Get People Talking About Your BUSINESS | 6 Minute Guide

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm answering a question from one of my readers, Leo, who's a YouTube viewer. Love you YouTube guys, thank you for writing. His question is about selling yourself. So he wrote in, "Hi, your videos are so helpful, especially for those who are new when it comes to business." "Can you make a video on how to approach people? Like how you make them excited about your business or recruit them? Thank you so much again." So thanks for the question, Leo. I'm gonna break that into two components. Oh, I just lost it. There we go. The fingers are a little fidgety here. So I'm gonna break it into two components. First is going up and approaching people and how to get people to know about your business, and the second is how to get them excited about it. The first, in terms of going up and approaching people, I think it depends on your personality. Me personally, I consider myself more of a marketer than a salesperson. If I go up at a networking event or a business event, I'm usually not in everybody's face saying, "Hi, here's what I do. You gotta come sign up with me and go check out my website." I'm generally a little more introverted, a little more shy, I guess. I like talking to people, but I'm not a heavy promoter, not a heavy salesperson, I guess. And so the strategy that I've used is more of a pull strategy. So instead of going out and trying to recruit people and talk to people I try to have people come and find me, and I find that I'm a lot better at being able to get people interested in what I'm doing once they are coming to me. And so I think a lot of entrepreneurs are probably like that, but there are others who are more outgoing and, you know, love going out and just promoting themselves and handing out business cards. So how I do things is, so, you know, I didn't have a great time sales, doing sales calls or cold calling people, or I never went door-to-door or anything like that, but I wouldn't be really good at that. So how I do things is I try to create content that is interesting for my target audience and I'll market it. So I have the website, I have my YouTube videos, I have Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook and all those channels to help market my material. So it starts with creating interesting things that your target audience would be interested in, and showcasing yourself as an expert. And if you're an entrepreneur, you should be an expert at what you're doing, right? Whatever product or service you're trying to sell, you should have a story that you can tell, and you should be one of the best in the world at what you do. And combining your various passions into one business is a great way to be able to do it, 'cause that's uniquely you, and something nobody else can copy or replicate. So you wanna be pushing out that content, and marketing it, and showing that it's value-add for your target audience, and people will hopefully find it. You can create partnerships to get that content out there, but that's the strategy I've always used. And so making videos like this or speaking at conferences, like I'll really go to an event unless I'm speaking at it. A lot of it is due to time. I don't have a lot of time available to go out and do these things, but when I go to an event and I'm a speaker, I find a lot of people come up to me and ask me questions and we end up finding new business opportunities or new connections, where if I'm an attendee, I'm not the guy who's going around shaking everybody's hand and introducing myself and, you know, trying to make business happen. Again, I try to, from my own personality, I'm not that kind of guy, and so I try to leverage my strengths and not play to my weaknesses. And so I'll try to be the speaker and get people to come to me. So a lot of my business is around getting people to find me and marketing to them, and then once we start a discussion, It's easy to move forward from there. So that's how I get people interested in, I guess, finding out about me. The second part was how to get them excited about your business. And I think the real thing that comes through is your own excitement. You know, I love entrepreneurship. I love helping entrepreneurs. When I'm sitting in front of an entrepreneur, there's an energy that I get. I want to help them out. I want to find ways to grow their business. Even talking about it now, I'm getting excited. That's what I love doing. And so if you're excited about whatever business you have, that's going to come through and other people will get excited. They'll catch your fever. If you're just going through your pitch and, you know, some people come and I was pitched recently with this guy, had a kind of like a PowerPoint, but he had it written down. So instead of using a computer, he brought two binders and he went through one and I went through one. It was just boring because he's just reading his slides. That's not great. Like, that's not showing passion. Maybe great information, great value, maybe great ideas in there for me, but I wanna see your passion and excitement. And it's not so much what you say, it's how you say it. And if people genuinely sense that you're excited about this opportunity, then they'll get more excited as well. So it really starts with you having something that you are genuinely excited about. So when you're starting a business, you wanna build it around something you are passionate about, something that you can wake up and get going every morning, and not maybe every morning because I know it can be hard, but almost every morning you wake up excited to go and do what you're doing, that passion will come through and other people will want to join with you on whatever you're passionate about. If you're just doing it to make money or you're just going through the motions and you're not really excited, if you don't personally use your product or service and you can't tell a personal story about why you started it or why you're involved in the business, then it's going to be a lot harder to get people excited about it even if you have the best case studies in the world. So hopefully that helped. Maybe a little bit different about how I approach it compared to others, but hopefully there's some information there that can help you with your business. So thanks for the question. For those of you watching, if you liked it, please give it a thumbs up. I love seeing them come in. And if you have a question about this video or question about your own company or challenge that you're facing, feel free to leave in the comment section below. I always read those. I love seeing them come in. So thank you, and I'll see you on the next episode.