To get attention authentically, care more than others do... (2018)

To grow your business, to build your audience, you need to get people's attention, right? And how do people usually try to get your attention? They usually try to be maybe louder or more obvious on social media, or they try to be, you know, better looking or more clever, more brilliant, a better copywriter, a better video maker, whatever it may be, to try to get your attention. And marketing is so much about trying to get people's attention. Have you noticed that when you, when you're learning marketing so how to get people's attention, how to grab their attention. I've always, it's always not quite sat right with me. And I think there are a couple reasons for that. One is grabbing people's attention, getting their attention is essentially a bit of a kind of aggressive move. It's an, it's an aggressive thing to do. But secondly, it's a, it's a very. Well, you could say it's, it's coming from ego or coming from insecurity. That is how most marketing is done. And that's how most of the marketing that you might be learning from elsewhere, most marketing teaching is not very heart, not truly heart based. Even the ones who might call themselves conscious, heart based, spiritual, authentic, right? Even, Even me, I'm always continuing to come back to my heart, come back to true spirituality, true being a light and love in the world. But marketing is the mainstream way of doing it is very insecure, it's very ego driven. It's all about what I gonna make you do for me. I'm gonna make you the customer, buy my thing. I'm gonna make you the viewer, subscribe and make you share, make you like it, make you comment on it, etc. And it doesn't have to be that way. I hope that I can demonstrate a different way of doing that, doing it that might make more sense to some of you, a way that might make, make it feel much better for some of you. And that way is instead of trying to get attention and grab attention to care more, in a few words, that's it. You can stop watching this video now to get more attention, authentically care more than others in your industry are willing to do. Now there's a lot different ways of caring. And let me talk about this one way of caring, which is how I started when a couple years ago I started to be, well, a couple ways of caring. One way is to be in one to one interaction with your audience. How many of you think about this or think about you? Do you have any kind of audience? Do you have an Email list. Even if it's how many, how many email list subscribers do you have? You don't have to put that in the chat unless you want to. Maybe you have 10, maybe you have a hundred, maybe some of you have a thousand or more. But even if you just have 10 email subscribers, when was the last time you reached out to those 10 people one on one? Really like email? Each of the 10 people, maybe look them up on Facebook a little bit, see what their public profile is or website and email them one on one. Say, hey, you know, I just want to thank you for being part of my email subscriber community. My email list is still small, so everyone that's there is meaningful and important to me. And if you are up for it, I would be so grateful to be able to talk with you even if you have only 15 minutes. But if you have 30 to 60 minutes to for me to kind of get to know you better, what are you looking for in my field? What have you tried already that has worked well for you or hasn't worked? When was the last time you did that? Reached out to your email subscribers one on one? Even if you have 10 email subscribers now, if you have a thousand email subscribers, you don't have to reach out to a thousand one on one or even 100. That's probably too much. But, but reach out to 10 of them. The last 10 people who opened one of your emails, reach out to them. And out of 10 that you reach out to, maybe one of them will be willing to talk with you. Maybe two or three if you're lucky, maybe five if you're super lucky. But reach out to 10. And even if you just talk to one of them, find out whatever your field is and please chat below, comment below if you want to share what your field is. What is your expertise, what you help your email subscribers with. Let's say you help them with relationships. Hey, you've been reading about relationships on my email newsletter and I'd love to get to know you better and kind of what you're wanting to learn more about, what you're wanting to get better about in terms of your own relationships. What have you tried elsewhere? Have you read any books that have been helpful? Have you taken any courses or done any kind of counseling or coaching, that kind of thing, or what are you looking for that would be helpful? And then maybe towards the latter quarter of the conversation, the final quarter of the conversation, you can say, and I'm thinking about creating this service or I'm creating this program or I'm creating this product and I'd love to get your feedback on it. And of course you share your thing based on the conversation thus far and see if it's appropriate. So that's one way to really show your audience that you care is to reach out one to one. If you don't have an email list, subscriber list yet, then you can do this through Facebook. How many of you have a Do you have a Facebook fan page? Do you have 10 fans on your Facebook fan page? Reach out to those 10 fans individually, go click on their Facebook profile and you're able to message them or if anybody has commented on any of your Facebook posts and you know you're just starting out so you don't have like I do. I have so many Facebook comments on my post now that to be honest I have neglected this area of caring and I apologize, I apologize to all of you because I haven't been keeping up with. I certainly haven't replied to any comments for weeks now and I have barely even have a chance to like or love your comments. But know that I am seeing them every single comment I see. And right here on the Facebook Live. Thank you Diane and Miriam and Stacy and Captain and who else is joining me here live? Sonia Michelle. So thank you all. So I see all the Facebook comments, I see all your YouTube comments. It's just that I literally haven't, maybe I should say I haven't cared enough, I'm sorry I haven't cared enough to reply to them for weeks now, almost two, three months. But let me tell you a different way of care. So there's different ways of caring and you need to care more then other people in your industry are willing to care and you could do any of these different ways. So for somebody like me who has a somewhat a decent sized audience, a large enough audience, doing the one to one can be overwhelming because I'm already so busy with my own clients and with my own course students and my group coaching program etc. That I'm kind of tapped out in terms of one on one interactions. That's why I haven't been replying to comments. But if you're just starting out, if you're not yet like me, where you have lots of comments for your posts, if you just have 2 or 3 comments for each of your posts and it's on your Facebook fan page, you can message your commenters right from your Facebook fan page. So the private message that comes through to them is from your fan page, not from your Personal profile. Check it out. Go to your fan page, go to your Facebook business page, look at the last post that had a comment, and as long as it's within six months, you were able to click message next to that comment and start a conversation there. So that's a really great way of caring when you're first starting out is to do it one to one. And you know, honestly, to be honest, if I needed more business, if I needed more clients or more, you know, I would be doing more one on one outreach and caring in that way. So, so, okay, let me. So that's one way of caring. Especially when you're first starting out or when you need some business. You got to do the one to one man. I mean, you've got to care enough to seek that one to one interaction, one on one conversation with your, with your subscribers and with your fans. All right? Now once you grow your business, grow your audience a bit more, and you're kind of getting closer and closer to having a decent sized audience then, well, I should say all along the way, even, even when you're first starting out, another way of caring that will be forever is you care through your content. You care through your content and you really show that you care through your content. So one thing, you know, one thing that I don't really agree with is when people have other people write their content. I understand, you know, some, especially some people who are really bad writers or they, and they don't want to get good at writing, which doesn't make sense to me. I think if you want it, I think skill, once bought, one group of skills that all of us should be continuing to improve on, no matter who we are and what work we do is communication skills. Writing, speaking, listening is a big part of communication skills. Yeah, writing and listening. Writing, listening and speaking is essentially the core ones. You know, outsourcing your writing, I mean, it makes sense for maybe larger companies, but for solopreneurs like us. Why are you outsourcing your writing? Like, if you really want to care for your audience, you do your own writing because your heart and your personality can come through in that writing a lot more. And you know, and of course, if you care about your audience through your content, then you're going to be really curious what kind of content will be helpful to them. And so what you'll do is you'll start to research your audience and look at their social media profiles and see what kind of content they're sharing so that you can then share better content too. You can create Better content based on what they're sharing. That's how you care. You know, one way to care through your content, another way to care through your content is, well, let's talk about writing. The way to care through your writing is to really put your heart and soul and personality in your writing. Don't just give tips or, you know, here are three things you can do to improve your life, blah, blah, blah. That's great. But are you putting your heart and soul. Are you telling stories that matter to you? Are you telling stories from your own life? Are you sharing things that may be controversial? Because if it's controversial, you might be criticized. But if you really care about an issue and you take a controversial stance on it, and if you care enough, then you should be sharing that controversy. You see me doing this all the time. I share controversial stances on issues all the time because I care about it, right? Rather than staying away and saying, well, I'm going to try to not get any criticism from it. Ironically, when you share something that's controversial, if you really passionately believe in it, and if you can give your reasons why, and if you can share your story, why you believe in it, you usually get a lot more praise than you get criticism. You might still get some criticism, but you usually get more praise. And that's one way to show that you care. So showing that you care through content is primarily through getting to know your audience by looking at what they share, talking with them one to one, if possible, creating more of what they share, share, creating more of what they want, essentially, and then caring enough to put your heart and soul and your stories into your content, your personality into it. And not being afraid to make mistakes in your content. Because if you care, if I care about you, I don't care as much about my mistakes. And looking polished and looking pretty and looking handsome and being, you know, brilliant in how I speak and being. No, I'm showing up with my heart. That's how I show you that I care. You see, and through videos is, in fact, even more transparent in terms of someone's heart than writing. Writing. You can edit the thing to death and make it look like you care. And maybe you do care, but through video, my God, you have to put your heart into it. And people can tell. Unless you just are an extraordinary actor and, you know, learning acting is good too. But if you can, if you can be willing to be vulnerable, make mistakes, make a bad video, make. I've made about a thousand. I made more than a thousand videos actually in my last 10 years I count webinars as part of that count of videos. But Even on my YouTube channel I haven't published everything. But I am just about at 1,000 videos on my one YouTube channel. I have another YouTube channel that's called Our Highest Work, which has another, I think 70 videos. So with that, those added together just on YouTube, I have over a thousand videos now, but I have probably made, I don't know, 800 bad videos. Out of a thousand videos, I've made 800 bad ones. Okay, maybe not bad. Okay, but to me, I have a pretty high self. I have a pretty high standard for quality of content. You might not believe that like George, your videos are crap but. Or your videos are so casual. What are you talking about? Good videos. I have a really high standard. I know that most of my videos are bad, but I don't care about my quality. I care about showing up with heart and I care about am I? And you might say, well, George, quality is caring about the audience. The problem with quality being caring about the audience. Here I'm having a conversation with myself here. The quality about the problem with quality. You're saying, well, caring for the audience means creating quality content. The problem is that most of the time people, when they think of quality content, they're actually caring about their own self image. It's not about the audience, it's about what they think about themselves. That's what they care about the most. They don't want to disappoint themselves. And they're caring about the authority figure, their mom in their head or their teacher in their head or their coach in their head saying, no, that's not good enough. That's whom they're caring about. They're not caring about their audience. They're caring about the judgments in their head. That's how quality content people think. No, so true quality of content is when you get to know your audience so well and when you care about them so much that you willing to show up vulnerably and relevantly and that is quality content. And yes, eventually you'll want to, you know, if you want to build a massive audience. I don't consider myself, I don't have a massive audience. I have a decent small, medium sized audience. 5,000 Facebook fans, 3,000 YouTube subscribers. You know, that's a small, really online that's considered a small audience. Okay, you might say, well then you have a tiny miniscule audience, but I have a small audience. If you want to build a big audience, you eventually you do need to Learn video editing or outsource that and make yourself look really polished or at least edit a lot of things out. But if you just want to build a small audience, which by the way is a six figure business, I know some of you don't care about six or seven figures, but you can have a million dollar business with the same audience that I have now. It doesn't take more than a few thousand Facebook fans and a few thousand YouTube subscribers to have a million dollar business if you want that. So it's not about bigger audience, it's about a truer audience. I've talked about that before too. So just honestly, with audience building, aim to have the same number that I have. And if you have the same number that I have, you could make several million dollars a year if you wanted to. At that point, if you're not making million dollars a year with, with my number of fans and you want to, then the problem is not that you don't have a big enough audience. The problem is that you don't either have a true enough audience or your business model is wrong. Not wrong, meaning your business model is not matched to your goals. Okay, I don't want to make a million dollars, but I make plenty of money right now. Totally make enough. But it's. Yeah. So back to caring. Okay. To get more attention, to get truer attention. That turns into money if you care about that turns into impact if you care about that. It's about caring more than your competitors, than your niche mates, than the people in your industry do, than your friends do, than your colleagues do. It's caring more for your audience than they do. How I've already talked about one on one conversations. That's how you start out. But you also do content. And I'm still doing content. I'm still carrying through content. I think that's probably enough for today. This is actually this video is part of chapter five in my book Authentic Selling. So and I mentioned that because as of today, the paperback version of Authentic Selling the book is out. So if you're interested in getting a paperback version of it, of course I appreciate your support. Every sale does make a difference on Amazon in terms of the rankings and how people find, whether people are able to find it. So thank you so much. And let me just thank those of you who are here and then call and if you have any questions, please go ahead and comment or chat below. Thank you, Matt, for your comment there. Thanks, Captain. Thanks, Ludovic and Stacy. Yeah, and Diane, Miriam and let's see, Caroline, Bryce, Hannah, Selena, Sonia, Michelle, thank you all so much for joining me live. And Stacy says, well George, you are now serving on a one to many scale. Yeah, I guess so. It's just that I wish, I keep wanting to say I wish I had time to care one to one, but I should say I wish I had the energy to care more for those of you who are in my audience because yeah, I wish I had the energy to really do because right now I do have. My energy is really tapped out with my group coaching program of 45 members I have, my client roster is full, my courses are happening on a monthly basis. So there's a lot going on and I don't have any assistance. That's a purposeful thing too because I'm learning to this year is my year to learn a streamlined business and build it before I hire another assistant. So anyway, blessings to you and thank you for being part of my audience. I'm so grateful. And if there's anything I can do to care for you more, especially in a one to many way, please do let me know if I can offer a better service to you. If I can. What kind of service would be most useful to you that you would say, yeah, that would be great, George, I'd love for you to offer that service. If I can offer a better course for you, let me know. I'd be grateful to know. So thank you everyone and I will see you in the next video. Take care.