POWER OF FREE! #2: Expert Niche in Intelligent Content Marketing: Fine Tuning Into Your Market Space

Once you’ve understood all of this, you then start to think about your service proposition, in your Expert Niche. You give away your expertise as far as you possibly can. But at some point, you have to be able to make money out of doing this.

 

The way that you do this is by effectively understanding the dynamics of the market that you operate in. Because you’re an expert in your niche, you know that better than anybody else. You then comprise a proposition that’s fit squarely within the dynamics of how the people who are accessing your expertise. But I need real assistance with it. How they’ll be able to access your expertise so that you can get compensated for actually delivering the true value in that relationship, which in the case of my business and immigration practice is peace of mind. We don’t sell a visa label and a passport or avoidance of queues at the Immigration Department.

We know that when people hand their money over to us, they’re buying peace of mind. That’s the one thing they can’t acquire, from all the free expertise that we give away. All the generosity that we embark upon, that they can’t acquire peace of mind. That’s ultimately what we’re selling. And is so, because you have that acute knowledge and understanding of how your market thinks. You have an opportunity to develop products and services around that.

Creative Disruption

This gentleman here is called Clay Christensen, and he’s a very respected business professor from Harvard. He coined the phrase creative disruption.  Then he does this work, where he assesses the reality of what people what forces people to transact. He gives this example of work that was done on Donald’s milkshakes, while McDonald’s milkshakes all of a sudden, peaking as being the most single most sold product, which before I think it was 11 o’clock in the morning, and they couldn’t understand why it was, you would think that if you’re buying a milkshake, you’re quenching your thirst, right.

But in reality, people were buying the milkshake, because it was just the kind of thing that they could toy with for the 20-minute drive to work. They wanted to have something in the hands of the sitcom. The viscosity was sufficient and would last the right kind of time. It gave a good sense of being full in the morning. It has also given a big Sugar Rush. The reason why they were doing it is not that they wanted a milkshake, but they wanted something to hold while they drove. So the job to be done was being satisfied by a McDonald’s milkshake.

Your Expert Niche Dynamics

So you need to understand what’s happening in your marketplace, and then identify those jobs to be done. Then, once you’ve identified those jobs to be done, you can understand all the friction points. Actually achieving the outcomes that people need to achieve to satisfy those jobs that are done. You can understand the emotional dynamics of each of these situations. Position your proposition so that any concerns that anybody might have about transacting with you are removed because you’ve effectively through your proposition, reverse the risk.

By understanding the way that your market thinks you have an opportunity to construct a proposition that is frictionless from the perspective of being able to supply or fulfil or serve a need. That need historically has been served in another way that has been founded on the constructs of the industrial era. But in the connection economy, you can do things differently. In fact, things will be done differently. So these are the jobs to be done. Once you’ve understood all those jobs, you’ve mapped out that entire experience for people. You then say to yourself, Well, okay, what are the psychological phenomena that are in play and having a relationship with a customer or anybody that’s interested in my expertise. Then you reach into your toolkit and pull out facets of or from the science of persuasion.

Making decisions in your Expert Niche

These are well-founded realities of how we as humans take shortcuts to make decisions in an increasingly ever more complex world. We are as individuals wired from an evolutionary perspective in a certain way. If you understand these constructs and apply them to the circumstances of the market you are going to be Providing your proposition to. You have an opportunity to melt away any potential obstacles to those relationships forming to the benefit of everybody.

So these short six shortcuts are very well known, but I’ll just identify how we’ve accommodated them in our service model, reciprocity. Reciprocity is where, because I’ve done something for you, you have this innate sense that you owe me something. So you carry around this obligation, that somehow at some point, you’re going to have to return a favour. We give everything away for free, that’s not a strategy, it’s just the reality. If you want to parlay your expertise, you’ve got to give it to people, you can’t expect them to pay for it. So you give it to them and the act of giving it to them.

Business Model in your Expert Niche

That act of generosity invokes a sense of reciprocity in the person that receives it. So it means that you develop unwittingly an armada of unpaid fans that are talking about you when you’re not even present. So reciprocity is a key facet of our business model. Another one is scarcity. We don’t take all of the clients that come to us, we actually choose who we act for. That’s because we only want to take on work for people for that we believe we can actually deliver value.

I get clients quite often that come to me and I said, I can’t take your work, even if you want to pay, you’d be wasting your time because I can’t get your visa approved. It’s a lot of money to pay me just to get help, right. So if I’m saying to, you know, think about another strategy, then there are ways to do that. But I don’t take on every client. So scarcity, something becomes more valuable, the less available, it becomes this is again, a facet of the way that the modern world works, or authority. Well, if you’re clearly an expert in something and you’ve parlayed that to the world, then people have an opportunity to assess for themselves. Whether you are indeed an authority or not on the quality of your work will determine whether you’re an authority or not.

Authority status in your Expert Niche

Only the court the perception that the people have of your work will determine when you’re ultimately an authority. But if you do achieve authority status, people respect that, because always people look to authority, and they accord you recognition. Wherever there’s a situation where authority presents itself, consistency, where people have made a small decision, which is going to lead to a bigger decision. Subsequently, it’s well well established that the first small decision sets a pattern that increases the likelihood subsequently that you’ll go on to do another decision that’s related to this one.

So in our business, what we try to do, as much as possible is to get somebody to give us their email address. We have an opportunity to continue to deliver value to people via their email address and deliver value by their email address. Well, we don’t sell anything, it’s just an opportunity to learn more, get more and experience more.

Act of Trust

But the act of giving us their email address is that first step towards them subsequently doing some other action that’s bigger and more profound that will lead to eventually having a relationship. So in a very ethical way, we’re able to address the social phenomena of consistency, and liking, while I try my very best to be as nice as I possibly can to everybody. If that works, then all is well and good, but it’s certainly part and parcel of our service model. Then consensus, which is social proof, where effectively if other people are doing it, then it must be okay.

If other people are saying good things about it, then clearly it’s okay. This is why on our website, we’ve got a very, very extensive collection of client testimonials. In fact, a service model is designed to anticipate the collection of testimonials at every step of our interactions with customers where it’s reasonable to do that because then we’re able to get back the feedback from the marketplace. We’re able to show that to everybody else.

Irresistible Offer in your Expert Niche

Transparency works in a very powerful way. These are the facets of persuasion science, we have an opportunity to construct your proposition openly, honestly, and tremendously ethically. So also, whilst you’re putting your service model together, you need to have something that is an absolute slam dunk. Remove all risks associated with possibly transacting with me, why would I not do this? I must be stupid not to take these terms on. If you can achieve that in your business, then you’ve achieved an irresistible offer. Our irresistible offer is if we take your work on you don’t get approved, we give you double your money back.

So this is how you put together your business proposition in the wake of having parlayed your expertise through the internet as a publisher in the way that I’ve just outlined.

THE REST OF THE SERIES

Attaining Expertise  
My 4 Areas Of Expertise
Turning Expertise Into Monopoly
Fine Tuning Into Your Market Space
Making A Market Of Your Own
Becoming A Publisher
The Winner Takes All
Absolutely Worth It

Disruptive Innovation By Clay Christensen: Competitor Management Methodology Is Flawed

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POWER OF FREE! #1: Intelligent Content Marketing in the Connection Economy: Getting Started