Here’s a great strategy that can dramatically change your business. It works best for professional service providers but it can work well for others as well. If you haven’t started down this road before, it can involve a lot of work but you only have to do it once. As soon as you’ve gone through the process once, you can use the same strategy over and over again. And you’ll be positioning yourself as an expert along the way.
First things first. You have to ensure you’re an expert in the field. Does that mean you have to be a PhD in the topic? No, it doesn’t. It just means you have to know enough about the topic to be authoritative. Keep in mind that most people know very little about any one fields and a recent study found that if you read just three books on a particular subject, you’ll effectively become an expert on that topic relative to everyone else.
The next thing you have to do is write a short handbook on the topic. This can be as easy as summarizing the content in the three books you read and putting the same content in your own words and in a condenses document. By doing this, you can forever more refer to yourself as an author and other people will treat you with more respect as a result. I have written two handbooks in the past. One was 28 pages and the other was 34. So these don’t need to be long novels. They just need to demonstrate your expertise.
The process of writing a short handbook does something else too. It structures your thoughts and your understanding of the topic. By being forced to explain the topic to an uneducated reader, you will end up knowing the subject better yourself. And with that understanding in place, you need to massage that content into a 2-hour workshop. Think about the most important points and organize them into a logical order for an audience to hear.
Next up, schedule the event and market it to get a few people in attendance. There are a lot of different ways to market an event like this and it doesn’t need to cost you a lot of money. The important thing is to get 10 or 15 people in attendance. That will give you a sufficient audience to practice delivering the information and getting the questions that naturally come up.
When you’re comfortable with the process, bring a microphone and record an event live. You can download Audacity for free and the microphone will cost $50 or less. Then, you’ll get the exposure from the workshop as usual but you’ll get an information product to boot. The importance of this is significant. A lot of speaking engagements require the speaker to have an information product to sell. It also builds more credibility. And it allows you to make some money even though you’re providing the workshops for free.
This 5-step strategy is a great way to position yourself as an expert within your field and leverage that position to gain new clients or partners. And once you’ve gone through the process once, you’ll have the tools forever more and can use them as often as possible without further efforts.
Tactical Execution has made a business out of helping others achieve their goals. The information in this article is just the tip of the iceberg and I encourage you to visit the website to take advantage of the resources available there.