Ch. 6-7: Finding Your Ideal Audience

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Transcript

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Hello, and welcome to the market. Your message show. I'm your host, Jonathan Milligan and author of several books. The most recent one, the discover your message book. It's a 14 day journey to uncover your calling and find your niche as our writer. Coach or speaker. And we're currently in a book club series. So I originally wanted to make this book club series, just like if you were hanging out at my house or we were hanging out as a group and Starbucks. And we have the book and you're sitting down with the author and asking questions, getting contexts, getting behind the scenes, better understanding. What is in each chapter. And so that is what this series is like. And so if you're jumping in right now, without context, we're in the middle of my latest book, the discover your message book. Now the discover your message book is the first book. So it's book one in a seven book series that I'm going to be writing and publishing over the next two years. So at the time of this recording, we are just beginning 20, 24. And this year I will be publishing a new book. Every 90 days. So I'm really doubling down on this process. In fact, book to launch your platform. Is going to be coming out very soon where. Deciding the actual publish date. But it's looks like it's going to be sometime in February 20, 24. And then the book three. Validate your offer will be coming out in roughly 90 days after that. Then as we get into the fall, we're going to be publishing. Book number four. In book number five sometime in November. So this is going to be a great fun journey. And a lot of this material comes out of my top tier program that I've been running for a couple of years now. Called online business insider. And this is where I teach basically my seven step method. Of how to go from scratch, not having a clue who your audience is and what your message is to having a thriving. Business as a writer, speaker, or coach. So now that the journey that we're going on together. Today, we're going to be getting into day six and day seven. They're also chapter six and chapter seven. If you have the book, if you don't have a copy of the book, you can go to platform growth books.com. That's platform growth books.com. We'll be having all of my books. On a single page, so you can find him. Jump in where you want and get a copy of this book and go through this book club series with me. Two chapters a week, which is our short chapters. And in a matter of weeks, you all have your message figured out. All right. Chapter six is called the egoic label exercise. Now I first heard of the egoic label concept. A few years ago. And I think it was really helpful because often what happens for us messengers is we want our message to be for everyone. We feel like, Hey, everyone can benefit from this message. But what you discover as you move on into your journey. Is that when you're trying to reach everyone, you're really talking to no one. And you do have to have a place for your message to land. And it's got to serve a specific group of people. So the going label exercise is a powerful exercise to help you identify your audience. Now is it the only way I've had readers since they've read the book say I don't know that I. Want to focus on it and go look label. I don't know if I want to niche that way. And that's fine. This is just one helpful tool that can be helpful in deciding who your audience is. Now. Ego is part of the word egoic. This is nothing about. pEople having any go, it's also not about labeling people. So what an egoic label is, it's a self label. You give yourself because you like it. For example, you could be an entrepreneur. A small business owner. You might like the term author or blogger or I'm a speaker. I'm a chef. I'm a counselor. I'm a corporate executive. So you go at labels. Our labels, our audience wants to embrace. It's a very important distinction as you start to look at this. Now to simplify things in the book. I have an egoic label index with five categories. So I've attempted to take all the different ethnic labels out there and summarize them into five categories. There's vocational. gOing labels, ownership. Egoic labels, religion. I Type. And hobbies. So we'll get a little bit into this and they're going to read every one of these, but if you have a copy of the book, page 44, Has all of the egoic labels. There's more beyond this, but it'll give you an idea of each one. So I'll just give you a couple examples for vocation. Entrepreneur, small business owner, counselor, lawyer, CPA. Those are vocational labels that we like. Ownership egoic labels. What are some examples? A dog owner. Cat owner. MaC owner, a PC owner, a Honda owner. A Tesla owner. Things like things that we own, we purchase and we love being a part of that community or that particular thing. Then there's religious labels and, Jewish, Christian, Muslim. Mormon. Catholic. Baptists. Those are pretty self-explanatory then there's identity type labels. Now, these are a little bit broad, like step moms. So you could have a business where you're just helping. Step-mom's maybe better attach in their relationships to their children that are not their own. But because of marriage, they have kids. There's also like single men over 40 hours, divorced women or single moms or a working mom. A cancer survivor and athlete. Those are all identity labels. And then finally, there's Hobie labels. Hiker hunter golfer, Fisher skier. You get it. So what I would like for you to do for this exercise. Is just identify three to six. It go up labels that you think could be a potential group you could serve. Just based on your own passions based on your own. Hobbies. Or interest. You can identify those three to six egoic labels. Now, once you've identified those. Then. We're going to begin. To move to the next phase in this process. And that's what leads us. Into chapter seven or day seven. And the title of this chapter is called the audience filter scorecard. Now, what this does is this helps you to identify. Which of these ideas? Might be the best idea. Because I often run into different pockets of people when it comes to this topic of choosing an audience. And here's. Some of those different. Styles that often here, maybe one of these resonate with you. I've heard. Jonathan, I'm passionate about a lot of things. How am I just going to narrow it down? I could literally create a business or write books or start a blog or a podcast on about eight different things. So maybe that's you. I've also run into people who say, I have no idea what I'm passionate about. I have no clue. I don't even know where to start. And maybe that is you. Or it could be Jonathan, I've got two or three ideas or have got two ideas. I just can't decide which one. The audience filter scorecard is going to help you. And here's how. It's designed to look at this idea. Logically not emotionally. It's easy to like, get your emotions involved in. Picking an audience and finding that passion. But what the audience filter scorecard does. Is it asks you six simple questions. And you can see those questions starting on page 54. And what I would like for you to do for this exercise. Is rate yourself on a scale of one to 10. And you're going to ask these six questions for each egoic label separately. Here's the six questions then I'll explain the exercise. Number one. Do I enjoy learning about this egoic label? Number two. Am I passionate about this egoic label, by the way. You might know a lot about a topic, but you might not be passionate about helping that group of people. I found myself there. About two years into my CPA career coach site. It was the most obvious place for me to start because I had experience as an executive recruiter. Working with CPAs, but a couple years into coaching CPAs, I was like, they're great people, but I'm just not passionate about this. As passionate as I am about helping. Writers and coaches and speakers. So it's an important question to ask. Am I passionate about this egoic label? Number three. Do I have experience or skills related to the cigar label? Number four. Does this it go label, have a problem to solve. This is so important. Good businesses. Solve problems. That's how you make money. People are willing to part with their money. In order to get a solution to a problem, either want to satisfy a desire. Or they want to get rid of some kind of pain. Number five. Our other businesses, earning money, helping this egoic label. Now. Sometimes people see that question and think. Oh, yeah. I want to move into an area where nobody's helping these people. That is not the point of that question. The point of that question is we want to actually see evidences. That people are already making money. With the egoic label. That's important proof of concept. Number six. Do I want to serve this egoic label? Again, just a question. Gut check to ask you if this is truly who you want to serve. Now. There is a score card. It's actually in the book. It's also in the workbook. If you have the workbook, by the way, did you know there is a workbook? It's a bigger version. Has everything listed has even journaling questions, extra exercises. And you can also find that on Amazon. If you go and you search, discover your message workbook. All right. So on page 61 in the book. And you will find the NCOIC label exercise. Now I'm trying to describe it as best I can, since this is an audio podcast. But picture three columns. Every column is for, at a Gothic label. So maybe column one for me is authors and speakers. Column two for me is selling sports cards on eBay or sports card. Collectors is Label. And maybe number three is. What would I choose as number three? Let's just use my CPAs. So I have a Google-able. Label one, authors it Coke label to sports card collectors. And he'd go label three CPAs. Then, what you do is you go down through the six questions. Like I just covered. And for each of them, you will get one go at label at a time. And you rate yourself on a scale of one to 10. 10 being, yes, this is. Really something I'm passionate about or really something I'm strong in. One being It's on the low end for me. So Label one. If I say that's for authors, do I enjoy learning about this and going liable? Absolutely. That's an eight for me. I love online marketing book, writing all things, book writing. And you go right down through it. You have a total possible score of 60. If you answered 10 on all six questions for that egoic label. You could have a 60. But you're probably not going to hit 10. On all three of Glock labels on all six questions. So you want to tally those up and see what came out on top for you. Now that doesn't mean you have to go with the one that's on top. Okay. If the second one is still in your gut, like I think this is still the one go for it. This is just a helpful exercise to help you. So the audience filter scorecard is a useful tool for identifying your target audience. Again, the scorecard helps you to approach this audience identification in the logical step-by-step manner. So again, first step identify at least three ago. Labels. The next step, use the scorecard to ask the six questions about your goal labels. And then add up the score and make a decision. And once you do, you're going to be ready to move to the next phase. Now, as we get into chapters eight, nine, and 10. We're going to be talking about my audience GPS system, and that simply stands for goals. Passions and struggles. Once you have identified an audience. Now we want to uncover their goals. We want to uncover their passions. And we want to know more about their struggles. And when we do, we've locked in to our audiences, GP S alright, so that is it for chapters six and seven. I hope you're enjoying this book club series. In the next episode, we'll be talking about chapters eight and nine, once you to join me for that. And if you don't have a copy of the book, you can go get a copy of the book. At platform growth books.com. And that'll lead you to Amazon, where you can get either the Kindle, the paper back, there's a hard cover. And there's even an audio book that you can follow along with us. All right. That is it for this particular episode? Let me know what you want me to cover on future episodes and take a moment, like share, review our right, our show. And until next time. I never forget your message matters.