1) Solves their problems and answers their questions. This seems like a no-brainer, but the part that’s easy to overlook is identifying what people actually want – not just what you think they want. As an expert in your field it’s very easy to think that because you know something, other people know it too. The truth is, a vast majority of people in all markets and niches are beginners. And in that beginning space, there are far more questions than answers. If you can answer those questions with clarity and point them in the right direction, they’ll love you! There are two excellent ways to figure out your market’s problems and questions:

1. If you already have a decent following (100+ active followers on email or social media) you can send them a survey. Ask them what are the top three things that would help them the most right now? From that survey, identify the most commonly asked questions you receive from your followers and create your new content around that.
2. Identify and follow the top 20 blogs in your field of expertise (use Alltop.com and Technorati.com to identify those) and find the most viral (commented and shared) posts. What issues are those posts addressing? You can also take the main keywords (terms people in your market are searching for) and search them at Yahoo Answers to see what else people are asking about this.

2) Helps them move towards their desired outcome. Answering your market’s questions are only a part of this. Once you do that you have to give them concrete steps of action so they can apply that new knowledge. The first thing to do once you’re done reading this post is figure out what the most common questions your audience has about your field of expertise.

3) Easily understandable and easily applicable. Don’t make your content complex. Your job as an expert is to communicate information to your audience in a way that makes it easy to understand and apply, so your audience can improve their results in the area you teach. After learning from you, they need to feel like they have the confidence and competence to apply your training.

So, the first thing you need to do to create this content is figure out what your audience actually wants. “Find out what they want and show them how to get it,” is a surefire formula for success. So put together a survey or start chunking away at that research. Use http://www.surveymonkey.com/ for free to get started.

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Start with two things:

1. Build Your List
2. Build Your List

Your list is your biggest asset online and one of the only things you have complete control over in this industry. You don’t know what Google’s going to do, or facebook, or youtube or any of that stuff. It changes constantly. Even me, a guy who teaches people how to make sure their websites stay within Google’s Adwords requirements – got banned by Google. (We were promoting a side business on how to convert your ebook to the kindle format. And the ads we put up on Google had the words “kindle” and “amazon” in them. Apparently that’s called copyright infringement and is generally frowned upon.

To build your list you need to drive eyeballs to your page and capture those email addresses.

If you are just starting, use our “Social Media Management” guide and our “How To Set-up Your Speaking/Coaching Website From Stratch” guide. Both are free. You’ll learn how to establish yourself in social media, and build a site that captures email addresses in just 6 easy to follow steps.

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There are three main objectives when sharing your story:

1. Connect and relate to your audience
2. Establish your expertise
3. Humanize you

But there are two major errors I see time and time again that can, when corrected, make a tremendous difference:

Error #1: Not wanting to talk about “The Struggle” and focusing on your results instead. There may be something locked up in here about insecurity and not wanting to sound show-offy. Everyone is afraid of sounding like a boastful bragging chauvanistic dick when delivering their bio or story. And if all you talk about is how cool you are, that’s exactly how you’ll look to your audience. You want about 70% of your success story to be about the struggle, the pain, and how much it sucked before you learned all teh great things you know now. Why would you do this? Why would you dedicate a majority of your time talking about how bad things were? Beacause that’s where 95% of your audience is. They’re stuck. They’re struggling. And they’re looking to you for guidance. They know where they want to go. But they want to make sure that they’re learning how to get there from someone who cares, from someone who has learned from experience, and someone who has been where they are.

Error #2: Not capturing the moments of the story. There are three key moments to any successful positioning story:

1. Reflection
2. Realization
3. Results

The Reflection is the moment you hit the proverbial “rock bottom.” It’s the moment you took a look in the mirror, stepped back in relfection and decided that something had to change. When things seemed like they couldn’t get any worse, but you decided that you would do whatever it takes to make it. The key here is you must paint the picture of what that was like and capture it in a moment. In my positioning story I talk about how I had been running my coaching/seminar business for about a year and I found myself finally training sales teams in Portland, OR. My moment of reflection was standing in-front of this team of people selling payroll benefits and insurance packages (ZZZzzz…). At this particular moment in the presentation I was telling them how important their work is for the good of society – and it felt like one big lie (because it was). I was totally out of alignment and every sale I made was like pulling teeth. The problem was I hadn’t found my audience yet. And in that moment on stage, everything shifted and I had had to find my real audience through internet marketing.

The Realization is the moment you discover the big secret that changed everything. For me it was realizing that I could create a series of videos walking people through a program I’d been coaching called The Goal Acheiver. Here I’d been learning about online product launches and strugglign to come up with a product to sell when it was right infront of my nose the whole time.

The Results are the results you have gotten since discovering that big secret. Again you must capture it in a moment. For me it was seeing the success stories come back from other products I helped my friends sell online. After I’d done a couple successful launches for GoalAchieverOnline.com, I started helping my colleagues and associates who were also trying to market their how-to products online with no success. I was helping out my good friend, Jennifer Lauck sell her audio program of writing memoirs. When the feedback and success stories from people who bought the product came back – I knew in that moment that there was really something to this. Seeing those names and thanks yous about how much clarity her product brought them and how they’d gotten more writing done in a few months than they’d done for several years before was powerful. And that’s when I committed myself to

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There are several keys to succeeding in this. Entire books, seminars, courses, and careers are dedicated to it. Our learning course, Big Kahuna List Builder, focuses on how to build your entire online machine – including product sales.

But there are two huge “needle movers” that will help you immensely in creating a sound strategy to sell product online:

First, pre-sell the product with training content before you ever ask to buy. This has commonly been called a product launch. You release a series of promotions building anticipation, providing proof, establishing your authority, and creating buzz around your product. When done properly, the market will clamor to get your product. The funny thing about the product launch is it was created out of a marketers apprehension about asking people to buy his product. The go-to product launch trainer is Jeff Walker – and I highly recommend following him as well.

Second, find out exactly what your audience wants to learn PRIOR to creating the product. Often times as experts it’s very easy for us to think we know exactly what our market needs. And while we may know the pathway to success in our area of focus, we might not know exactly where the audience is at. Find out what their biggest, most pressing issues are and then center the learning course around that. You may teach people how to lose weight and know the perfect formula for your customer, but they may be having additional issues and barriers to success that you never thought of.

So, put together a survey and ask your audience “What is the most frustrating thing in your business/life right now?” It might be that even though they have all the tools and resources needed to be successful, they can’t find the time, or they don’t have support from their family/co-workers, etc… Finding out the biggest frustration for a market is pure gold.

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Have you ever found yourself thinking, “Does this internet stuff even work?” “I don’t know any of these people.” “I have no idea who’s reading this. How do I know I’m connecting with them?”

The best way to make a sale is sitting down with someone and talking mano-e-mano. You can genuinely connect with them, get a feel for their personality, their likes and dislikes, their problems, their goals, where they’re trying to go, etc… Then once you know all that stuff you can show them how your product/service helps them overcome those problems and accomplsih their dreams. Right? This is how you started getting speaking gigs and coaching clients right? By TALKING TO PEOPLE! What a concept?!

So now you’re marketing your speaking/coaching business online aaaand… how do you do that? You can’t talk to every person who comes to your website, there’s hundreds-thousands of them. And even if by some miracle of science you could be in thousands of places at the same time – would those people who come to your site even want to talk to you? They don’t even know you. They just found your website.

What’s a player supposed to do? There’s one huge needle mover here:

Share your personality and your true character (not the overly professional salesy hat)

People will come to your site for content. They stick around because they like you.

When people first come to your page, see you speak, check you out – they don’t care about you. All they know is that you might be able to help them solve their problems and accomplish their goals. That’s why you offer them free training early on. It’s your personality that turns them into fans and customers.

Now here’s something very interesting… the big name experts do not have special information. Shocker right? Today, information is a commodity. Pretty much anything can be found through search engines, and somewhere some nasty person has posted all the expensive multi-thousand dollar advanced learning courses for free (illegal) download. So the thing that will make your audience become raving fans and pay those exclusive prices is you.

So share yourself with them.

Don’t just share your story – talk about your hobbies, your family, what you’re reading, what you do with friends, etc… As soon as you become a publisher (expert posting content) you become a celebrity. And suddenly this allure of fame surrounds you and people want to know about your personal life. It’s weird, but it’s real.

Some of the most viral posts I see among our clients are funny things their kids say. It’s intimate, it’s personal, and it’s something you’d share with a friend over coffee. So every so often, share those kinds of things. And in your training videos for launch sequences, talk about what you do for fun! Your enthusiasm is infectious and will catch on with your viewers.

Me, I talk about how I love board sports (surfing, snowboarding, kiteboarding) and I share some of the goofy stuff that happens in my extended family.

Start off by building the online marketing machine we teach you how to build in the Big Kahuna List Builder course.

I actually discovered this secret before I started marketing online. I had been coaching in Portland, OR for about a year at this point, and building clients mostly through word-of-mouth referrals. To reach more people, I started hosting these short half-day workshops at my athletic club on the weekends. At the time, I felt like my performance was great as a speaker and I knew that people enjoyed the info I was sharing with them. But no one was signing up for the programs at these sessions! And the same thing was happening with my one-on-one coaching clients. They’d sign up for the first program and then not sign-up for the second one. One weekend in particular I was closing the session by sharing with the audience that if they’ve liked these sessions and want to really dig deep into this kind of material, that they should attend the three day seminar we had coming up in a couple months. Again, afterwards everyone said how much they loved the information, but they can’t commit to the seminar. I whopping number of zero signed up. How’s that for feedback?

Knowing that this wasn’t exactly sustainable business wise, I got help. I had a few marketing experts and other people who sold from the stage watch video of my weekend sessions. (Side note: Film everything). What they shared with me was priceless:

Apparently I was doing everything right on the surface. I was hitting all the main emotional triggers, appealing to all kinds of deep human drivers/triggers, and doing it with all sorts of enthusiasm. But the problem was I wasn’t treating them like they’d actually buy. I rarely talk about personal development/positive thinking in the marketing training. But this is one place where not using it will really hurt you. The lesson for me was:

The way you treat your customers is the way they are.

Do this in everything you do. Expect them to be the way you want them to be. If you expect them to be gracious and excited about your advice and products – guess what? They will be. Now of course you need to know what you’re talking about and deliver in a way that serves them in the best way possible. But treat them like they are the most important person in the world. For goodness sake, these people feed you!

Here’s how to apply this:

1. Figure out what your ideal client is like. How will they interact with you? Talk to you? Feel about your business?
2. Start treating them like that. Talk to them like they’re actually going to do apply your training. Treat them as if they are that ideal client.

PS: If you get the occasional weirdo, just move on. I got a wildly entertaining phone call last week about how I’m working for the Illuminati and part of this massive conspiracy against this poor who called me. I just deleted it even though I totally am a part of this massive global conspiracy against him

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Wasn't this guy the bad guy in James Bond?

What can you learn from the best speaking and coaching websites on the market?

A key to success is to learn from the experts. And the biggest names in the industry have gotten there for a reason: they know what they’re doing.

So what is really going on underneath the surface on their websites? How can you replicate that success without ripping it off? And what are the psychological triggers at play?

There are five things that the best speaking sites do:

1) They all have a clear and compelling call to action. But not in the way most internet marketing experts talk about. You land on these homepage homepage of these leaders and there’s tons of stuff (they rarely look like the traditional ugly squeeze pages)

BrianTracy.com is NEVER going to look like this…

Yet they still have clear and compelling calls to action. They have “free gifts” you have to exchange your email address for. Sometimes the “freebie” is the main element on the homepage, sometimes it isn’t. But it is always noticeable. It always draws the eye and captures fascination. The key to doing this is to provide a gift that stands out and is based on what your market wants. Use subtle arrows and bright oranges (orange attracts the eye in the most effective way for marketing both online and offline. Red attracts more attention but it subconsciously says “warning.” You don’t want that). The best way to start is to place your “freebie offer” on the right sidebar in of your page. If you’re using wordpress for your site (you should be), open up the “widgets” menu, drag “text” to the top of the menu, and add an image of your headline and free report/video in html and paste the html code for the email optin beneath it.

2) They all establish authority. Even though many big name speakers have been around for decades and are internationally renown,  they still take the time to establish themselves as an authority on their subject. This can be done through espousing your expertise through videos, blog posts, free training, and social proof.

3) They all feature compelling social proof on the homepage. Tony Robbins dot com does this very well, there are revolving quotes and testimonials from well known, famous people who have endorsed him. Keep in mind that these endorsements must meet the needs and interests of your market. Robbins appeals to a mass audience, therefore he has movie stars, business leaders, spiritual leaders, tv stars, authors, and so on – big communicators that the masses recognize. Get endorsed by a big name in your field, and you become associated with that endorser and are even considered an equal to them because you (the expert) were able to help that person (the celebrity). If you don’t have those big name endorsements, use testimonials from people you have worked with. Follow our guide on creating the perfect testimonial here.

4) Speaking Videos. The biggest thing that conference and event planners are concerned with are:

1. Will you add value to the audience? (Do you know what you’re talking about?)
2. Will you not be boring? (How engaged are your audiences?)

Video is the best way to convey that. But instead of making a montage video featuring your quippiest one-liners and crescendo’s, feature entire points and stories. So often for a trainer, the format you use in speaking is you make your point, prove/illustrate it with a story/vignette, then restate the point in a different way. Instead of just having the video of you making the BIG POINT, feature a few different videos of entire vignettes. And please (please), refrain from the temptation to use dramatic music (ie Flight Of The Valkyries, Chariots Of Fire, techno music, etc…) or flashy graphics.

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But the most common objection I hear from speakers and coaches is that they don’t want to waste their time poking people on facebook and twittering  people. I totally understand. And as speakers and coaches we’re busy people. Between juggling the speaking gigs, coaching/consulting clients, and now doing all this online marketing stuff, how can you possibly have time to be constantly checking your facebook and twitter?

The other question I hear all the time is, “Is the energy I put in worth the energy I get out?” If building thousands of new followers/fans in a few months and connecting with other experts in your field doesn’t interest you, then move on. If not, I can show you how to manage your social media account in no more than 30 minutes a day.

Start with twitter.

1. Do this work during the time of day you are most unproductive. You know what time that is for you. For me that’s about 10:30 or 11:00 pm. Now you will make productive use of otherwise unproductive time.

2. Find the top 100 blogs in your area of expertise and follow those blogs in an RSS Reader. Just click the RSS icon (the orange on usually next to the other social media icons) and copy the web address into a Google Reader account under “Subscribe.”

Find these blogs by searching StumbleUpon.com, Alltop.com, and Technorati.com for your subject.

3. During this designated 30 minutes, scan the Google Reader for interesting content that your audience would find interesting and helpful. Select 8 to 10 different blog posts. Just scan Google Reader, it will give you a preview of each post. Click on the 8-10 that look most interesting and open them up in new tabs.

4. Plug those 8-10 blog posts into a twitter scheduler. I use Hootsuite.com, but there are other such as SocialOomph.com. Using these tools you can schedule these tweets to be posted from your twitter account throughout the day. Space them about 30 min. to an hour apart and random intervals.

5. Getting followers to click on your twitter links is all about writing catchy headlines. Appeal to curiousity, use lists (top ten…), and challenge commonly held beliefs in your market place.

That’s all you do. In just 30 minutes each day you’ll be able to begin establishing yourself as an expert in your field on social media. There’s no magic money machine to twitter or facebook (that’s called your website) so take baby steps with this and build is over time. You won’t be a superstar overnight.

Well, that should get you off to a strong start. But if you want to know much more…

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Everything matters online. Every detail is another piece of your reputation, presence, and credibility. The German architecture  Ludwig Mies van der Rohe put it perfectly when he said, “God is in the details.” So if you have incredible content, then treat it like it’s incredible. Film it properly and make it look professional.

Here are a few tricks you can use to make sure your online videos look fantastic:

1. Create a home-made teleprompter: if you’re using a script plug the script into a PowerPoint/Keynote presentation on your computer. Make the background black, the text white, and use a plain font like tahoma or arial. Now place your camera on the laptop of your computer and scroll through the slides with a clicker (or grab a buddy to push the buttons). This way you’ll still be looking right at the camera even though you have a script.

2. Use a lapel microphone. Grab one for $30 off of amazon. Plug it right into the microphone port on your computer/camera, make sure it works and shoot. Using the microphone in the camera tends to sound  hollow as it picks up all the other sounds in the environment.

3. Use an HD Camera. The new iPhone 4S cameras look ok, as long as the size of the video on the screen stays small. Using these hi-def camera phones is fine for short youtube videos, but not for launch or sales videos that go full-screen. If not grab a hi-def camera off of amazon (kodak zi8‘s work well and you can plug the lapel mic into the camera – be sure to get a bigger memory card though).

4. Don’t be back lit. If the dominant source of light is coming from behind you, you will look very dark. If need be, get some flood lights from your local hardware store. Try bouncing the light off the wall and onto your face. This makes the light much softer than if the light was pointed directly at you.

5. Expect it to be tough at first. If you’ve never done direct to camera filming before, then you’re in for a treat. It took me several rounds of camera work, youtube videos, and product launches before I finally got totally comfortable in-front of a camera. If you’re struggling with this, then we teach an great module on how to connect with your audience over camera in a deep meaningful way. It’s part of our Big Kahuna List Builder Program. Check it out here!

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There are three things to say in the video in terms of your content. These short freebie videos should stay in the 1-3 minute range. 90 seconds is the sweet spot. First for the content:

1. Start at the beginning with your intro – “Here’s who I am, why I’m doing this, who I help, and what I help them with.”

Here’s a quick example on this format:

“Hey there, this is Jake Gudger and Brad Granger from Embark Internet Marketing. We believe that if you have a message that will help improve people’s lives – than there’s an audience waiting for it. We help speakers and coaches just like you build internet marketing systems that help you reach a bigger audience than you ever thought possible…”

Once you’ve introduced yourself to your audience it’s time to share with them… 

2. The video content. Start with framing the content as answering a common question you receive from your customers. Say, “one of the most common questions I get is…”

Don’t pitch them. Just get right into the content. Don’t talk about how if they go to your site they’ll get access to a free ebook that teaches them how to xyz – just answer that question.

3. CTA for subscribing to the youtube channel and to visit the site for more information. Say, “If you found this video useful, subscribe by clicking the orange button above. And visit [yourdomain.com] for more presentations showing how to [what you teach them].”

That’s it.

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