Attn: Future Thought Leaders, Are you an underpaid expert? A professional "nobody"? Are you ready for the world to take notice of your talent and know your name?
Before I had an agency, a team of people working for me, and a client base that could actually pay my bills, I was a professional "nobody."
I was a low-level corporate consultant, brought in to clean up other people's messes and grossly underpaid for it. I worked sixty hours a week for people who felt entitled to my entire existence while refusing every effort I made to start getting paid what I was worth. Worse yet, I watched as these same clients spent ten times my salary on so-called industry experts who could barely operate a Gmail account without the IT team holding their hands through the entire process. I was exhausted and discouraged, ready to give up and go back to working the overnight shift unloading trucks at the mall or any job that wouldn’t require me to deal with Karen and her team of professional stooges.
But let's face it, unloading trucks just isn't going to pay six figures, and I wasn't about to waste my potential on a pay cut, so I knew something had to change.
I went to a conference my client was hosting and sat in the back of the room, watching a speaker lecture the crowd of suits with a mixture of intangible industry lingo and poorly timed dad jokes. But the crowd was eating it up. As he got to the Q&A, the audience was gushing, and every question was preceded with a compliment on just how smart or talented the speaker was. After he got off stage, he was mobbed with even more questions, and I watched as he began collecting business cards like baseball cards — each one a potential lead worth millions in potential revenue. I realized in that moment that if I was ever going to escape the consulting trap, this is how I had to do it.
Everyone gets into consulting because they think it'll be their path to the land of milk and honey, but the reality is that consulting, when you're just getting started, means spending every waking hour trying to keep a client happy while they complain about your rate and refuse to make any of the changes you're suggesting. It's only after you build authority that the equation changes, and now your clients pay you richly. If they don't implement your directives, they're held accountable by their own bosses who are picking up the tab. Suddenly, all the right people are on your side, and all the Karens are pulling sixty-hour work weeks to keep up with your directives.
Getting Exposure Made Easy
After I left the conference, I started looking at the work I was doing and began writing case studies about all the messes I had helped clean up. Then I started reaching out to the SaaS vendors I had hired for my client and asked them when their next conference was. I mentioned that I had a couple of unique case studies featuring their product and asked if they would be interested in having me present them at the conference. Honestly, I thought it was a long shot, but soon enough, I had been booked as a speaker not only for a national conference but also for a number of smaller regional conferences taking place throughout the year.
So, How Do You Become An Authority?
Now, I was under no illusion that I was being given a chance because my client was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on their service, and keeping the guy who sold your product happy was a good way to ensure that I continued recommending their product. But I didn't care; I just needed to get in front of an audience. So when the day of the event arrived, I came, I saw, I conquered, and I started my own collection of business cards.
My Ace In The Hole
How I became a known authority in my industry, increased my income tenfold, and built a business around my expertise without spending all my time creating content, begging for publicity, or relying on luck online.
Before, I was a consultant. After spending my evenings unloading flip-flops for Old Navy, I worked in radio as a producer. Part of my job was to create what were called One-Sheeters. These one-page documents would consist of talking points and background details for the host to review in the sixty seconds or so before the guest came on the air. I used this format to create one for myself, listing my accomplishments, topics I could speak on, and a bit of background for context. For those familiar with the concept of a media kit, this is like a stripped-down version of that.
Once I had conducted the interviews, I began reviewing the footage and selecting clips that I could use on social media.
Profit! After following this system for just a couple of months, I attracted my first paying client through one of these interviews.
With money in the bank, I hired a team of people who could take this system and run with it. Once we had optimized it, we started sharing this strategy with our clients, helping them book interviews, speaking engagements, and dozens of content partnerships.
It works because authority is all about context. If your potential clients consistently see you being interviewed on multiple channels, they start assuming that you know what you're talking about. And as you appear in more and more pieces of content, they start positioning you in their mind as the foremost expert on the subject. And why wouldn't they? Most people assume that getting that kind of publicity is hard, right? Wrong! It's easy! And here's why: Publishers (podcasters, magazines, video channels, etc.) are desperate to speak with experts. We live in a twenty-four-hour news cycle; there is a ton of content that needs to be produced to stay relevant and on top of consumers' minds. Believe it or not, there really aren't that many experts out there looking for these opportunities
Why Does This Work & Why Is It So Easy
We'll help you build a personal brand, get your interviews and speaking opportunities and take that content and turn it into a marketing goldmine using paid promotion or if your just getting started and not quite ready to partner with an agency, Let me teach you how to do this for yourself.
For The True Experts:
I took my one-sheeter and began reaching out to as many media outlets as possible. As I was doing this, I distinctly remember thinking, 'This is never going to work.' But to my surprise, it worked incredibly well. I got interviews booked with both independent podcasts and some major media outlets, as well as a few other businesses that were looking to supplement their own thought leadership with leaders outside of their businesses.
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You are an actual expert
No one wants to hear from someone who gets all of their insights from entrepreneur bros on Twitter.
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Knowing and doing are two very different things.
You have a track record.
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Authority is earned, not given. There is no amount of money I could charge that could make you an authority if you're not willing to get interviewed, contribute to publications, or speak on stage.
You apply yourself to the process
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You're probably thinking, "There is no way this is going to work for me; you must just be some kind of marketing guru!" And yeah, it's not, and yeah, I am pretty good at marketing. So here is exactly who this will work for.
This Is Not Going To Work For Everyone
I continued doing this until, eventually, word got back to my client, who was none too happy about me airing their dirty laundry. Oops! In my defense, I was twenty-five, pretty dumb when it came to these kinds of things, and didn't really think my NDA would apply here, since everything I spoke about had been challenges overcome in the past. But regardless, they weren't happy, I wasn't happy, and so at the end of that year, we went our separate ways. Suddenly, but not surprisingly, the invites to speak at conferences stopped coming. So, I knew if I was going to continue to build the authority I needed to make the kind of money I wanted, I needed to have a system that I could use to predictably generate authority-building publicity. Here is exactly what I did:
What Do I Do Now?