Do you like to read? My coach told me once that a leader should be expanding his or her knowledge all the time and a good way of doing that is through reading books on your topic. I love to read and I’m always reading books about business and marketing for the solopreneur.
One book I read recently was Brendon Burchard’s “The Millionaire Messenger.” He wrote it a few years ago and I got so much out of it that I wanted to share some points he makes to inspire you to read his book.
One of his chapters gives his 10 steps to building an “empire.” These are very helpful to know if you are a new coach. But if you are a seasoned coach who needs more clients, it’s helpful to revisit these steps periodically to refine your marketing. I will do a series of blog posts on each of his 10 steps.
Step 1) Claim and Master your topic
This is basically to decide on your niche or specialty. A niche or specialty is something very specific and narrow.
When you are a creative entrepreneur, it’s hard to pin down one topic or specialty to offer—there are so many things you can do, right? So that’s the challenge—picking one. Now when I ask clients to pick one, I remind them that they can offer more services later to clients they already have, but they need to start out with one specialty for marketing purposes. One of my clients verified this concept when he told me that if he had stopped resisting the idea to pick a narrow niche sooner, he would be farther along by now. If there is lack of inspiration or ideas, then there are many things to do! One of them could be speaking to other business owners and CEOs, or even forming a business mastermind group where like-minded people can get together and have many insightful discussions. This could help develop a lot of knowledge and skills, also acting as fuel for your own business idea.
As Brendon says, “Trying to be everything under-the-sun right from the start is and always will be a bad strategy. If you are going to build a real empire, you need to pick one topic, learn it, master it, share it, become known for it, and make real money teaching it.”
So many entrepreneurs resist the idea of narrowing down your service to one specialty and that is too bad because that resistance is costing them. It’s just so much easier to market a specialty than something too general. If you can name the problem a group of people have and share how you can help solve that problem, you have a much better chance of reaching those people through your marketing.
