Celebrity Expert Series #03:
In this article, I’ll be sharing tips and tricks from my book How To Be A Celebrity Expert with a goal helping you to define your why. So if you haven’t heard of my book, click here to get your copy of the book, and find out how you can join our community to get lots more great advice from branding and marketing experts.
Your “why” is the outcome that you deliver, and it’s usually based on both your ideal target market and your positioning as a thought leader. If you’re struggling with it, a great place to start is with Simon Sinek’s popular “Start With Why” TEDx Talk.
Discovering your why is all about discovering what your professional purpose is in life. After all, you need to understand your identity before you go ahead and create the ideal personal brand. Ask yourself why you do what you do. What’s the one thing that gets you out of bed in the morning? And what differentiates your job from your vocation? And what will your legacy be?
Using the past to guide your future
The things that have been significant in your life in the past can often act as signposts that point to where you want to be in the future. Look back at your early days in life and find out what made you tick. So for example, have you always loved drama, music, sports, riding horses, video games, comic books or sci-fi? Select all of the qualities that have been vital in shaping the person you are.
If you’re still struggling, you can get started by asking yourself some questions:
- Why do you do the things you do?
- What makes you excited about your career or your current job?
- What does a perfect day look like to you?
- What does a bad day look like to you?
- What does achievement look like beyond just getting a paycheck?
- How does it feel when you get a taste of success?
- What kind of impact do you want to have on the world?
- What are the things that you don’t like about your current career/job role?
- What’s stopping you from accomplishing what you want to achieve?
- What does disappointment feel like to you?
It’s vital to understand your professional purpose before you start building your personal brand. And remember that if you don’t take control of your own brand image then someone else will take control of it for you. But the good news is that simply taking some time to stop and think about where you are and where you want to be in life, you can point yourself in the right direction.
Building your support network
If you’ve stuck with me so far and completed each of the activities in my Celebrity Expert Series, you should have finished defining your purpose and have a good idea about who you want to reach and what message you want to reach them with. Now you need to make a commitment to make change happen because it doesn’t just happen by itself.
Change – and especially the kind of significant changes that you’re going to create for your life and for your career – require a plan and a support network. And a good place to start is by joining the Celebrity Experts Facebook Group, where you’ll receive success advice, tips and stories from our authors, speakers and coaches to keep you motivated and inspired throughout your journey to success.
The good news is that once you understand your why, your mission and your vision, you can start to identify the solutions you offer. Then you can deliver power content in multiple different formats, from webinars, workshops and PDF reports to video sales letters, case studies, email invitations and more. The choice that you make will depend upon the market you’re in, but the good news is that you only need one effective method to consistently bring new customers into your business.
This Week’s Action
Take some time to ask yourself the questions that we covered in this post and to find your why. Remember that by defining your why, you’ll also be able to narrow down your message and to start thinking about exactly why you do what you do. That’s going to come in useful when we get to the next few posts in this series, so be sure to put in the work now to stop yourself from falling behind.
Conclusion
Now that you know what your why is, you should have a good idea of what you have to offer people. The next step is to create power content that leverages your expertise whilst simultaneously showing prospects why you’re the best solution to their problems. You’ll do this by first displaying your true value and then by answering any questions that they might have before they even think of asking them.
If you get this right, your prospects fully understand exactly how you can help them before you even speak to them. Better still, not only will you attract the right people (the people you can help), but also you’ll repel the people you can’t help (or who you’d just rather not work with). The upshot of all this is that you’ll never need to waste your time speaking to unqualified leads again.
When you have this system in place, it automatically leads to the right people coming to work with you. It changes everything. Imagine if you had a constant flow of qualified leads literally seeking you out and asking to work with you. And imagine being able to take on as many or as few of them as you wanted to.
In my next article we’ll share advice on how to make that happen for you.
About the Author
Cydney O’Sullivan is a multiple best-selling author, award-winning international speaker and communications consultant who helps experts and businesses stand out from their competitors.