Ch. 11: Extraordinary Focus Leads to Success

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Transcript

0:40

Hello, and welcome to the market. Your message show. I'm your host, Jonathan Milligan and author of the book. Your message matters, how to rise above the noise and get paid for what you know. And yes, if you're following along live, I am a couple of weeks behind tackling the next chapter in our book club. But hopefully you think I've got a good reason. And the reason is I just celebrated my 25th wedding anniversary, married to my wife. Charity. So we took some time off. And I hope you'll forgive me for a little bit of the absence. But I want to make sure that I follow through and finish going through this book together. If you're just now catching the episode for the first time. Go back a few weeks later and you'll find it listed chapter at a time. Go all the way back to the introduction. And you can use my book. Has a textbook and go through it one chapter at a time. And hopefully this will help you to implement it. Hopefully it'll help you to take more action. And by the way, if you don't have a copy of the book, you can actually get a free copy. All you gotta do is pay for the shipping and handling. So you go to your message matters. book.com. Your message matters. book.com. All you got to pay is 4 95 shipping and handling, and we'll send you out your own copy of the book. So today we're going to dive into chapter 11. Extraordinary focus leads to success. And I kick off the chapter with a story and I'm going to actually go ahead and read this story to you. I'm starting on page 1 49 in the book. 44 year old Dean Potter was about to attempt the impossible. It was April of 2012. And before him stood. 44 yards of rope that stretched over China's initially grand canyon. The floor of the canyon was more than a mile beneath him. So he's up there. To complicate matters. Dean, wasn't your typical tight rope Walker. Rather his preferred style was slack line walking. Slack line is considered more challenging than tight rope. Because the line is not completely taught. And is more susceptible to bouncing something you don't want to experience when you're a mile. Off the ground. On top of that, a slackline Walker makes his crossing without the aid of a safety leash or balancing pole. But Dean Potter successfully made his crossing in just under two minutes. What allowed Dean to make the successful crossing is the same thing we can employ in our business. Extraordinary focus. So that's what this chapter is all about. Is how can we as content creators, whether you're blogging, podcasting, doing YouTube videos, if you're trying to build an audience online with a message. There are a lot of distractions. Isn't there. There's new softwares to look at new tools, new marketing strategies. I got to learn this. I got to learn that right, Jonathan. And the truth is there's really only four things. I call them for focus habits. That you need to have to be successful. And the four focusing habits are. Create. Capture. Compile. In connect. Now. The good news is if you'll stick with me through the podcast over the next four episodes, and we're going to do a deep dive into each of those four habits. So you'll really understand how to implement them in your business and grow your audience. But I want to start by giving you an illustration. I like illustrations. I'm a former high school teacher. I think illustrations help let there like window that helps let the light in. And so I want you to picture one of those old fashioned hourglasses. You remember those with the grains of sand inside. Now, I want you to picture that the hourglass we're talking about is open at the top. And as we pour sand into the hourglass, Those little specks of sand represent your audience coming into your world. Now each part of this hourglass funnel. Serves a purpose. What are they. First there's the create habit. Now the very top of our hour glass is wide and it represents how people come into our area of influence. The create habit is all about providing free, valuable content in the form of text, audio, and video. I want you to think about this? Think about the influencers that you follow, the people that you follow online or on social media. You probably didn't realize it, but your journey. I didn't start by purchasing something. It more than likely started because you watched a really good video or you listened to a really cool podcast or you read some of their content. And the point is this. Create value first. Value comes before trust. And if you skip over that step, you miss an opportunity, both trust and authority with your audience. And I think that's hugely important. So the very top half. Of that hourglass funnel. Is our content. It, by the way, it's actually what you're doing right now. You're listening to this podcast. And hopefully this podcast brings so much value to you. That it builds trust that you can trust what I'm saying to be true. That's what we have to do, but I'm surprised at how many coaches course creators out there. Just make their course. They try to just run Facebook ads or they just try to go promote themselves and it doesn't work. Why not? Because there's a difference. Like we talked about a couple chapters ago, there's a difference between demonstrating your expertise. And actually displaying it. Most people just display it. Here's my credentials. Let me help you. We demonstrate it through our valuable content that we create. So that's habit. Number one, create habit. Habit number two. The capture habit. Now the middle of the hourglass is narrow. And this represents the skill of building your list. Now there's a variety of ways to do this, and we're actually going to dive into it in a couple episodes. We're going to really do a deep dive in how you can build and grow that email list. But the idea is capture the traffic that the people who. You have been able to build value with and you've grabbed their attention. We want to capture them. Onto an email list. That's super important. And by the way, Don't build your empire on rented land. There's a lot of people will be talking about this. There's a lot of people out there who build their following on social media. And what happened. Some of them, the social media account got shut down. Some of them. This whole social media site got shut down. In the case of vine, remember vine back in the day. And so we don't want to be building our audience or our empire on rented land. A email list is something you own. This is really important. I was lucky to have a mentor early on. That's a Jonathon, when it comes to an online business. There's only two things you can take with you to the grave. Your reputation. And your email list. And boy, I got the message. I need to treat people well, don't burn bridges. And I also need to value an email list. And boy has that advice. Been true for me. So that's number two, the skinny part of our hourglass funnel is the capture habit. Habit number three is the compile habit. So once we've built a relationship with our leads. We can now introduce them to our products and services. And by the way, it's so much easier to. To tell people about your products and services. If you have them on an email list. Because you have a way to continue the relationship. On an ongoing basis. And that's super important. We're going to be spending a whole episode on the compile habit. There's over 12 different income streams that you can create as a messenger in a message based business. So stay tuned for that. And then we're going to go way back to the top of the hourglass outside of the hourglass hovering above it is the connect habit. So once you have the top of the funnel, which is the content that creates value, and you have the middle of the funnel, it's just leads and the bottom of the funnel, which is ways to sell your knowledge and advice. It's time to pour traffic, pour more grains of sand into your business, into your hourglass. So again, picture the top of the funnel with no lid. And the grains of sand represent people. And the connect habit is all about getting that new traffic. Now that traffic can, there's really three types of traffic that I believe is out there. It's free. It's paid in its partner. Free traffic again, that might be social media. It might be referrals. It it could mean obviously blogging. If people are searching the web and finding you or they're searching. Four podcasts. Somehow you found me on this podcast, or they're searching YouTube and they find you on YouTube. That is ways that you can have free traffic paid traffic is like Facebook ads and then there's partner traffic. Which is partnering up with other influencers. And allowing them to promote you again, we'll spend an entire episode. On that. This is the four habits. If you are doing things that don't fall under one of these four. You need to stop it. Just decide. It's not worth it. You need to ask yourself, does this help support the create habit? The capture habit. The compile habit. Or the connect habit. That is where you want to spend your time. So guess what tweaking your website. Doesn't count. Unless the tweak you're making is going to help you get more email subscribers. But tweaking the website and the design is not one of the four habits. Now, let me leave you with a statement that I say over and over again that are really drive home. The whole point of today's episode and the whole point of chapter 11. And it's this. Value comes before trust. Trust comes before attention. Attention comes before profits. And here's the point I'm going to unpack each of these for just a minute. The whole point is most of us want to go right to the end of that statement, profits. But value, trust and attention have to come first. How do we create value? Our free content. How do we build trust? Or we build trust from obviously valuable content people trust us enough to get on our email list and we continue to build that trust with more value. Which creates a tension. Where people actually pay attention to us when our email shows up in their inbox, because they associate our name with value and trust. It's a simple business, 1 0 1, but it's easy for us to skip over it. And if you have value, trust and attention, you can't help. But get profits. Unless you're just not creating things for sale, which is another problem altogether. And so that is all for chapter 11 in the next chapter, we're going to dive into the create habit. How do you get your message out to the masses? What are some of my favorite stories? Favorite examples, favorite methods around the idea of creating that free value. All right. That is it for this episode. I hope you enjoyed it again. If you do not have a copy of the book. We go way more in depth with examples. Than what I'm covering here. I'm just hitting the highlights with you. And try to unpack certain parts of it that I think are important. But if you want a copy of the book, just go to your message matters. book.com. Your message matters. book.com and we'll send you out a free copy. All you got to pay is$4 95 cents. For the shipping and handling. All right, that's it for this episode. Let me know what you'd like for me to cover in future episodes. And also take a moment in like share, subscribe, or review our show. And until next time, never forget your message matters.