[Quick Tip] How to Get More People to Follow You - 312

Think of these quick tip episodes like a cold water swim. In just a few minutes, you can get some amazing benefits to support you on your speaking journey. And bonus, the only thing that's getting wet here is your appetite to try this stuff out. And if you have a question you want me to answer about anything related to speaking, storytelling, pitching, performance, or humour, then DM me on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Twitter. @SarahArcher15.

Hello and welcome to episode 312 of The Speaking Club Podcast. I'm Sarah Archer, and it's been a bit of a minute since I did the last show because, amongst other things, I've had the lurgh. The lurgh, if you don't know what that term means, maybe it's a UK-only term, I don't know, it means a cold, but a little worse than a cold. I've still got it knocking around, so I'm not quite firing on all cylinders yet, but I am back with you. And happy to be here. I hope you're well. Hope you're having a great start to 2025. It's been interesting so far, but things are going, going well for me. I'm enjoying myself, and I think that's the big thing for me this year. One of my top goals is have fun, prioritise joy, and if you're doing things that you don't like doing and you can offload them, do that. Otherwise, suck it up and find a way to make it fun. Anyway, I digress. What I want to talk to you about today is something that I know a lot of people have an issue with, and specifically, I've had a number of people come to me recently complaining about this issue. I'll talk about 2 particular cases today to highlight the problem. So, first of all, I wanted to talk about Dave. Dave came to me and he said, Sarah, I am really struggling to build a following. To get an audience to engage with my posts on LinkedIn? And he wants to build an audience because he thinks that it will help him get more traction and more speaking gigs. He's not wrong, it does play a part, it's not the be-all and end-all. You don't have to have hundreds and thousands of followers to get speaking gigs, that's not what I'm saying, but for him it would help his confidence and he, he wants to do other things as well. So, Then he said to me, I've tried all different ways of positioning myself, and I want to be like Michelle. Now, Michelle is someone we both know, is a client of mine, and she is the author of Good Girl Deprogramming. And when he said this, I knew that I'd found a way to get him to see something that I'd been talking to him about for a while. And When he said Michelle's name, we went onto LinkedIn, we looked at Michelle's post— posts and profile, and what I showed him was this. Michelle doesn't talk about herself first and foremost. Everything Michelle does and talks about and posts about and speaks about is the problem that she helps solve. So, people are connecting with her around the problem first, and then her personality comes into play. And I think this is a really important message for you. Like, there are barely any unique problems. Right? But there are unique messengers around the problem. And I think that's something that Azul said recently in a podcast interview I did with him. So, the first thing you've got to do is get super clear on the problem that you're solving, and I feel Dave wasn't 100% on that, but when I said that, it was like a light bulb went off, and he saw what he'd been doing wrong, and we talked about his problem and how he needed to bang the drum for that. So, that was the first case of it. Second case was a lady who reached out to me and is looking to do speaking and also launch a group program, and she was super frustrated because she felt that there were people less qualified than her in her field who were getting more traction on social media. And I can understand that's frustrating if you spent all the years studying and, and, you know, got tons of experience, and someone with so much less experience than you is getting people following them, I can understand that, and I know that there's a lot of other people who have that same feeling and frustration and experience, but the issue with that lady who reached out to me is actually because of her expertise and And her experience, and all of her qualifications. Because she is so far removed from the problem and the way that the people she helps experience it, and talk about it, and feel about it, that it has become an obstacle for her connecting with them in the first instance. And that's often what happens when we get into a situation where people are being referred to us, by people that we help, and we're not needing to go out and build a pipeline, whether that's speaking gigs or coaching clients or companies that we are selling our products to, we don't get good at communicating about the problem in a way that is going to deeply connect with our audience. And those people with less experience are much closer to the coalface of that problem. And that's what I explained to her. And we've been working on a number of different tools and techniques and things and messaging in the way that she needs to speak to her audience. And the other day, she had a breakthrough as well. We were talking about the problem and the different things that her audience thinks, feels, says, and does about the problem. And she said to me, oh my God, I get it. I'm so focused when clients come to me on moving them away from getting stuck in the problem and the issues and the pain and looking at moving towards solutions that I— that's all I've been talking about, and I need to speak more about their problems. And, and that is exactly it, and we are working on developing the language and the content that is going to absolutely resonate and connect with her audience. So, that is a huge thing that you need to understand. If you want to build a following, the first thing that you need to do is define the problem you're going to solve, and then speak about that problem and evangelise about that problem. In all sorts of different ways, and often there are multi-faceted aspects of that problem. So, for instance, Michelle will talk about how people don't speak up, or not having boundaries, so there are different elements of the problem, and if you can start speaking about the problem in a sort of 360-degree way, but always using the language of your audience, then you are going to be finding people reach out to you, people connect with you, people follow you, people engage with you, and people book you to speak because you have identified their problem and their pain and connected with them in a way that they are thinking about it. It's so powerful. So, that's the first thing. Define the problem, evangelise about the problem, bang the drum. I'll never forget, of the books that had a real big impact on me. It was called Play Bigger, and in that book they said, whoever evangelizes or articulates the problem best wins. And that's true. If you articulate the problem best, people will come to you for the solution. So, so that's what we got so far. We've got define the problem, evangelize about the problem in the way that your audience can connect to it, in the way that they think, feel, say, and And do things about it. And then the other thing is then bring in your unique personality and way of speaking about it, something that no one else can copy. Michelle is super quirky. She doesn't give a monkey's uncle— that's an English term, it means she doesn't care— about what people think of her. She is on a mission to connect with her audience. She is authentic. She is herself, and she and people resonate with that and the way that she is cheeky and funny and so on. So that is when you come into the equation once you have connected with their problem and with their pain. So takeaways: it's it's not about you in the first instance. It doesn't matter how you position yourself. This is not about influencers and stuff like that. This is about sorting people out with a problem, speaking about a problem to connect and get on stage and get people engaged and following you. Um, nailing the problem is the first thing you've got to do, you know, are you solving a problem that actually people care about? So first of all, you know, define the problem, then as I said, keep banging the drum about the problem, do a 360-degree, look at it from all different angles. If you are a coach, or a consultant, how do your clients position the problem and speak about the problem when they come to you? What do they say about it? What do they feel about it? And so on. And lastly, share why it matters to you and bring your personality into it. Well, I hope that this quick tip episode has given you a bit more insight in how you can connect with your audience and build your audience, get them to follow and engage with you. Whether you're speaking, writing posts, doing videos, doing podcasts, speaking on podcasts, really harness the language of your audience and reflect that back to them, and then bring your personality into it. Thanks so much, again, for watching and listening to The Speaking Club. And if you are a regular watcher, please subscribe to the channel and leave a comment. How do you feel about this? Is your problem clear? Do you have a struggle to connect with your audience? Has this given you a bit of an aha? And if you're listening to the show, whether that's on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or any good podcast app, then do subscribe and leave a rating or review, an honest one. I'm interested in what people think. We wanna make the show better. But most of all, thank you. And you know what I'm gonna say? It's that time again. I want you to go out, grab your life by the nuts, and get speaking about the problem. Take care. See you next time.

It's a nightmare. You're an expert with so much to say, but now that you've been booked to speak, you're struggling to know exactly what to talk about. You want a talk that engages the audience and wins you new clients without you losing your personality or anyone feeling pitched to. But what happens when you sit down to create that talk is that you end up staring at a blank page for ages, or worse, surrounded by hundreds of sticky notes with content that you could include.

With so much material, you just don't know where to start or finish.

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