#075: Dorie Clark on How to Capitalize on Your Unique Perspective and Knowledge

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia. Hey there. Thank you for joining me for episode 75 of the High Income Business Writing Podcast. My name is Ed Gandia and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to take their writing businesses to the six figure level or the part time equivalent. As a quick reminder, you can find detailed shown us for this episode by going to b2b launcher.com forward/episode75. You know, I think many of us believe that talent and hard work are really the keys to success in business. And as competition stiffens, what tends to happen is that it's more difficult for clients to distinguish one freelancer from another. So hard work alone and just sheer talent is no longer enough. Especially today. In fact, if you want to get ahead, you need more than that. You need a different strategy. And specifically, you need to capitalize and you need to communicate your unique perspective and knowledge. You need to capitalize on that, and you have to be able to communicate that clearly to your target audience. And that's what today's episode is all about. My guest is Dory Clark. Clark and Dori is the author of two business books. She's also a consultant and a speaker. She's got a really interesting background. She's worked as a journalist. She's been a spokesperson for gubernatorial and presidential candidates and an executive director of a nonprofit. And in this interview, she explains why hard work and talent are just no longer enough and how you can position yourself as a trusted expert to set yourself apart in today's competitive environment, even if you don't quite feel like an expert in your fields. So for those of you who are starting out or don't quite feel that you've achieved that level, that expert level, make sure to check this out because she's got some really valuable ideas and insights here for you. So with that, enjoy the interview. Hey, Dorie, welcome to the show. It's so great to have you here, Ed.

Thank you. Good to talk to you.

So why don't we start by sharing a little bit about you. I want folks to understand where you're coming from with this material. I think it's really important tell us about what you do today, a little bit about your background, because you have very interesting background.

Yeah. Thank you very much. So today I'm an author of a couple of business books. One is called Reinventing youg, which came out in 2013 from Harvard Business Review Press. My new book is called Stand how to find you'd breakthrough idea and build a following around it. And so I'm really excited to be sharing some of those ideas with your audience. My background before writing these books and starting my career as a consultant and speaker was that I actually started out as a professional journalist. I lost my job in one of the early rounds of layoffs and had to reinvent myself. And so I did a lot of different things. I was a spokesperson on a gubernatorial race and a presidential race. I was the executive director of a nonprofit. And then finally, nine years ago, started my own business. But ultimately, I too am a freelancer and entrepreneur. And I know that what's really critical for all of us is to find different ways to stand out and make sure other people really understand what we have to bring to the table.

Yeah, and it sounds like if you came from the world of journalism, you'll also understand kind of the dynamics, right, of that world. And a lot of people in this audience have come from that world. So it seems like you've really, you've seen a lot of what's going on. I think you can relate to this audience really well. And so you talk about the fact that, look, today it's not. Talent is not enough, you know, and hard work is not enough. And all those things that you've been told you need to really emphasize and work on, that's not going to cut it today. So tell us more about that. I mean, it's really, if I'm a wonderful writer and I work really, really hard. Are you saying that, hey, you know, that's great, but that's just kind of a starting point in a lot of.

Ways, I am, because, you know, ultimately, I think we all recognize that the world is getting noisier. I mean, there is a lot of competition out there. It seems like everybody has a blog. Everybody's, you know, on Twitter, everybody's trying to get heard. And with more and more people going freelance, in fact, a well known Intuit study says that by the year 2020, nearly 40% of the American workforce is going to be freelancer contractors. There's a lot of competition out there. And so the real question is, is how do you make sure you get noticed for it? I mean, doing good work, of course we know that's essential. We know that if you are great, word of mouth will happen to a certain extent. But the truth is, people are not paying that close attention to you. And oftentimes, unless someone literally says, do you know any good copywriters who have you got for me? Which is fairly rare, that people are going to literally be asking that. It's hard to get word of mouth transmission going. So we have to get clear. This is our responsibility, not other people's responsibility. We've got to get clear about what's different about us, what's particularly good or unique about us, and give people reasons to be talking about us and saying, I have to have him, I have to have her.

So let's talk about some of those reasons. And what are clients looking for? I mean, right, with all this noise, the needs are still the same, but there are more people out there who are just yammering and saying, pick me, pick me, pick me, look at me. What are clients really looking for?

Well, you know, Ed, what I think clients are looking for is certainty. And what I mean by that is that when they're hiring a copywriter, it's a little bit of a risky situation, right? They're entrusting their brand to you. They need somebody to create copy and that is going ultimately to result in sales. They want a sort of general brand voice to be conveyed and they want people to be so intrigued, so interested, so moved that the people say, you know, yes, I'm going to click on that, yes, I'm going to investigate that further. Yes, I'm even going to buy that. And if you, if they make a wrong mistake, if they choose incorrectly, there's a lot at stake. I mean, if you think about it from the buyer's perspective, if they really screw up, they might get fired. If they screw up a little bit, well, they're not going to make as much money as they thought. The sales numbers are going to go down, they're going to get castigated. So there's a lot at stake. So if you as a copywriter can convey to people, you know what, this is a safe choice. I am the safe choice. That's actually really powerful. And what makes somebody a safe choice? It is creating a reputation as an expert. It is creating a reputation as the go to person. So that it's basically the equivalent, you know, 30 years ago of someone, you know, like a stockbroker recommending IBM stock. You never get fired for recommending IBM.

Yeah, yeah. And how do you do that? I mean, so that's, I think, the big question, right? It's, I can't just say, look, I'm the safe choice, right? This is a show me, don't tell me situation. So for if you're trying to communicate that, how do you do it in a way that's going to be believable and it's going to really resonate with the potential client.

Yeah, absolutely. So really the key way to do this is to build up this reputation in the marketplace. As you say, it's not what you say about yourself. It is what the buyer can see with their own eyes and what they are hearing from other people. And so I talk about this a bit in my first book, Reinventing youg, and also in my, in my new book, stand out, that basically it's a three step process, right? So the first step is getting clear on what your current brand is. Like, what are you actually known for? And this is, this is something that I think a lot of us assume we know and assume we understand, but we have a lot of blind spots. And so one quick exercise that I suggest to people is over the course of the next week, do what I call the three word exercise, which is where you go to a kind of cross section of people, let's say, you know, friends, colleagues, maybe a client or two, and ask them, if you could only describe me in three words, what would they be? And, you know, it's not a hard ask. It takes a minute or two for someone to answer you, but it's very illuminating because you're going to begin to get a quick cross section of what people view as most interesting or most different about you. That's a good starting place because you can either say, yeah, that's great, you know, that's exactly what I want to be known for. Or if it's not what you want to be known for, it gives you the evidence that you need to figure out how you can pivot and move towards something. So the first stage is getting to know who you are. Now the second step is really coming up with this vision of how do you want to be known? Maybe you want to be best known for a ton of experience in a particular industry vertical, or maybe you want to be known as the really, you know, super creative copywriter. Or, you know, maybe you want to be known as, you know, the guy who can always drive sales, you know, whatever the sort of niche is that you want to play in. And so it's, it's thinking through, all right, how do I get from, from here to there? You know, maybe it's, it's, you know, spending more time in certain, you know, personal skills development. Maybe it's, it's increasing your networking in a certain industry so you can get hired for more gigs in that industry. And then the Final step, the third step is what I call living out your brand. And this basically goes to the fact that a lot of people think that your personal brand is a synonym for your elevator pitch. Oh, yeah, it's what you say about yourself. But the truth is, what you say about yourself is just the tiniest fraction of your personal brand. Ultimately, your brand is the totality of everything that people perceive about you. And so you have to do a total inventory. It's when people Google you, what do they see out there about you? It's who do you hang out with? You know, what's your. Who are your friends? What's your social network? Are there professional associations you're involved in? What kind of leadership roles do you take on when you're creating content? I mean, not for clients, but for you, when you're creating your own sort of intellectual property, blogging or whatever, what types of things are you writing about? That is what creates the sum total of your brand. And that's something that. That a lot of people are not paying as close attention to as they need to.

So let's say that you really like what you heard back from the people in your network with that three. By the way, I love that three word exercise. I'll have to steal that. I'll give you full credit. All right, so you're getting some great stuff, and some of it, let's say most of it resonates. However, you have this higher vision. And let's just say that a lot of people's responses are very tactical. But you've been in that world for a long time and you're kind of edging out of that, and you really want to get to a more strategic level in your work. And, you know, you can do it. You've already been experimenting with it with some clients. So that's kind of the vision. And there's a big gap. You know, how do you reinvent yourself, especially when it comes to communicating your value on your website and in conversations, when there's this huge gap?

Yeah, yeah. It's an important question, and it's actually, it's one that I've gone through myself. I mean, in the early days of my business, you know, I was glad to get work, doing whatever. You know, it's. So I would do all kinds of things, you know, many of them involving copywriting for, you know, if the National Park Service needed a brochure about xyz, I would write the brochure or I would write speeches or, you know, for executives that they were going to be delivering at banquets or things like that. And that was great. But ultimately I also wanted to make a shift into more strategic domains and go into more marketing strategy stuff. And so the way that I personally did this, and in reinventing you in particular, I talk a lot about best practices around this, is that first of all, you need to do a pretty thorough inventory of how you're presenting yourself. Because if you've been presenting yourself a certain way for a period of time, there's going to be things that you're not even thinking about, that it's going to be a paper trail on the web. And so of course you're probably thinking, okay, well, my LinkedIn profile, maybe the bio on my website, but literally you want to do a search or even better, pay somebody, pay some college student 10 or $15 an hour to just spend a couple of hours trawling online looking for stuff, looking for places where you have somehow represented yourself or whatever, and just do an inventory and make sure that in all the places where you're able to change your bio and update it, to tweak the language and make it a little bit more focused on strategy or the areas that you want to do that, that you're presenting a very cohesive picture, the next thing that you want to do is you want to start flooding the channels with information about this new identity of yours. So if you want to be doing more, let's say, marketing strategy or whatever, you want to immediately demonstrate expertise by creating an incontrovertible flood of evidence showing that you know about this. And so just creating a lot of blogs, maybe interviewing other people who are experts in the industry, but getting it associated in people's minds that, oh, this is the kind of stuff that Dory does. A third thing that you want to do is actually practice your conversations. Because I think unless we do that, unless we literally have run throughs, it can be very hard. And in the moment, you can get tongue tied when you're talking to people, when you know they're at the cocktail party and they say, well, tell me about what you do. And you're not really sure what words to use or how to position it, so you want to practice it so that you get very comfortable. And then the fourth and final thing that I'll mention, Ed, is that you have to understand that when you're making a pivot in your business, sometimes, you know, it's painful, but you can't always bring your clients along with you. Some clients are going to have pigeonholed you and they are going to resist viewing you in this new capacity. They're going to always think of you in the old way. And so if you really want to make a break, sometimes that involves being strong enough to say, okay, I don't really want to do work like this beyond a certain point. So, you know, you want to handle the relationship well, so you maybe want to give them a fair amount of notice, but you can let them know, you know, after. After June 30th of this year, I'm no longer going to be accepting these kinds of assignments. If you'd like to work together, I'd be glad to work with you on xyz. If not, we can part as friends and I'll refer you to somebody else.

I think it's. I always tell people, look, if you want to grow, it's going to require you to get out of your comfort zone. In fact, if you feel very comfortable, even if you're earning what you want to earn, you're not growing. So I think I couldn't agree more with you on. It's going to feel uncomfortable.

Yeah, for sure.

So one of the things you mentioned in terms of kind of get new information out there and start positioning yourself as somewhat of an expert in the field that you're trying to do more work in or a thought leader in that area, a lot of people have trouble with that. They say, well, yeah, but I haven't done a lot there. You know, it's something I'm very interested in, but I'm not. I don't have the track record yet. So they don't see themselves as a trusted expert or a thought leader. And in, in that category, even though they're perfectly capable of doing it, what advice would you have for somebody like that?

Yeah, so. So I, I think it's true that a lot of people have some hesitations about stepping forward and really, you know, saying, yes, I'm an expert. And, you know, to a certain extent, that's a laudable impulse because, you know, a fair number of the people who are willing to say, yes, I am an expert, you know, it's. It's not a great thing because some of them may be overstating their capabilities. So there's virtue in modesty.