Marketing Advisor, Mentor, & Educator
Kevin C. Whelan
The other day, I mentioned how I was bullish on YouTube.
In painstakingly meta fashion, I decided to explain why in… a YouTube video.
Check it out here and subscribe to the channel if you’re into that kinda thing.
—kevin
P.S. Doors for the membership are open again for a limited time. Full details here.
I’ve been spending a lot of time on YouTube recently. It’s become my new go-to background music.
It’s therefore no coincidence that I also started a YouTube channel recently. I’m extremely bullish on the platform (I’ll talk about why another time soon).
Does that mean you should start one, too?
Naturally, it depends. It depends on whether your target market hangs out there, whether you have interests or skills in video creation, and largely… whether you’re a consumer of content on that platform.
I believe it’s hard to do or sell anything that you don’t personally consume yourself.
It’s hard to sell strategy and advice if you’ve never hired a coach or mentor, for example. Or sell online education if you haven’t invested in courses to further your own skills.
And similarly, it’s hard to create content for a platform if you’re not a consumer of it.
Being a consumer of a thing doesn’t guarantee you’ll succeed at creating it. But it is hard to succeed if you’re not.
A big part of creation is tapping into how it feels to be on the consumption side of the table. If you’ve never been hooked by an idea or channel, it’s hard to have the intuition and context necessary to successfully create around it.
As with all strategy, you’re best to focus on your natural advantages. Those advantages usually include your skills and interests, and just as importantly, the areas your clients care about as well.
If you’re not sure what kind of content to create or channels to be on, look at your consumption habits.
Maybe you’re constantly on LinkedIn or listeing to podcasts. Or you enjoy longform articles and books.
Check to see if your target audience also enjoys those formats, and if so, consider going deep on those first.
Creator/channel alignment is just as important as audience/channel alignment.
—kevin
P.S. In case you missed it, the doors to Mindshare are ope again. If build a more strategic, leveraged, and profitable solo marketing practice, this membership is for you. Enrol now: https://howtoselladvice.com/membership
I started Mindshare to help solo marketing professionals create more leveraged and profitable practices.
I do that by focusing on the business side of what we do. Things like sales and marketing, client delivery, and business model design.
Everything I teach is broken down into my Four M’s Framework:
The way I see it, there’s a path we all take. It goes something like this:
(This path is part of the Model portion of my framework, by the way).
One step on the journey is not better or worse than another. They’re all fun and challenging in their own ways.
But generally speaking, it gets more leveraged and profitable as you go further down the path from doing to teaching.
Some of us skip steps along this journey. We go from freelancing to advising, perhaps.
Some of us only do one thing and never try the other models. Some of us do a little of everything.
Regardless of where you are in your journey, Mindshare is a learning community for solo marketers seeking to build more profitable businesses that suit their own specific goals and preferences.
If you want to see what it’s all about, the doors are open again for a little while.
Inside you’ll find:
Running a solo marketing practice isn’t easy and is fraught with challenges.
If you want to get an inside track and see what it’s about, be sure to join while the doors are open again. They open and close only a few times per year.
Gotta run to take my family out to dinner on this unusually warm February Canadian evening.
See you in the next one!
—Kevin
P.S. I also recorded a video earlier on the risks and downfalls of niching your marketing practice. You can watch that here if you’re niche-curious.
Niching your marketing practice is a scary proposition.
Get it wrong and you might be on the fast lane to nowhere.
Get it right and you might be on the fast lane to riches.
Exciting, right?
I decided to share some thinking pulled from my niching training in the membership on 19 core benefits of niching.
Hopefully, it helps inspire you to make the transition.
Next week, I’ll also share the risks associated with niching so you have a little counterbalance and can go about it with your eyes open.
Head on over to YouTube and watch/subscribe to the channel!
—kevin
P.S. I’m re-opening the doors to Mindshare next week. I was hoping to this week but ran out of time. Be sure to join the waitlist for the inside track.
In an ideal world, everything would be perfect.
Your content would have no typos. And it would speak to your target market in precisely the right words to make them buy your services today.
Your messaging would make people feel seen like they’ve never been seen before. As if peering deep into their soul, they would finally feel heard and understood.
Your services would be like nothing offered anywhere else. You’d be in a category of one. Nobody would be able to do what you could do.
Your prices would be attractive yet highly profitable for both of you. Your offers would make clients feel like they’re stealing from you. And you’d still be laughing all the way to the bank.
Your ideal audience would line up to pay attention to every word you said. They’d wait with bated breath for your next piece of content so you can blow their mind yet again.
But the reality is, things will never be perfect.
Your messaging will be close but never perfect. Your services can and will be replaced with alternative options to get reasonably similar results.
Your prices will hurt some people and be cheap to others. Your profit per engagement will vary dramatically.
And your audience will grow one single person at a time.
This is how business works. It’s a discovery. And what works well today will stop working tomorrow.
That’s because the market is efficient. It’s competitive. It’s always innovating. Never sleeping.
You could either wait for that perfect idea to come along, or you can get to work trying to help people you seek to help.
One way works. The other leads nowhere.
Focus on doing over thinking. Helping over perfecting. Trying over waiting.
Then, give it some time. Let your ideas breathe and marinate. Run experiments. Evolve with what works.
The landscape is fluid so no point in standing still. Keep swimming.
—kevin
P.S. If this topic interests you, I uploaded an off-the-cuff video to YouTube last week on how to become more confident in publishing content. Check it out here (and subscribe to the channel!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwqjZ4eJ2T4&t
A funny thing happens when you get busy.
What happens exactly? You stop marketing yourself!
But that may not be a problem for the obvious reasons.
Sure, you will potentially have revenue problems 6 months down the line. The old feast and famine and whatnot.
But the real problem is simple: you have no idea what prices you could really be charging!
The only way you can do true price discovery around what the market is willing to bear is to become what Daniel Priestly calls oversubscribed.
When you have more people waiting to hire you than you can handle, you have the opportunity to create a waiting list.
And not just any waiting list. A waiting list at incrementally higher prices and/or lower labour intensity.
You can continue to increase your rates to prioritize the highest bidder or decrease the level of involvement you’ll offer for lower prices.
You now get to discover what prices the market can truly bear.
This only works if you have a degree of specialism or are perceived as having rare expertise.
Another benefit to being oversubscribed is that you can turn over those old clients who are paying your old prices.
They either pay more for your services, you offer less for the same amount, or you refer them somewhere else.
(Unless, of course, you enjoy working with them enough to leave money on the table, which is actually totally legit if that’s your preference).
The third benefit to being oversubscribed is it creates urgency and scarcity.
If people know there are 10 others lined up behind them ready to work with you (or even 2-3), there’s an incentive to commit to working with you sooner rather than later.
No more long-lasting sales cycles and negotiations. They commit, sign, pay the first invoice, and you get to them as soon as you can.
Or they risk waiting several more months to work with you.
I know this sounds great in theory to those of you still struggling to get a few clients to fill your roster. But it has to be your mindset going into this.
It’s not enough to finish the race. You have to run past the finish line. Aim for twice as many prospects as you can handle. Heck, 3x as many.
Sure, it takes energy and effort. A lot of it. And you will be tired.
But like all things, the more content (marketing) you produce the easier it becomes and the more your results will compound.
Don’t stop at the finish line—aim past it.
—kevin
P.S. If you’re interested, I’m opening the doors to Mindshare membership again next week.
If you’re on the waiting list, you’ll get a special bonus. If not, you’ll still hear about it with everyone else. 🙂
Get on the waiting list here: https://howtoselladvice.com/membership
In the beginning, you won’t know what to charge for your services.
In fact, you will charge too little. And that’s okay.
Why? Because people can tell you’re still figuring it out.
Someone out there will see your potential. But they will also know they’ll need to massage the process to get the final result they want.
And that’s actually a good thing in the beginning. It will force you to improve your methods and processes.
Over time, however, it will become apparent that you have done this before.
You have the chops. You get results. People are seeking you out.
When that happens, you’ll know it’s time to raise your rates. The market will tell you by hiring you even as you increase your prices.
You’ll also feel more confident.
You’ll know you’ve sold your services at similar prices before and did great work. It feels less scary to say a slightly bigger number than it does to jump to a new price that feels foreign to you.
I’m not saying don’t raise your rates past your comfort zone. It should sting a little if you’re doing it right.
But if you are new to the game or your roster is sitting empty, start low. Build up your roster. Let a few people make a big profit off your time.
From that base revenue—which gives you a degree of confidence in itself—you can begin to take bigger swings.
Your confidence will increase the less you need the additional money. People will sense your confidence and trust that with that, you’ll deliver on your promises. And they will usually be right.
So give it a try. Start low if you need to. There’s nothing wrong with selling a few for cheap while you build up your experience.
Just remember to raise your rates when you feel like it might be time.
(You’ll know when it’s time.)
—Kevin
P.S. I have been feeling a little generous this week and have given my workshop on How to Design Highly Profitable Productized Advisory Services away for free to a few people on X/Twitter (I’m @kevincwhelan btw).
If you want it, the link above will unlock it for you at no charge until I disable the coupon in a couple of days.
Get it while the gettin’ is good.
So, you want to publish content to attract clients.
Do you start a blog? Hammer out posts on LinkedIn every day? Start a YouTube channel? A podcast?
Good question. I get asked it a lot.
In fact, someone in Mindshare asked me about it again today, so I thought I’d break out my mental model for how I think about publishing and distributing content.
Here is a visual breakdown to look at while you listen to the latest How to Sell Advice podcast episode:
There’s a good chance your ideal buyers are doing things the conventional way.
Maybe it’s the safe way. Or the easy way. Or the convenient way.
As my friend Billy says in his Five Lightbulbs framework, it’s the status quo way of doing things.
And it’s not working super well.
This is your opportunity to highlight your unique advantages and position yourself as the better option.
Maybe they’re hiring full-service, do-it-all-for-anyone agencies who can’t deliver anything of quality on time.
You—the expert service provider who does one thing for one type of client—can actually deliver for them.
Your specialized way of doing things tells a story about why you are the better option.
Or maybe, you’re a freelancer and your buyers work with big agencies because of some perception of convenience and quality.
…but inevitably the work ends up getting delegated to juniors who have zero training and end up costing twice as much to fix later on.
Not very convenient.
Or maybe they are burning money on ads while effective content marketing is the real key to their success… if only they knew how.
Whatever the status quo is in your circles, that’s your chance to differentiate.
Compare yourself to the other “competitive” forces out there. Make an honest attempt at contrasting the strengths of each approach.
You might find this message is the one that finally gets heard and allows people to consider you as the better alternative.
Rage against the status quo. Make it the enemy.
—kevin
P.S. I might open the doors again to Mindshare soon. Get on the waiting list for the best way in when I do: https://howtoselladvice.com/membership
Your first meeting with a new client is critical. It sets the tone for the entire engagement.
On the one hand, they’re excited. On the other hand, they’re trepidatious.
They just committed to you. Buyer’s remorse is trying hard to reveal itself beneath the surface.
But you won’t let that feeling take over. You’ll start things off right and show them they’re in good hands.
Here’s how…
When people see you have an onboarding process, they begin to relax a little.
You’ve done this before. They’re not a test subject.
Things are under control.
Part of your onboarding process will be to explain how the engagement will work.
It will highlight the areas you’ll cover, when you plan to cover them, and how everything works.
Your client can relax a little more. You’re a professional. You have a process.
This is important.
You want people to enjoy the process of working together.
While you have serious work to do, you can also be relaxed, make jokes, and have a little fun.
After all, you have to be good to have fun while you work on serious things.
Having fun is a signal of competence.
You can’t ask too many good questions.
As Robby Fowler said in this week’s member training on personal branding, “Nobody ever got mad because you cared too much about their problems.”
You want to be thorough, ask clarifying questions, and above all else, make sure people feel heard.
If you have a questionnaire and they’ve completed it, review it together in detail.
The more thoroughly you understand the client’s situation, the more relaxed they’ll be.
Throughout the sales process, you’ll want to be setting expectations.
Now that the engagement is kicking off, you’ll really want to re-establish and align around your mutual expectations.
Things like what kind of results to expect, common challenges to be aware of, mutual responsibilities, and what to do if something isn’t working.
Make sure you’re on the same page about everything and your clients will trust you more.
If you don’t have a formal kick-off process, I highly recommend you get one.
The Advisor Operating System has kick-off templates, questionnaire templates, process documents, and so much more. If you’re a marketing consultant, you’ll want these.
When you have a process, everyone can feel relaxed and at ease. When you don’t, you’re only setting up your engagement for stress and micromanagement from the client.
And if you remember nothing else, remember this: make people feel heard and understood.
—kevin