harms: For example we set up a training programme teaching a specific niche and it was property investors.
How to grow their brand, how to improve property results, leveraging online tools. Amazing 12-week program.
We actually ran that as a product within the Facebook group and created social learning units and put the daily lessons, live video lessons within the social learning units, incredibly powerful. What it meant was we didn’t have to go create a website, host a course on a learning portal, give people usernames and passwords.
It cuts all of that friction out and there are pros and cons, but it’s a great way for them to stay familiar with the platform they use, and actually dive into it.
The management of the group.
Facebook has an incredible panel and ability to allow you to actually manage the group in the sense that you, your admin powers are amazing.
The amount of detail you get as part of the admin is also incredible.
Whereas a WhatsApp group you can either kick somebody out or allow them to join the features within a Facebook group are very much you can turn people’s post approval on, you can silence people within the group.
Kyle: This is individual people.
Harms: There are other elements where you can set up rules, if someone breaks a rule another member can flag that person up and say which rule they broke.
You can automatically click a button which sends them a message saying you broke this rule and then you can then think about a process of post approval.
What’s the power of this?
It is not so much that you have lots of control, it’s so you can keep your tribe safe from anything which deviates from the idea, concept, and the fact that they gave you permission to share your message with them.
Rather than getting bombarded by lots of different things they did not subscribe, yet they’re receiving this crazy information, so that’s the power of it.
That’s a Facebook group.
Kyle: Coming back to the idea of the tribe, we are trying to create a space for them to communicate with us and amongst each other.
It has been around for 10 years and they’ve been evolving over time and if you have been in a Facebook group before a few years ago, if you go to one nowadays it is very different because of the tools because of the powerful moderation ability.
If you’re thinking Facebook groups are nonsense, not any more. They can be easily controlled.
Harms: What do we recommend or suggest people use?
We’ve covered tribe, email newsletters as a mechanism and forums.
Chat and messaging apps as a mechanism specifically we spoke about WhatsApp and Slack and then finally we discussed a Facebook group as another mechanism to host your tribe.
To form your tribe to get people to a location in which they can interact with you as part of a tribe, rather than be the wider audience.
How do we take care of them?
How do we look after them and how do we get our message across to them to at some point gain the trust and the permission to then present them with the offer?
We’re talking about creating a business here for your information expert product, that is the key.
So what to use?
Kyle: One is it depends and the second is to use all of them. However, Facebook groups are going to be the best place to build up a safe space for you and your tribe.
Or messaging using Slack if you want that level of intimacy, the ability to chat with people quickly. You could use both of them as well.
Harms: It also depends on your audience.
Harms: To dos now off the back of what you’ve learned today is number one, essentially get the infrastructure in place.
Everything we’ve spoken about is an application, piece of software and you can call them different mechanisms, different pieces of infrastructure.
Get those in place and you’re not building them from scratch, what we’re saying is, select which one you would like and start to make it look the way, feel the way you want, that’s the key.
Get it set up.
Kyle: This is going to be your Facebook group or set up a Slack channel.
Harms: Once you’ve identified which infrastructure you want, then go ahead and set it up, look at the pros and cons and then go ahead and set it up.
Either a Facebook group or Slack channel.
For most people it’s going to be a Facebook group to start with. That’s the key.
Super guide on creating a community/tribe around your expert business | Part 2
Harms: We’ve spoken about what a tribe is but also why it’s important to form a tribe rather than direct sell, in the aim for making efficient sales.
Specifically around your expert business and specifically selling your knowledge around a package product.
This is part two of building a tribe, hosting a tribe, and developing a relationship with our tribe.
We spoke about specifically what infrastructure to host a tribe in. We spoke about emails, marketing. We spoke about forums; we spoke about chat messenger apps, anything from WhatsApp to something more sophisticated like Slack.
We suggested different groups you can use Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, we gave you lots of different options and after that discussing the pros and cons for those.
We suggested you default to number one suggestion is Facebook groups and then a secondary option if you preferred was Slack.
Kyle: We already talked about what tribe is, it’s basically the community you build around yourself.
People who are coming from your audience into your tribe, they’re liking and trusting you more and more, and as you build up that goodwill we can then move into the sales.
What we are going to be talking about is the actual mechanics of the tribe. What’s going to be happening there? How you’re going to get people into the tribe? What value do they get in the tribe, we’re talking about the nitty-gritty of how you serve your community.
Now we’re going to talk about the actual interactions you’re having with the people you have attracted to you.
Harms: Really answering two core questions which are, what do we do when people get into the tribe and then another core question, which is how do we get people into the tribe?
In that order for a specific reason, and that’s very much because what we want to do first is identify what the promise is?
What will we be delivering to the tribe and using that promise as a hook and as a mechanism to help us say, hey, this is what we’re going to be doing the tribe come and join in it as this is what you’ll experience.
We decided to position it in that order, rather than how we get people into it, what we are going to do for them.
So, logically, that makes sense but if we take the end in mind and work backwards we can then get this nice flow which makes sense right at the end.
So what do we do when people enter the tribe?
Kyle: This is a question of, what is the extra value that we provide to these people?
Why would they bother joining our tribe?
They already watch our videos or read our blog articles, maybe listening to our podcast. Why would they take that next step and we need to work out going upfront what additional value we are going to be offering people there.
Because that allows us to structure how much information we give away in our audience, so that’s the general public. And then what are we holding back that’s going to be talked about in the tribe.
Generally, though it is going to be more of the same.
It’s going to be similar information and similar tactics, problem-solving that you were giving out in the public realm to your audience, but you’re going to be doing it in more depth, or with more personalisation inside your tribe.
There’s going to be a lot more care, a lot more attention to individual tribe members than for your general audience.
The reason they’ve joined your group is because they were attracted by what it was you were publishing publicly whether it’s your podcast or your video, your blog articles. They liked that stuff, so we are just going to continue to give them more of the same stuff. High quality may be higher quantities as well, and more personally tailored towards their needs.
That’s the basic premise here.
Harms: Think of it as basic information that is digestible to people and understandable, because if you’re an expert and you’re talking about a specific area it can be quite alien to people in terms of information.
What we don’t want to do is overwhelm people with information and it goes straight over their head.
Think about the online space, which is the audience section as basic level content.
Put whatever wording you want around that, just so it’s digestible, understandable to you, the listener at home. Think about this as basic.
Now when they move into the group think about intermediate level information which is more personalised, more engaging, it will be talking to people what will feel like on a one to one level.
We assume that they know the basics now we can level up the information that they’re going to get.
The first question is what is a nice starting point?
We’re going to cover three core areas in which you can engage with your tribe, what you’re going to do with them on a one-to-one to group level basis.
What’s the first one?
Kyle: Let’s imagine we are a business coach and we are helping London based tech start-ups to raise money. That’s what we’re doing. That is our business and how we make money. That’s the expertise we are putting forward online.
Let’s use that as an example.
But you need to adapt this to your personal business but we’re using tech start-ups in London, that’s who we’re talking to, we’re helping them to raise money.
The basic information that we might be putting out to the audience would be news.
Like this is what’s happening in the tech world right now.
These are the news items you need to know about. We’re not really adding a huge amount of value, there’s not much commentary we’re just passing on news.
Maybe we’re doing some free live videos and some very basic workshops, giving you the top five things you need to know about venture capital and raising money in London.
But we’re not really diving into detail because we are waiting for people to opt in and say, hey, I want to know more, so they come into our intermediate group. They come into our group into our tribe and that’s where we start to give them more focused information.
We’re going to look at three different ways to do that.
Kyle: The first one, and this is a nice simple one is we do a live question and answer session.
So, previously you were doing live videos or podcasts, blog articles where you’re basically giving information out. It’s one direction it’s you talking to people out there.
Yes, you are aware of their problems and we talked about that in the audience section how we generate lists of common topics that they are interested in, but it’s not going to be specifically tailored to their questions.
That’s what we’re going to be doing now in the group.
Let’s say you have 500 people in your group. I’m a business coach. I have 500 people in the group who are asking me about now that coronavirus has hit what are the best ways to raise funds for a small business?
That’s going to be a specific question asked by a specific person about their specific business.
Then I can go into my group and answer that question as a business coach using my expertise, so this is a really nice format.
A really nice way to provide a lot of additional value to your tribe members. Logistically the best way to do it is to ask questions throughout the week and then compile a list of all these questions and then sit down, let’s say, on a Friday afternoon and then just blast through each question.
It’s going to be answering specific questions from specific people and that’s a massive value add.
For you as an expert it’s kind of easy, we’re good at answering questions generally.
Harms: It’s information that you know that’s why they are hanging around you because you know the stuff.
That’s why you are called the expert in this arena and I think having the ability to answer those questions saves you time.
The focus here is if you can sit in front of a camera and have compiled a list of questions from the community it’s very much a case of, answering it live to camera. It can then turn into video and then to audio and then to text.
It is very dense in the way that it can create lots of other kinds of media formats.
Think about answering in terms of live video because of the benefit later down the line that this will produce.
Kyle: The key thing is, even if somebody asked you a question by text do not respond to it in text.
Respond to it using a video or live video for that reason because you have that information density and that video you can now potentially with permission or not, you can take that video and take it public.
You’ve just created a five- or 10-minutes extra piece of content which can go on YouTube, Facebook, wherever you need to protect your tribe members and that’s something that you work out with your tribe members.
But apart from that, that specialised Q&A, question answer session within your tribe can become a public piece of information later on.
Harms: That’s the next level kind of access they get to you. In the wide world it’s very limited. It’s a one-way conversation in this world it’s, now you’ve got me, you’ve entered the group. Thank you for that, now let’s answer questions, burning questions that you may have.
That’s the first way in which you can engage with your tribe and essentially what to do with them when they get in.
Another way, staying on the trend of business coaches and this can apply to many nieces but it will work even better for certain niche areas. Let us assume that we’re staying in the trend of business coaches.
Now another way you can do this is via a live coaching strategy session live coaching hour with somebody.
Essentially we’re saying you would take somebody from the tribe or somebody would opt in to be live coached with you, live streamed into the group.
Few things to bear in mind in terms of getting them to opt in, asking their permission.
Being conscious of sensitive subjects but again because you’re an expert in this space you’ll be able to navigate that with the person you’re communicating with. This works fantastically well.
We’ve got groups in which the expert in that group will live coach somebody on relationships, money management and confidence.
The community will be watching this live coaching session.
Now the learning experience is phenomenal because what somebody else faces, you may face as well. You may have faced, or you are facing, but it’s not an issue that you are addressing.
Live coaching from a business perspective is a fantastic way to engage with your tribe.
Kyle: This could be mentoring, training this could be many different forms, all slightly different.
So for example if I was a yoga teacher. Let’s say I have Ben who was in my community, he wants to learn to touch his toes for example.
I would get him live on a stream and I would watch his form and me as the expert I’ll be able to say, it’s because your hamstrings are too tight.
These are the things you can do so this would be like a live consultation live training.
It doesn’t have to just be coaching.
There are so many different ways you can deliver value.
What we’re talking about here is mainly a one-on-one session. It’s like two heads next to each other format where you have an expert and somebody who is seeking their advice.
It’s a really engaging way to create content in your community and add massive value to that one particular person who is getting the free coaching or training session.
Harms: If you’ve got other experts or guests or somebody in the tribe, who has very specialist knowledge within what you do, so let’s say business coach and somebody is a HR expert.
Somebody is a sales manager; you could get them to jump on and you can ask them questions as the expert host talking to another expert in their specific niche area.
That’s a win-win, your tribe gets some exposure or members of your tribe get some exposure but also you get this fantastic piece of content to share with your group.
Kyle: Even though you’re promoting them as an expert that doesn’t detract from you being the expert in the community and the fact is, if your tribe gets stronger and stronger and has lots of different experts that makes it even more valuable.
You’re still the host of the party and I’m hoping you have enough professional and personal humility to say, I’m really good at this but Michelle is an expert in this particular part so I want to chat to her about that.
Harms: That’s a really good point because sometimes you can feel as if somebody will be taking your limelight but let’s look at the longer-term picture.
The value you’re adding to the group here is that you have connected the group with an expert that is an amazing thing to do because that takes time.
It takes effort, it takes the process of the interview and like Kyle said it takes the humility to say I am connected to these people and I’m going to present you with all of these amazing people.
That’s certainly a nice approach to take with interviews.
There is a third element which is structured information.
Harms: It’s moving from unstructured information, so potentially your podcasts, blog articles, your live videos, they’re one-offs and not really connected, but inside the tribe you have some form of structured information.
You can bring this structured information and make it exclusively available in your tribe and only in your tribe.
This is one of the reasons why we mention Facebook groups as a wonderful option they’ve added. I believe in the last year have added social learning units which allows you to structure a course directly in Facebook.
Now you can directly have this structured information inside a Facebook group so that looks like day one here is a video. Day two is a video and people can work through that. Facebook allows them to tick I’ve done this. I’ve completed this unit.
I think you can even assign awards to people who’ve gone all the way through which appear next to their name in the group.
It’s a really nice out-of-the-box solution for structuring information and delivering courses online, and you don’t need any technical ability.
What it allows you to do is organise your courses in a schedule. There’s even a total score that if somebody logs on, they can see how many units they personally completed it’ phenomenal.
To give you some context, to pay an expert to create a learning management system for you that will cost a lot of money.
A massive job to put together a learning management system even if you’re buying one out-of-the-box it still requires a lot of technical expertise, the time and effort to customise it. To make it look the way you want, brand it the way you want it to be branded and you can fall into that trap.
Then the next thing you know two, three months gone down the line and this exciting product that was timed for a certain moment in time, whereas if you take where we are now Covid-19 is an opportune time to share what you have with somebody.
Honestly you can knock this up within half a day.
You could take your live videos that you are producing and plug them into the social learning units and now new people coming into the tribe have a place to go.
The place to go is the structured information in which they can start working their way through.
Kyle: It gives them a pathway whereas usually if you’re just dumped into a Facebook group it’s a bit overwhelming, but if there’s a structure to allow them to engage in the community, work through some content and be integrated into the community that way.
Harms: If you work through this one, two, three structure and have ideally all three in place using that model there, then you’ve got a solid infrastructure and an engaging infrastructure for when somebody enters the tribe.
Kyle: On the structured information when I say make a course I’m not talking about making a 10-hour course, you might sit down and deliver a one-hour video, which is here’s everything you need to know.
Here are the 10 steps to get started with X, then you cut that video into 10 parts and then you upload them.
It should be an hour max or so in this free group maybe less.
Harms: It’s too early and it becomes way too overwhelming to think of this as the immediate level of information otherwise it’s just too long.
Go back to when you started this expert journey you knew nothing, then you went on to this part, which is maybe you started to implement a lot of the strategies that you are learning here. Then you are here now.
When you get to this level this is almost the journey which has allowed you to create this group, help people and sell your information product.
Don’t feel like you have to share this immediately this is another common mistake people. It was too much information.
Help serve your tribe by also providing them the adequate level of information that is suitable for them as well.
Kyle: You can make the coaching call a competition if you have a large enough tribe.
Maybe people need to do something or engage in a certain manner and then they can win a coaching call.
I really like the structure of having immediate weekly information and coaching calls.
You can structure the value you provide in your tribe however you want. This is just an example, but this would give you an extremely solid foundation.
Harms: The big burning question is great. I would love to have this in place, I’m an expert and I can talk about the subject. But what is a way to get people into the group?
How do we market to them?
How do we encourage them, persuade them, make it an easy transition for them to go from a wide space of basic information to the next level of information?
How do we get people into the group?
Kyle: We’ve already answered a large part of this question by looking at what it is we’re going to provide within the group.
As long as the actual group members receive a huge amount of value, whether that’s structured learning Q&A’s, interviews, coaching, whatever it is, as long as there is a lot of value in that group, the sale getting people from the public into our group is going to become a lot easier.
That’s why we actually addressed what we’re going to do in the group before we worry about how we’re going to get people in.
We need to know what that hook is.
Harms: Think of this structure as organised value because that’s why we also position these quite counterintuitive with the end in mind.
We know what the value is now, that is what’s going to help encourage people to get into the group.
That’s the principle of it.
Kyle: Once you know this kind of value your script for bringing people in becomes a lot easier and we’re suggesting you actually write down a specific script, it doesn’t have to be complicated. It should be fast and delivered in 20,30 seconds.
You’re going to be delivering these generally as a video to people who are in your audience.
It might be at the end of existing videos you just go into your script to bring people into your group.
Or maybe it’s a separate video which you are boosting or advertising to get as many people in your audience into your tribe as possible.
Harms: Element number one is where do we use this and how to use this and element two is what is the actual message?
Kyle: The script will be something like, I’m so happy I’m able to provide you with this information that I’ve been talking to you about and if you want to take it a step further, I’ve put together a seven-day boot camp course teaching fundamentals of fundraising. I’m doing a weekly Q&A’s and monthly coaching calls where I deliver a massive amount of value to specific people within my tribe. All free all you need to do is join the Facebook group at the link below you’ll find other people who are on this journey, so you’re going to be able to support each other and I’m going to be active in the community, helping people out and bringing you lots of success moving forward. So join the tribe follow the link down below, and I hope to see you there.
Just something extremely basic like that where you are primarily outlining what the value is, the core that was there’s a seven-day boot camp.
There are weekly Q&A’s and coaching calls. And telling people what they need to do to get there, which is the call to action.
We call it marketing clicking the link down below. If it’s free make sure you tell people it’s free because that’s going to be their first objection.
Because we have done the groundwork because we’ve decided what value we’re going to be delivering within the group, the script for getting people in should be quite easy.
Harms: When Kyle talks about the background work as well as the fact of what we’ve covered all of this has been done in advance.
What we’ve avoided is this classic element which is going direct to the sale.
We’ve done the groundwork.
Think about putting yourself in your own shoes as a customer. Is there somebody out there who you follow and you are a part of their tribe?
You may not speak to them every day, but if they put a piece of information out you trust it, you like them, you now know them, they live in your mind in regards to an expert within a specific niche area.
Think about it from that perspective.
If you’re doing this, it should now be a realisation that I’ve put all of this work in getting people to the tribe is going to be an easier process than if I did not put any of that work in, in advance.
Kyle: The great thing about this is, it’s less reliant on your selling ability.
You are still selling, you’re still trying to get people into a tribe and then you’re going to be selling them products later, but it’s less reliant on what we normally think of as selling and more on just delivering massive amounts of value.
Then when it comes to asking people to pay you or asking people to do an action like join a tribe, it becomes a lot easier.
Harms: Now we’ve got the basic script in place and again tweak it to your personality.
Make it yours, make it unique and individual to who you are and what you’re offering. But at least now you’ve got something to hook people because there’s an organised value that they’re going to get once they come through the door, spend some time with you.
Element number two is what’s the best way to present this script to somebody?
Kyle: At the same time or at the end of when somebody interacts with our content, so depending on what your content is, let’s say you have a podcast.
You might half way through and at the end of the podcast mention you have this free group. If it’s a live video you’d probably do it half way through, or at the beginning or at the end mention again your group.
You interweave it into your existing content that they are already watching. You do it in a way that it’s not over the top and you don’t want your content to be 10 minutes long, and five minutes for it to be promoting your group.
That’s going to be very off putting, but you just have this simple 20, 30 second script that you can add at the end of any content.
Harms: One of the challenges online is that people’s attention span is short, that’s the reality of it and if you’ve got hundreds and hundreds of videos to get through, whether you’re advertising the video to them or whether they’re seeing it organically.
Let’s assume they’ve started to watch it and watch the first five seconds and then flick through.
One train of thought is a very sales thought is let me tell them about what I have to offer early in case they disappear. That’s one thought process.
Another thought process is let me give them value in the assumption that the value is going to hook them long enough that when I do present them with this offer at the end, it’s going to be a no-brainer.
There are two trains of thought if you asked me and Kyle, it will be an experiment to try both and see which one works best.
Everything that we do online within online business and marketing is an experiment.
I very much prefer the first method because we know we are going to give you lots of value, I know this video is going to be super valuable.
I know the Facebook group is super valuable so why not just tell people about it.
Kyle: Unlike Harminder I would tend towards the softer one, which is at the end mentioning but I know that’s not necessarily going to work.
That will not convert people who have left the video in the first five seconds, but we come from different sides and it’s going to depend on who you’re talking to, depending on the niche, type of content.
There are so many different variables here.
Harms: It also depends on what you’re comfortable with.
What we don’t want you to do is every single time you create something you have to think very hard about this, just make it a natural process, which is why we shared this with you today, which is just a structure.
You don’t have to think about it.
Start with a structure and over time you will have something that you feel comfortable with, and also is unique to yourself.
Kyle: I think one very important thing we called this a call to action, a CTA every piece of content you put out should have a CTA on it, it is my belief.
If it’s a blog article if somebody reads through it they’re obviously interested in what you have to say, you need to make sure there is a call to action there to bring them into the tribe or to take them onto the next stage.
Otherwise people will get distracted.
We need to make sure there’s always a way for people to go to the next level.
That’s a CTA, a call to action in marketing lingo and every piece of content should have one.
Harms: The assumption is that call to action is always linked with a sale and not always in this case we’re linking it to please come and join the group because you’re going to get this and this.
It could be a sale, it could be asking someone to click a link, it could be asking somebody to go to a website.
It varies but just remember when people do say CTA, that’s what it means call to action. Like we discussed that can go at the start, middle, end it can be weaved in your conversation.
It is up to you how you would like to do that. Whatever you’re comfortable with.
The final thing would be what format to do this in?
Kyle: Number one video.
For your message video is going to be the way to do it.
Obviously, your pitch in the tribe will depend entirely on what format your content is in because we’re saying you put your pitch to join the tribe into existing content.
Harms: By default it will be as part of your video. We suggested a live video but of course you will know what medium best suits yourself.
If you’re doing all of it, then it will feature in every item.
We need to continuously ask as many people as possible to get the message. So CTA, and don’t be afraid of it.
Quick summary is the core question we spoke about within the tribe, what do we do when people enter the group?
We discussed a few elements using this structure here which is an organised value approach, where you’ve got a boot camp which is the social learning unit.
You’ve got maybe a weekly Q&A and a monthly coaching session.
Now that is a nice structure to start with when there’s a tribe to interact with you within the group.
Now we use that value add and that structure to hook people using the script which is put into your call to action in the content and the videos that you produce outside of the group.
That is a great starting point.
Kyle: The to-do’s are really following on from setting up a Facebook group.
That’s a basic thing to do.
We need to make that decision of what is that value add we’re going to provide in the group. Are you going to put together a structured course?
If so great, go ahead and record it and get into the group.
Are you going to be doing Q&A question and answer calls and coaching calls?
Just make a decision, dedicate yourself to doing this because we’re going to need that information, we need to know what we’re going to be doing on a weekly or monthly basis, so we can do the next thing which is putting together our script.
It’s our promise to the people who are going to be joining our group.
To-do number one decide what value you are going to be providing in the group and stick to it.
Number two write down and record and practice a quick 20 to 30 second message and really repeat that script, get rid of any extraneous words and nail that pitch so you can deliver it just off the cuff at the end of any live video you do.
You shouldn’t have to be looking for your notes at the end of a live video and then anytime you do any kind of audience building contents whether it’s live video, recorded video, podcast, blog make sure you’re including that call to action.
Start to sell your expert knowledge to people who care
Kyle: We’ve been talking about how we turn your professional or your personal expertise into a business.
We’re packaging up your expertise, knowledge, skills into a product and we are taking it out to a marketplace, we’re building up an audience, tribe and in this guide we’re talking about the actual product itself and how to start monetising your position as an expert in your niche.
Harms: The focus is how do we start to get to that point and we’re very much focused on that idea, attracting an audience to the idea, putting that audience into a tribe.
Essentially the tribe once you start to move from audience into the tribe those are the people who care and we spoke about where we will host those people and from that point going forward, we can then offer them our service and our product, which we’re focusing on
Kyle: We are moving onto the O of BATON, so it’s business, audience, tribe, offer, network. This is where we are going to finally start to sell products to people who have already told us I am interested.
Business used to be very much face-to-face, shaking hands and meeting someone. That is how you got to the point where you liked and trusted somebody because you met them, you went for a meal with them, you chatted to them, you had a glass of wine.
What we are doing is trying to replicate that kind of that process of building up trust and likeability, but we’re going it within our tribe until we get the sale point.
That’s where we are at now.
Harms: What are we actually selling?
Because there can be lots of things we are selling, but we want a starting point.
Kyle: We’ve talked about a funnel where we’re taking people through the BATON system, starting to build up trust we are initially providing free content free value.
So whether that’s videos, whether that’s an eBook. Whatever it is, it is free and it doesn’t require people to give us any money.
The next stage we’re going to start to charge, but we want something low-cost, easily consumable but still very valuable and then we’re going to move up to our core product, whatever that is.
Then from core products we go to premium.
Obviously, you can have many, many stages in between but that’s a good basic structure of free, low-cost, core and premium. Generally, whatever your business is whatever niche you’re in that is going to be a good value ladder.
That’s going to be the basic structure we’re going to be using and you need to know where you’re going with your funnel, you need to have in your head a rough idea of what you’re going to be offering at each of the stages.
You do not need to build all of these products or the services before you start this vitally important.
In fact it is best not to build everything upfront because you might find as you start to sell to people some products fit really well and they sell like hot cakes and some products and services do not.
They’re not resonating for whatever reason it is and if you have built everything upfront then it’s really hard to change things around afterwards.
Whereas if you build step-by-step you are saving time, money and you’re saving a great deal of frustration as well, because you’re letting your market, your customers tell you what it is they want and it’s going to be an organic process.
Harms: We very much want to avoid the concept of investing loads of money, loads of time and almost falling into the classic risk of a Dragon’s Den scenario where you’ve spent six months, 12 months, maybe years creating a product.
Trying to put together a service and building up the idea that takes time, money, energy, sacrifices, all the things that go into building a product in a start-up, and now you present it to the marketplace and the marketplace, says I don’t think this is a valuable product.
The Dragon Den scenario comes in.
Imagine you walk through the door; you’re pitching a product and none of them decide to invest because they don’t believe there’s a market for it.
So working through the system that we presented you allows you to avoid that scenario.
We are talking about this three-tier process in which you now start to offer your tribe, your product and that is typically in a classic model is broken down into a low-cost offer, a core offer and then a premium offer.
Now again if we narrow this down what we ideally don’t want to do is go from tribe all the way to a premium offer.
We would love for our customers to work through this process. Now some will go to your core offer, will go to the premium offer immediately and that could happen, but if we systematise this and say the focus initially is to get a low-cost offer purchased, then winning.
Harms: That’s where we want to focus on.
So what is the first low-cost offer that we’re going to present people with?
Kyle: There are different ways to do this.
The main thing is that price escalation, generally we would recommend going from something around £10, $10 as your first low-cost offer.
It’s something that if people are disappointed with it is not the end of the world, obviously we’re not going to disappoint people, but it’s the kind of thing where somebody when they’re making a decision to purchase they think, I’m taking a risk here I’ve never purchased anything from them before it’s only $10 like what’s the worth that can happen?
And then we overdeliver.
It is going to be the best ten dollars they’ve spent in their life hopefully.
The classic example in most online funnels will be an e-book; there are alternatives here like a short video course or a resource pack, or a bundle of checklists.
What exactly fills this slot doesn’t matter.
It’s more about the price point, it needs to be around $10 for them to buy, so you shouldn’t record a whole 15-hour course and sell at $10 because your return on that personally is going to be very low.
Harms: Think about it as an entry point, an entry point for your customer to then discover the core and premium products.
We want to allow them this entrance.
When I think about that when I go to Wagamama they have this lobby. I walk in the entrance; they hand me the menu and I’m just working through the menu thinking about what products I would like to purchase from this place.
But there’s a price attached to entering the lobby and it is going to be low-cost.
Kyle: Other entry projects include things like when you go and buy a razor set from Gillette, for example, the razor set with the one or two blades it comes with is priced quite cheaply.
Once you buy that entry-level product the core product is actually the sale of the re-fills the blades you buy, which cost a lot more.
That’s how that business model works in particular you buy something which gets you into the system and then to continue the system you continue to buy razor blades.
That’s an example of entry products in the physical world. For us it’s going to be an entry into our ecosystem.
So as an expert it’s going to be the first paid step on the journey to delivering whatever value they’ve signed up for.
Harms: If you’re thinking how do I re-frame this?
How do I get grounded with this?
If we think about what was the original problem that we were trying to solve that’s very much where the focus is going to be in creating this value ladder in the sense, how are we going to serve the customer?
How are we going to help them?
And what problem are we solving?
It’s that statement which defines what product we create because that’s often that question comes up, which is what is my first product?
This is going to be a digital product. The first item will be a problem that we’re solving through the use of your entry level item.
That’s the key.
Kyle: We talked about this problem statement and that is the spine covering this whole section.
We’re talking to a market who has a particular problem, the example we used was I am an expert in helping London based technology start-ups to raise money.
Let’s say that’s my business and that’s my expertise that I can help you with. So my problem statement becomes how do I raise money for my tech start-up? That’s what the people who are attracted to me are asking me as I am the expert in that theme.
If the problem statement is how do I raise money for my tech start-up that is the core of all the content I’ve been putting out, all the audience and all the tribe content.
It’s also going to be exactly the same question that I am answering in my entry-level product, it’s going to be the same question I’m answering in my core product, it’s going to be the same question that I’m answering in my premium product.
That is the through line and if you nail it with a problem statement that resonates with a large enough market, you’re good.
Harms: Throughout the whole process we’re going to be answering the same problem statement at the entry level at the core level and at the premium level.
Now the next question is, what would that typically look like?
We’ve hinted to it already as an ebook, short course potentially, or long course as your core product.
The core product becomes a full course in depth course and then the premium product becomes coaching, consultancy within this framework of the example that we’re using which is a tech start-up coach who helps tech start-ups raise finance, raise funding for different rounds.
That’s where you can sell your premium product.
This filter process means selling your premium product becomes a lot easier.
It means selling your full course becomes easier and because you formed a tribe your low $10, $20 £20 course short entry, e-book becomes a lot easier as well.
One of the questions that often comes up at this point is an tricky one to adjust to and absorb is, what you’re asking me to do is show them how to do everything and I’m going to be giving it all away and if I show them how to do it they’re never going to buy my premium product and left with no customers.
Kyle: If you go into a bookshop and you look at fitness and dieting, weight loss section a hundred books there.
Each year a few hundred new books. Information is out there that’s not the problem. People know how to lose weight.
So why are there still weight loss books out there, why are they still making these products?
The information is not the key here. It’s more than that.
There are a couple of reasons why people will still purchase from you and why they will still escalate with you even if you are given the core message.
Even if you are given the answer if there is an answer away in your free videos.
First is you’re going to have more detail, more depth.
So yes, you have free videos talking about raising funds for VC start-ups. As you move into an ebook, as you move into a course as you move into a three-day seminar or personalised coaching and mentoring it’s going to be a lot more depth and specificity towards your particular situation.
I give my top three tips on raising money in the tech start-up in London.
Are they going to be relevant to your company in particular?
No, not necessarily because it’s very hard to give that general advice if I’m given general advice to the public it’s hard to talk just to you.
That’s one way we can escalate people.
You give them more detail, more depth and more specificity.
Harms: I think that’s a very valid point because you know more than you think.
I think this is a big misconception if you put out that general knowledge like I’ve got 10 powerful ways in which you can raise funds for your start-up, that’s great.
But then what happens when somebody at step number four comes across a challenge?
What happens if they have an industry which you haven’t maybe discussed within step four. It’s that level of specific knowledge that starts to become very valuable at the core and premium stage.
So as they escalate there is more detail getting more specific and more depth and then if you’re thinking about this as a creative, maybe you go into case studies which become a part of the premium product, the core product.
But maybe it’s too early to present people with case studies yet because they don’t understand the theory.
It’s all about getting detail theory and then you go more in-depth with case studies.
Kyle: Also the fact that your customer as your client’s knowledge increases they start to realise how much they do not know.
When you’re first starting out the top 10 tips in raising money might be enough, but then as you get into the details of your client, your customer they’re going to start realising but what about this?
The more they know about the subject, the more specialised information they are going to need to know to push forward.
But your customers and your clients, people you’re going to be working with as you educate them using your free content, as you educate them using your low-cost content.
They’re going to start to realise, there’s a lot here.
That’s when the specialised knowledge, technical knowledge, the case studies, etcetera will come into play.
Harms: The second element is the inane fact that humans and people are lazy, we do tend to try to walk down the path of least resistance as much as possible, I think it’s a survival mechanism built into us.
We don’t like adversity, we don’t like to feel uncomfortable, and then the second part to that is the fact that we don’t act, there’s a lot of inaction involved with what we do.
For example, there will be books on the bookshelf about subjects which I’ve read, which I have not acted on.
That’s another key topic, I’ve entered the funnel here, the book the low entry cost, but I haven’t acted yet. But I’m now in the ecosystem.
Kyle: People are inherently lazy and I don’t mean this in a bad way.
Another way to think of laziness is we’re very efficient. We don’t want to expend the energy that we don’t have to. That’s a nice way to think about it, so knowledge itself does not lead necessarily to action.
We generally need a bit more than that, sometimes it is motivation, which is why you might have read personal development books and then not really done anything with it.
But then you’ve gone to a personal development seminar and the person up on stages has energised you and then you actually make the changes in your life.
That’s because you have the motivation as well as the knowledge so that’s one way.
There are other things you can do with your products just to make them more actionable. So, for example, reading a 300-page book is going to put off a few people.
Not everyone is going to make it all the way through the book.
Not everybody is going to have the energy left afterwards to act it. If you have easier to digest videos or maybe videos with exercises for example, it’s going to be a lot easier for people to get through that material.
You can add resources like checklists or done for you templates for raising money. Things that reduce fiction. They reduce the barriers for your customer or your client to get these things done.
You can also add in community which adds accountability.
Potentially you have a mastermind group or you have a place where all of your customers hang out and they can talk about their successes and failures, and it gives a community sense which helps to push people forward.
These are all different ways that you can help people move from the knowledge that you’re providing to actually enacting it, to actually doing something with that information, and these are all different features you can add to high-level products.
It might be adding actionable steps, exercises, adding resources, adding a community, adding personal touches like Q&A or live sessions you do once a week to go through problems.
These are different levels of products that you can add on to get people to fulfil the action that your educational material talks about.
Harms: If we think about the first low-cost product in regards to teaching them and allowing them to learn the knowledge within a packaged space so not just videos here and there which they may have been experiencing, or maybe a weekly Q&A but now they actually login.
They’ve got a start to end process with a got package.
Once they understand it now it’s time for them to specialise and to specialise they may pay slightly more, or a higher priced ticket item in order to learn specifically what that item is.
Because they’ve got the base level knowledge they know exactly what area they would like to specialise in.
The final step is where the premium product comes which is the accountability.
Personally for me I think this is when most of the success comes in.
I’ve personally had coaches and mentors who their job is to hold me accountable and to keep me going in order to achieve whatever success it is within the goal I’m setting out to achieve.
Accountability there is important.
Kyle: This is why people get personal trainers for example for fitness, because you know that if you drop and do 50 press ups, or you do 20 burpees and you do that every single day you’re going to get stronger.
You know that if you eat less junk food you’re going to get slimmer, we still get a PT because that gives us the accountability to turn up once or twice a week.
And have somebody keeping us accountable and asking us what are you eating on a day-to-day basis.
That’s why we do use experts like that.
Harms: At the base of this, there is going to be low action from the customer, they’re going to be implementing this probably not, maybe trying something, but not really acting on it.
At the highest level of this process is where they put in the high action, but that’s a result of them paying the PT sitting there saying five more burpees, ten more push-ups.
That leads us onto another question which is, somebody may be thinking I thought we’re building the business.
I’m not really a teacher, I don’t really know how to teach.
What’s our thought process around this?
Kyle: We’ve been focusing on expert funnels and the reason we are educating is because it’s the quickest way to win trust and the quickest way to build goodwill with potential customers.
The Internet is really noisy and there’s a lot of rubbish out there and we need to cut through that noise, the quickest way to do that is to be yourself, your personal brand, teach and help people deliver massive amounts of value.
Teaching is just the shortcut way to do this, we are now going to be selling products.
What we might think of our core service is adding additional products in front of that. So let’s say I am a business consultant. Up until now my core service has been sitting down with tech start-up founders to talk about funding. I charge them £250.
That is my service.
We can still do this but we will be adding this as a service just further down the funnel.
We bring in far more people into our funnel, far more people into our ecosystem by providing lower cost products which are educational in nature, but the end outcome is we can also sell our professional services which are not purely educational.
Education here is, I understand the concern like I’m not a teacher, the education here is a means to an end of selling your professional services and your professional products.
We’ve structured it in a way that you will also be making money from your educational content as well.
Harms: The ultimate scenario here is you have a queue of people wanting your premium service, that’s one of the goal is to take away from this and that queue comes from the idea that somebody has purchased a low-cost product, an entry-level product and a core product, they’ve seen you, absorbed you and there’s going to be a percentage of people like I need to pay this person because they’re going to get me results.
This is the expert.
I need to be interacting with and rather than you rely on word-of-mouth for the rest of your life or try to pitch a client here, pitch a client there.
We’re saying let’s allow a queue of people at your door, your virtual online door saying whenever you have new spaces for your premium product, please choose me.
We want to reverse the situation here to give your queue rather than you having to go out there and chase lots of clients.
The teaching part isn’t necessarily teaching but it’s educating your client on what your service and expertise is all about in a very sophisticated way that actually leaves them with a lot of value and gives them an opportunity to start themself as well.
Which is very powerful otherwise it’s a complete mystery or myth to a lot of people and maybe there’s a lot of people out there who can’t afford your premium offer and your service, but they’re very early on in their career and one day they potentially can, but right now they can’t.
So how can they get started?
It’s actually with your $10 product, your 50 or hundred-dollar product.
Think about it from a bigger, wider perspective.
Kyle: Education allows us to show that we know what we’re talking about.
We have the authority to teach this stuff so we can also provide the service and sell products in this space.
Harms: Now let’s talk about what we are creating specifically.
What’s the best way in which we recommend people do it?
What mechanism we use and the caveat here is this is not going to be the complete end-to-end process, just an introduction to this.
Kyle: For your first product, I know we talked about an e-book being the low-cost offer, however, writing a book is a lot of work.
Maybe you’ve written a book already, even if it’s a short e-book it takes a lot of time to sit down and do that.
The main problem is people don’t start. Lots of people have an idea for a book and they never do, and I’m sure you know people like this.
Maybe you are like this yourself.
The book never materialises, so I’m not just going to say write an eBook because that’s not very helpful and it will act as a roadblock, you’ll get to that point. Flipside pulling together like a 10-hour long video course of all of your content and structured learning curriculum and bringing people from A-to-Z is also going to be too much.
Too much planning, lots of upfront work, and you won’t get paid for it until you get it all ready and launched out into the public.
We also want to build this first product so that it becomes the foundations of all of your products.
We talked about how all of your content and products are going to be answering basically the same fundamental question that your customer has.
We want to make a nice product that sits in the middle and we can expand in different directions. It’s almost like creating a core product, expanding it to premium or we can cut it down to go to the entry level.
And we want to get paid for making it, so there’s a lot of things we’re adding in here which makes it sound very attractive.
The technique which sounds counterintuitive, but the technique we’re suggesting is you start with a short course and you deliver it live to your tribe.
Let’s first look at why this is really good.
Harms: There are two components here, number one is we’re honing in on saying we’re going to create a short course, this is the what part and our suggestion is create it using a live mechanism, that’s the how.
We’ll give you a template which you can almost copy paste into whatever your business niche is.
We will give your structure so you don’t have to think we’ve done the research for you, we’ve looked at some of the greatest and the best course providers out there and say this is a good formula that works and that can be used again and again and again.
Certainly to get you with your starting process.
Kyle: We will use your expertise to give you the framework and then you’re going to get your expertise out of your head and plug in the actual content.
Why are we using this particular method?
Writing an ebook of a block will slow you down. You won’t be able to launch it until three, four months or however long it’s going to take you. Putting together a full course.
No we’re scrapping that for now it’s too much technological set up.
Instead we’re going to deliver a short course and we’re going to do it live with real students so it’s not pre-recorded.
Why?
First up you’re going to get paid immediately, which makes it a lot easier to get the job done.
If you are spending three months writing an e-book or six months producing a longform course you’re not generating any income from it while you’re doing that and the whole thing psychologically, it feels like a white elephant.
You will get paid later for it but it’s a lot easier psychologically to get paid at same time, or upfront.
Harms: There’s the other flipside which is a good advantage is, you don’t fall into the creators trap where it is so exciting.
Maybe money is not a challenge right now, but this is so exciting I’m going to create this product and make it perfect and spend loads of time on it and four weeks goes down the line. Six weeks goes down the line we want you to avoid that process.
Whereas we are saying you can create immediate revenue by creating this live and what live means instantly.
It means that I am doing this part of a course I shoot at 12 o’clock, by 1 o’clock my course is live and I just got paid for it.
That’s what we want to do.
Kyle: One of the other benefits is as we’re producing this course we suggest doing it on a weekly basis.
Because you’re shooting it and you’re releasing it on a weekly basis you’re getting live feedback that allows you to shape the course as you build it, based on what people are saying, what they’re asking.
Whereas if you sit home and write a book or produce a course from scratch, you’re not getting that live feedback.
This is the Dragon’s Den syndrome that Harms mentioned.
If you go into your shed and you develop a product or service totally without regard to the people who will be using it, then you might come out with a complete monster that nobody wants, nobody cares about and nobody will buy.
Whereas if you’re shaping it with your actual customers people are already paying then it’s far more likely it’s going to be a valuable product going forward for customers in the future.
The third benefit is that it lights a fire under you.
You’ve committed yourself you’re saying every Tuesday at 12 I’m going to be delivering a new module.
That means you need to be there every Tuesday at that time to deliver the module. You have set a schedule publicly and you’re accountable to this now.
Whereas if you’ve said to yourself I’m going to write a chapter a week. That’s just you.
That’s the same process of I’m going to do 20 push-ups and you don’t do it. We need to have exterior accountability.
If you set a creative schedule based on the delivery to your audience this lights a fire and it makes it more likely that you are actually going to deliver it. You have to deliver it, people are waiting.
Harms: What we’re saying is we’re keeping our promise and we’re going to maintain the trust because we kept the promise we made it and we kept it.
If you can’t turn up for whatever reason, it’s all about communicating that out.
Give them some notice.
We understand that you are an individual not a large production company.
Kyle: We are using this psychologically to light a fire under you to get the creative process done which is so importantly.
Many of you would have written in your New Year’s resolution I’m going to write the book this year or I’m going to do this project and you don’t do it because there is no exterior need, we are adding one of them by doing this live.
Yes we will be doing weekly sessions, live sessions, delivering each module but we’re still spreading it out. We are still allowing a week or two weeks or whatever you decide on between each module.
We think a week is about enough that gives you enough time to fully prepare and script that module you’re going to be delivering.
The key here is we are not preparing every single thing we’re going to be saying for the whole course of a six week or 12-week course.
We’re not preparing it all up front; we are preparing as we go along.
We’re using just-in-time manufacturing and it was developed by Toyota but it’s the idea of you do not build everything you need to before you have to because then it’s very inefficient.
You have things stored inventory; etcetera we can use that same principle in our course creation.
We’re not preparing everything in advance and then having to go back and adjust it as we go along, based on consumer feedback or customer feedback.
Instead, we are each week, able to sit down and produce the lesson for this week based on what we know and what we’re learning as we go through the process.
Harms: For us it will just-in-time creation and production, where it’s built on demand.
The demand in this circumstance may be that you’ve got a weekly schedule for when you’re delivering this live short course, so there will be some preparation time.
But the actual production of it will be at 12 o’clock on a Wednesday. For us it’s Monday to Friday, 12 o’clock.
Importantly for us.
We know roughly what we’re going to be talking about each week, so I know the next four or five weeks I know the topic and then we are sketching out in this example, we are sketching out each week at the weekend and then filling it out as we go through.
We haven’t planned the next six months of content upfront, so it’s very much just-in-time.
And that allows us to adapt to questions being asked, it allows us to adapt for example on Wednesday we over ran so we were able to change things around.
But the main thing is we are producing a massive amount of content. Each week we’re doing about six hours.
Kyle: You can also adapt it to the people who are taking the course with you. They can ask questions they are going to have certain areas they need additional explanation of and therefore you can adapt the course based on that.
Because the people taking your course for the first time are going to be very similar to the people subsequently taking the course.
Harms: The final one is because we’ve done it live via video we can use this again and again and again and we can convert it into different products.
Kyle: We’re going to do the first run of the course we do it live with actual people.
They will pay because we’re still giving our time.
That’s more like service at that point, what we’re going to do after we have the recordings after we finished all our sessions, we productise it.
We take all of those recordings and we create a video course from it, and this is a product we can then sell forevermore because it’s us delivering the content, it is guiding people through the process.
Those videos then become a product rather than a live service.
You do not need to keep delivering the course live because you already have the recordings of your first session
Harms: Those live videos we’ve produced don’t disappear; they don’t become suddenly not valuable.
What happens is we can package this up as a series, a short course and we attach a price tag to it, and now we can sell that as a recorded informational product that can generate cash automatically 24 seven.
Throughout the night, somebody can work through it weekly. Somebody can work very quickly.
The key here is you’ve already created it.
The opposite of this is a new customer turns up and says, I want to enjoy that five-part series you created, what it means you don’t have to reshoot that five-part series it means there is a recording available and say just head over to that.
We mentioned early on that the default is let’s create a low-cost ebook but that takes more time, whereas we can actually turn this into an ebook.
So think about the way we spoke about repurposing video has the highest density of information so we can turn that into text.
We can extract the text from a transcription and turn that into an ebook rather than create the e-book and then do the video.
We’re talking about leveraging time, making things easy for us, and replaying into the fact that we are very efficient human beings.
Kyle: We are creating our core product here, let’s say we do the course for eight weeks. So every single Tuesday at midday we come on, we deliver a live session at the end of that we have eight hour-long videos.
We package that up into a course. We sell that for £500 depends on our niche and how much people are willing to spend on it.
We can also take those eight hours’ worth of video, get everything transcribed and you can pay someone to do this or there are electronic tools and then we use that plus our show notes to compile an e-book version of the same course.
We get someone to edit it, make sure it’s more like a written language than spoken language, but the basic structure is already there; it just needs tightening up into an ebook format.
We can then release that e-book as our low-cost offer, so we have created two products at the same time, we’ve created our core eight-hour video course and a low-cost entry level e-book. What about the other way?
We can take that core course which is eight hours and we can expand on it.
We can add in checklists, resources we can add in additional videos on technical aspects.
For example, we can add in live Q&A sessions, we can add in a community where people can come and discuss what’s been taught in the course. We can add in live calls and coaching, we can add in lots of different things based on these basic eight hours of video courses in order to create a premium offer.
Harms: Number one is we shoot the live video on a schedule that works for you, we package that up and we turn that into recorded video products, number two. T
hen either parallel or I’m numbering it in terms of 10 stages where we can create an audio product from this as an audio guide.
That could be a podcast.
Step number four again or in parallel to audio is you pull the text, so e-book, checklist, workbook resources and the price will vary slightly, but what we’re saying is you’ve got this video product that started as a live video and you’ve expanded your ecosystem of products. But you’ve really done the work, the creation work once.
The hardest creation work which is presenting the live course it’s an extremely powerful way to do it.
Kyle: Now you have seen the basic system, remember we’re getting paid upfront as we’re going it live.
We’re getting feedback and shaping the course as we go along because it’s a live session, which means the end products are going to be better as a result, because we have the feedback.
We have the creative impetus the need and necessity to create because people are expecting us to do that every week, which means if it’s an eight-week course it’s going to take eight weeks to complete, it has to.
Which is so powerful.
It’s just-in-time production, so everything is produced that week so it means it’s up to date. It can deal with events happening. It can take feedback from customers and it doesn’t require us to plan out the whole thing and create the whole thing over months without any feedback.
Then finally we can convert the live video course into multiple products.
So sell the recorded sessions as a video course, we can strip out the audio and turn it into an audiobook and then we can transcribe the video and get an e-book version from it.
This is why we are suggesting starting with a live course.
Harms: We have a fantastic podcast called the Growth Tribes podcast where Kyle kindly came on just to speak about the topic of online business.
That podcast talks about all areas of life and the challenges we face different topics from wealth, health, and occasionally we get a guest on an expert which myself and Dr Ro who is a co-host cannot answer specifically.
It is better answered to the voice of an expert which in this case was Kyle who joined us this morning.
We very much speak about a business model which is selling your expert knowledge as part of a digestible piece of digital information, but rather than sell this immediately we used the BATON infrastructure.
If we sell immediately we get lower conversions, less trust, it’s more expensive to implement the whole process.
Whereas what we do is we build an audience first, we filter that audience down to a tribe and then we present that tribe an offer.
That’s the key here.
We very much focused on the entry product, what’s the first experience somebody can transact with you in order to start this discovery of solving their problems.
One action point to do off the back of today, which is all of this takes work.
We appreciate that to get to the point of sale takes work, I think your focus very much should be on continuing to build the audience, continuing to build a tribe, practice engaging with the tribe, with a lot of the methods that we spoke about.
One of the biggest tips would be to create a Facebook group within there that has these social learning units which will start to get you into the practice of this entire funnel. About creating a short course, making it easily accessible to your tribe.
As your tribe develops you’re going to have numbers in there where they’ll be needing this just in time entry product, because the information will need to be packaged up.
They now trust you, like you, that’s when you start making cash for any business.
Kyle: The only thing I would add to do is listen.
Start listening to the people in your tribe, they’re going to be addressing their problems whenever they ask you a question that is something that needs to be covered in your course.
The more you listen now the more you know what their problems are, the more you’re going to be able to structure a course that helps these people, helps your potential customers.
Harms: Hopefully, we’ve given you a pathway and a couple of side pathways to actually go ahead and start building your expert business online and starting to generate cash from selling what’s in here.
What knowledge you have.
In Conclusion
You now understand what an expert online business is and how to implement one. From the idea conception stage all the way through to making sales online. Whilst most people undersell themselves, or can’t see the value in the expert knowledge they have – others are creating automated marketing machines off the back of the back of their expertise. The online world has now given us the ability to talk to such niche segments of a macro marketplace, that we can be heard and build an audience. You have learned how to verify this market is large enough and that an audience can be built from it – before you even go and start. This means you have greater confidence in committing time and money to the next stage of your expert business development.
You have learned in the next stage it is important to convert this audience into a tribe, because it’s the tribe who buys what you have to offer. In the case of this blog, it’s your expert knowledge. You have also learned that although at first they are buying your expert knowledge and experience in the form of a video course, later this escalates into larger revenue. Through coaching, consulting, public speaking, contracts and more.
Most of all you will have learned that by turning your expertise into something valuable that can be shared with people, you will create a steady flow of customers for your business. This steady flow means sustainability in the long run. When someone thinks about their next expert purchase (coaching, consulting, digital product etc), will they think of the direct advertisement they just say or the expert (you) they have been following for years.
By implementing what you have learned, you will be the top of mind expert that makes sustainable sales for years to come.
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