MicroFamous

You have a podcast, you're in a rhythm, you're consistent, you have a small but established base of listeners, but you want to take it to the next level. Where do you look for podcast growth?

There are several broad areas where we can look for growth, starting with the MicroFamous system itself.

1. Are you being featured as a guest on other podcasts in your space? How consistently?

1. Are you pulling out clips of your guest appearances and podcasts for social media? If so, are you paying to boost them to target audiences? (cold and warm)

1. Is your email list growing by other means? If so, could the podcast be incorporated better into your email nurture system especially in the first 7 days after someone joins your list?

1. Industry PR - Are you writing for trade magazines and online publications? Are you giving speaking presentations (in person or virtual), webinars, masterminds or other types of events that make you visible to new people?

1. Co-Marketing - This is where the biggest leverage and biggest opportunities lie, but under very specific circumstances. The ideal co-marketing relationship for a coach/consultant would be a SaaS or product company that has a big list but is bad at creating content and has no in-house thought leader.

1. Straight paid traffic strategy - This is where you go directly to Facebook, Instagram or YouTube and run ads designed to grow your email list.

As always, I recommend that you have your MicroFamous system in place before moving on to home run potentials like co-marketing or paid traffic strategies.

Your MicroFamous system is where you have complete control, and it's the foundation of your influence. If you have influence in your space, it sets the stage for bigger things. But if you skip the influence building, you'll end up with co-marketing agreements that don't last, and paid traffic that's too expensive to be viable.

Many have found that out the hard way and started podcasts to build their influence. Don't make that same mistake. Make sure you're using the MicroFamous system first, then look at taking big swings at big opportunities.

One of my good friends, a fellow agency owner, said something really interesting to me the other day. “The way you’ve niched down sounds terrifying to me.” 

I’m very clear on who I can serve at a high level and who I can’t. And I don’t say Yes to people who aren’t a good fit.

But his comment caught me off guard, even though I know that it bothers people to choose a niche and stick with it, I think I take for granted how scary that choice can be.

So I want to address a few of those fears and how we can deal with them.

First, a niche isn’t some abstract thing. It’s a group of people who feel under-served by the options in the market right now.

So the first step toward conquering the fear of choosing the right niche is to focus on the people. Then you can move on to the next part, validating the niche.

When you’re validating a niche, think about what it would look if you dominated that space.

Finally, understand your responsibility to the people you serve. As a coach, consultant, author, speaker and thought leader, you have a responsibility greater than merely selling something. You have a responsibility to get people results.

Taking on clients in a bunch of different niches means you’re constantly outside of your depth, working in industry niches you don’t know very well, taking a lot of guesses on what’s going to work and what won’t.

When you really internalize that reality, it helps offset the fear of choosing to work with one group of people first. Focus on attracting the people you can serve at a high level and establishing a leadership position in that space. 

Once you hit the 6 figure mark, getting to the next level is often based on focus, not opportunism.

Doing less, not more.

Which means saying NO.

Saying NO allows us to focus relentlessly on the right things, and avoid the shiny object syndrome that keeps so many people trapped at their current level of success.

Saying NO requires us to accept the pain of turning away a check now from the wrong people, so we can do amazing work for the right people.  

In order to make this strategy work for you, I want to encourage you to;

1. Say NO to grow 
2. Build systems that make tomorrow easier.
3. Protect and manage your energy

Thanks to a social media landscape built around extroverts, it’s been drilled into our heads that attention is the goal and that it automatically converts into sales. 

But attention doesn’t magically translate into a demand for our services. Many people who generate tons of attention can’t figure out how to get people to buy from them. 

Attention should not be the desired outcome of our marketing. What we should be after is being influential to the right people...without being glued to our phones.

1. Understand How Influence is Built. 

Authority, Visibility and Relationships are the building blocks of influence, the basics of the system we are engineering.

One of the core beliefs of MicroFamous is that attention does not convert into sales automatically. There is a gap and most people try to fill that gap with skills. That leads them to more work, more complexity, more commitments.

So why build influence instead of more skills? 

2. Uncover a Clear & Compelling Idea

To engineer influence online, we must start with a Clear & Compelling Idea. 

Our Clear & Compelling Idea is what we will become known for. It's what we do and why we're different, expressed in a way that's razor-sharp clear to the right people and compels them to take action. 

3. Publish content aimed at the 3 building blocks of influence, Authority, Visibility and Relationships. 

Our content must be designed to attract an audience, build trust and change our audience's beliefs over time.

We need to publish content consistently, methodically, relentlessly...but without being glued to social media all the time.

Why? Because to engineer influence, we need leverage. 

Our system can't be based on trading time for money with endless live videos, or Stories that disappear in 24 hours, or being engaged in 5 different places online.

We need a system that allows us to create long-form content, that's easy to create, which can then be broken up into chunks for social media. MicroFamous is that system. 

4. Optimize the system - Resist the pressure to turn our newfound free time into new commitments, especially to new social media tactics.

Focus on tweaking the system. Create space to think strategically and make small tweaks that can deliver big results.

The goal at this point is to just keep improving the system that's putting your Clear & Compelling Idea in front of the right people. 

If you have the right Idea for the right people, you will cut through the Noise, you will draw people into your audience, you will change their beliefs, and you will become known for your Clear & Compelling Idea.

That's how you engineer influence in the online world, without being glued to your phone.

We all want to close sales faster, but in this cluttered, distrustful online world, that's getting harder. People who are selling things online are having to lean HARD into credibility indicators to build trust quickly. 

Getting results for people is critical, but there's another way to build trust and shorten the sales cycle - launch a podcast. 

Podcasting can make you MicroFamous in your niche, it demonstrates your commitment and consistency, builds a relationship with the audience, and attracts the right people and repels everyone else. Ultimately, podcasting can destroy objections before you ever show up to a sales call and it.

In the absence of good marketing, these are all hurdles you have to overcome in the sales process.

You have to change the initial perception of you, create rapport, build trust, demonstrate credibility and commitment to solving their problem, handle objections and THEN try to close the sale.

Imagine if 90% of that work was done before you ever showed up to a sales call?

Podcasting takes care of steps in the sales cycle you'd normally have to handle on calls. That's the power of podcasting to shorten sales cycles.

The social media environment we’re in today favors extreme extroverts, and the clear message introverts are getting is that you have to change who you are to succeed. If you're not an extrovert, better start changing yourself, otherwise you'll be left behind!

This message seems to be hitting us from every direction.

We hear it from the social companies, in the content they promote, to the big name influencers shouting at us to jump on Tik Tok or Clubhouse, to the latest apps and features, which are all geared at real time content and engagement.

It's a false choice, there's a third option. 

Don't change who you are as an introvert, just build a system around you to reach people online.

A system that leverages your strengths, makes up for your weaknesses and allows you to be who you are.

That's what I've done with MicroFamous.

Whatever is going on with online marketing, introverts don't need to change, we don't need to become more extroverted.

Right now, podcasting is an ecosystem that operates completely different from social media. That's why every introverted coach, consultant, speaker or author needs to have a podcast.

If you're an expert in your field, but you're not a social butterfly online, you don't need to change.You just need a marketing system that's designed for you. You can either build that from scratch, or use our shortcuts to get there.

But either way, don't buy into the false choice that if you don't become an extrovert, you'll become irrelevant.

For introverted experts, a podcast can be the powerful foundation of a marketing plan that helps you establish your brand in the market, and build an email list that gets you more clients. 

These outcomes are only possible if we’re actually focusing on the things that really matter and push the needle. 

There is so much noise in the marketing world, and it can be hard to separate what drives results and makes all the difference from the smaller things that don’t actually make an impact. 

If we want a podcast that drives results to our expert business, we have to focus on the key things that matter, and ignore everything else.

In this episode, I discuss what matters when it comes to launching a podcast, and how those key things play into the success of your podcast. 

Interview podcasts have become a dime a dozen and standing out requires consistent evolution and experimentation. Repeat guest, Adam King has rebranded and relaunched his podcast as a hot seat with multiple guests, featuring real questions from real people in his audience.  

With whatever podcast format we take, the key is understanding our belief system and point of view so well that an interview podcast ties back into our Big Idea.  

On this special interview episode, founder of Think Like a Fish and host of the B2B Growth Think Tank Podcast, Adam King shares the reason behind his rebrand, the execution, and what he’s seeing in the world of podcasting. 

Freedom is my #1 value. I want introverted experts to have freedom from guilt, frustration, peer pressure and the hamster wheel of social media. Why do I say hamster wheel? Because as soon as you take a break, it stops working.

Social media companies are rewarding real time content and real time engagement, which favors the extroverts.

For an extrovert, being social is energizing. For an introvert, it requires us to use energy and then recharge through alone time. That combination doesn’t work well with today’s social media which is now a hamster wheel you can never get off of.

So what’s the way out? 

A marketing system that’s designed for introverted experts. With the right system around us, we don’t need to change, and we don’t need to pretend to be an extrovert.

If we want freedom, we need a system that’s designed to leverage our strengths as introverts, rather than making us feel guilty and frustrated for not being more social.

In this episode, I share why the MicroFamous system is the perfect way to back out of the hamster wheel of social media and find freedom. 

Being MicroFamous means becoming famously influential to the right people - being someone who leads people to new beliefs, actions and results.  

In order to reach that destination, we need a clear message that cuts through the noise in a way that’s compelling and sustainable, and we need to focus on having clarity in our message.

Who should we go after? 

This is the critical decision we need to make before we do anything else. Without this decision, we’re left chasing attention without really knowing who we’re trying to reach and resonate with. For introverts, it is especially important to narrow our focus or else we’ll burn out. 

Going after the maximum eyeballs on our content leads us away from the things that will actually get us the sustainable, profitable, simple and enjoyable business we all want. 

When we get clarity on who the right people are, it gives us massive power and sets us up for success. 

In this episode, I share the first question we need to ask ourselves in the journey to becoming MicroFamous, why introverts shouldn’t approach marketing the way extroverts do, and how to build a profitable and rewarding business by narrowing our focus.