Ch. 11: Awareness: How Will I Attract Them?

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Hello, and welcome to the market. Your message show. I'm your host, Jonathan Milligan author of several books. The most recent discover your message. And this is a book that follows a 14 day process to uncover your calling. And find your niche as a writer, coach, or speaker. And currently we are in a book club series for this book. This is book one. I have a seven book series that I in the process of creating and writing. Over the next 18 months. In fact, book two is literally a month away from coming out. And we'll talk more about that on future episodes. But book two is launch your platform. So once you discover your message, how do you launch your platform? What do you need to do? What do you need to have in place so that you can attract your first 1000 targeted? Visitors. So just know that's coming and you're going to hear more about that in the days ahead. But today I want to jump into chapter 11 or day 11. And this is the beginning. Of three questions that we're going to cover over the next three weeks. To wrap up our journey of the discovery, your message process. Now we've gone on quite a journey. So just to catch you up. If you remember from day one, I talked about the night, your message framework in the entire book helps you. Two. Uncover or discover three primary things, your purpose, which is what is your unique gifts? Your people, who do you want to help? And your passions. What problem are you passionate about solving for the next two to five years? Now, if you don't have a copy of the book, I would encourage you to go grab one. You can actually go to platform growth books.com. Platform growth books.com and you can find it at all the different retailers it's available in Kindle paperback and audio book. And as of this week, I have made the Kindle version. Or the ebook version, depending on where you pick it up at. Completely free. I want everyone to get a copy of this book to help you get started. Whether you go to Amazon, it's free. Whether you go to Barnes and Nobles it's free or anywhere else. That you might be picking up your eBooks. The ebook is completely free. Go grab a copy. All right, so let's dive in to day 11. This is the first of three questions. Let me go ahead and set up the three questions. So that you will understand. The big picture here. So whenever I'm coaching people in my online business insider program, they at times can get overwhelmed. All of us do right. There's just all of the things we think we should be doing. Upsells down sells funnels, memberships, books, courses. And man, it just doesn't end social media. Oh, you need to be running Facebook ads. And it just seemed like it never ends, but where should I put my attention? And this is what I always bring my clients back to. You only need to be able to execute three things very well. To have a successful business online. Number one is awareness. How are people going to find out about you? Number two. Is engagement. How are you going to build that relationship? We'll talk about that next week. And then finally is conversion. How are you going to actually make money with us? And that's what we'll talk about two weeks from now. So today I want to attack. The awareness question and the way I phrased it on chapter 11 is how will I attract them? C, this is, I believe one of the missing pieces for a lot of writers, coaches, and speakers. And here's why. Because what often happens is we put together a website. And then we say, now, what. We don't know what to do. So now I've got to go promote myself. Do I just go on social media and tell people, Hey. You can get coaching for me or Hey visit my site and we just don't. Know what to do. But here's the beautiful thing. And this is what made EV everything made sense. Once I really understood this. Instead of trying to just promote myself. It was much easier to promote content. It was much easier to point people to a blog. I had written. Or a podcast I had recorded. Or a helpful YouTube video where I showed a demo of how I use something. And isn't that easier? Isn't that much easier. I don't know about you, but it just is. It just wears me out if I have to promote myself, but promoting helpful content, that's free. That's easy to do. And that's what we're talking about in this chapter. How will you attract them now? You don't have to do blogging and podcasting and YouTube and all of the other things. You can start off with just one. Now today I do blogging. I do podcasting. I do YouTube videos, but I didn't start there, especially when this was just a side thing. The very beginning for me, I did blogging. And then I, after a couple of years, leveraged into podcasting. And after a couple of years after that got into YouTube. And so I want you to think about just picking one. So let's talk about these first blogging. This is about writing your way to your audience. What I love about blogging in the reason why it's in a great awareness tool. Is because the blog that you write, the blog post, does it just live in the dark corners of your website? They actually get indexed in Google. And people's first introduction to you. Could be something you wrote, not your homepage. Every day for years. People come across to me. For the first time. From an article that I wrote. Not to my homepage. Because they're searching on Google. For answers. And if you write blog posts that answered the common questions that the audience that you're trying to reach is asking. People will find you. So there's lots of good benefits of blogging. But let me just give you some statistics. Websites that have active blogs have 434% more index pages. Which greatly improves search engine visibility. Okay. What does that mean in practical terms? If all you have is a brochure website, that's basically. Your home page, a contact page, your services page. And that's it. You only have three pages that could be indexed in Google. But the reason. Y I get more traffic to my sites is because for years I've been blogging. So on my blogging, your passion blog, there's probably close to 300 or more. Blog post. Those are all 300 more pages than probably the average person has, who wants to be a coach because all they've done is set up a brochure website. So it is a powerful tool over time. On average companies that blog receive 97% more inbound links and increased website traffic. And potential for new readers. Here's the other thing about blogging? Other people who are blogging on similar topics. We'll use your articles in linked to them. Which in turn makes all of your articles right. Better. And then finally, 82% of marketers who blog daily. Acquired a customer using their blog. Versus only 57% of those who blog monthly. So in conclusion, starting a blog is great for us thought leaders and influencers. All right, let's talk about podcasting. This is engaging your audience with your voice. So there's lots of good reasons to podcast if you don't want to be on video, but let's say you love to talk or maybe writing's difficult for you, but if you have a topic to share. All of your ideas bubble out of you. When you hit record and you're just having a conversation like I'm having right now with you. And maybe that's just seems more authentic and more natural for you. Great. What's great about podcasting. Is that it can build a lot of trust with your audience, more powerful than words, even though I'm a fan of writing. Because think about it. It's a very intimate form of communication. Right now, as you're listening to this, you might have. Air buds. Your air buds. Not air bud. The my kids used to watch the earbud movie. But earbuds or headphones, and think about that. It's just you and I having a conversation. And when you're podcasting, Don't podcast to a crowd podcast, a one person. Because it's an intimate form. Of communication. It also gives you a chance to showcase your coaching skills. So you could bring other guests onto your show. You could coach people. In your sphere of influence, you could interview experts which can expand your reach. It's one of the easiest networking tools. When I first got into podcasting was just inviting people that I wanted to network with. To come be a guest on my show. Why is that? Because you're having conversation before you record. And you get to have conversation after, and you've made a meaningful connection. I also love that podcasting is on demand. So while you're listening to this, I could be making dinner with my wife. I could be. Playing with my dog in the backyard. I could be traveling. I could be doing a lot of different things, but my influence is able to scale. Because podcasting can be accessed at any time. Let me give you a couple of statistics on podcasting. And I covered this in the book. You can go check them out. Page 96. 75% of Americans are familiar with the term podcasting and 50% have listened to a podcast. So it's got amazing reach. 37% of Americans have listened to a podcast in the last month. And around 24% have listened to one in the past week. Podcast listeners on average, subscribed to seven different shows and listened to more than six hours of podcast every week. That's incredible. And so podcasting is a great opportunity. Let me cover one more in today's episode and that's YouTube. This is making a connection with video. Now, maybe for you, you want to really connect with people via video and our video can have all kinds of styles. It can just have a talking head video where it's just you sharing helpful tips. It can be little bit more engaging and interactive where you're sharing your screen. You're demoing how to use a software or a tool, or maybe you're riding on your iPad and making it more visual. But YouTube has a huge audience and there's still a huge opportunity. With YouTube. So you have a wider audience. You could have greater impact. With what you're doing, you can even repurpose old podcast or a blog post and turn them in. To videos. So you can also, by the way, monetize it. Once you reach the criteria, you can turn on the ad. Portion of it and you can actually earn money from your videos. Every single month as ads play on your video. Let's talk about some interesting statistics. And why you might want to consider YouTube. First YouTube has over 2 billion, monthly logged in users who watch videos. So YouTube is actually the number two search engine behind Chrome, Google. As you can see I'm having just a regular conversation with you. I personally don't want to sit here and edit out every little mistake I make. Because we're just having conversation. It's different. If I was recording the audio book, but to me, podcasting is different. Think about that. Number two search engine. I've used it a ton. I've used it for things where I wasn't finding my answer or what I was looking for on Google. So I hopped over to YouTube to see if maybe somebody covered it in a video. Users on YouTube. They watch over a billion hours of video every day. Incredible. It's a lot of watch time. And finally, 70% of all YouTube watch time. Is generated by the platforms, recommendation algorithm. What that does. To make it simple and practical. Is it matches users with interests. So if you're creating content that's for a specific audience, They might be watching a video from a different channel, but if they're trying to figure out for example, how to write a Kindle book. And you have videos that talk about that sort of thing. Then it makes it easier for people to find you. So we want to niche our videos. All right, so there's YouTube. So here's a little exercise and a cover this in the book on page 100. Now it's time to decide. What you're going to do. How will you attract your audience? You need some type of an awareness tool. So are you going to launch a blog? Is it going to be a podcast? Or is it going to be a YouTube channel? To give you a couple pro tips. I'm gonna leave you with two tips here. Number one. Which of the three. Matches up to your natural strengths. In other words, If you love to write. Blog makes sense. If you love to speak. A podcast makes sense. If you love to teach. Maybe YouTube makes sense because you're teaching, demoing, showing how to do things. So that's point number one point number two is. What is your audience that you want to reach? What are they consuming? So for example, and I've used this example in the past. If I was a kettlebell fitness expert. I probably would not start a podcast. Because more than likely they're either going to be consuming content via a blog. Which may have embedded videos or step-by-step instructions and photos, or a YouTube channel where they're actually watching my recommendation. Or recommendations on exercises. Does that make sense? So we want to think about the audience. Do they consume content? And when we find one that is. Matches are. Desires. And. Matches what our audience wants to consume. That's where the magic happens. So there you go. Building awareness is essential for sharing your message and choosing the right platform can greatly impact your success. And as we've talked about, blogging is a timeless and powerful platform to share your message through writing. Podcasting provides an intimate connection by allowing your audience to engage with your voice, your unique insights. And it allows you to become a respected voice in your niche. And then YouTube. Delivers that rich engaging experience by combining visual auditory and emotional elements, creating a memorable connection with your viewers. All right. In the next episode, we're going to talk about engagement and this is a really important lesson on how I capture them. You need to have a way of building an email list because that is where the energy and lifeblood of a message based business lives. The ability to communicate and get attention at any time. We'll talk about that in the next episode. Again, if you don't have your book of the discover your message book. Then go to platform or growth books.com. Platform growth books. Dot com or the link is in the show notes until next time. Never forget your message matters.