Do you believe the saying “If it’s to be, it’s up to me?” Many people do. If you don’t, you might already be using leverage in your business to reduce or replace work with a better strategy for growing your business.
One of the challenges that Master Leveragist Scott Manning likes to give his clients is to take their plan for the next 12 months, cross out “months,” and replace it with “weeks.” Now, you’d be forgiven if you thought at first that he meant to get 12 months worth of work done in 12 weeks. But you’d be wrong about Scott’s intent.
What he wants his challenge to accomplish is to get his clients thinking deeply about leverage. Because leverage is the only way you can accomplish the same goals that would normally take you 12 months, in just 12 weeks.
So what if you were given this challenge?
How would you change the way you are marketing now in order to accomplish the same goals you have for 12 months of work in such a short amount of time?
Would you have to change the way you are doing content and social marketing?
Would you have to change the way you look at building your audience and customer base?
Actually, practically everything you do right now to market your business is on the chopping block for this exercise. And practically everything you’re doing right now can be reduced or replaced with leverage plays.
For instance, I bet you’re spending time and resources on content. Content for your site and your social profiles. It could be the main attention-getting factor for you if you are a blogger, but it certainly is a concern for most people looking for a steady stream of organic traffic.
If you’re wondering how you’re going to get 12 months of content and social engagement accomplished in 12 weeks, you’re not alone. Most people will look at their 12 month plan and see mountains of work that needs to be done to hit their biggest goals in the next year.
Leveragists see the problem in an entirely different way.
We know we cannot possibly write 12 months of blog posts in 12 weeks. Not good ones, anyway. And we know we cannot cram 12 months worth of social media engagement into 12 weeks either. Nor can we cram much of anything we had planned over the next year into 12 weeks and get the same results or better.
So we have to dump it. Yep, throw out the detailed content and social marketing plans and start from scratch. A clean slate!
So how can you get the same amount of traffic and attention, subscribers and customers, without man-handling your way there with 12 months hard labor? Simple. You have to give up on building your own audience first and go after existing audiences immediately.
Building your own audience is an admirable goal for any business owner. And you need your own big, healthy audience, eventually. But who says you have to build an audience to then turn around and sell to them? Why can’t you skip right to the “sell to them” part and get in front of audiences that are already hanging on the words of thought leaders and authorities in your market?
–Someone has a high traffic blog in your niche. Have you guest blogged on it yet?
–Someone has a podcast with tons of subscribers in your market. Have you been a guest on it yet?
In fact, there are so many ready-made audiences around you that once you start thinking like a Leveragist, you’ll see opportunity everywhere you look!
If you know how to give thought leaders what they want, they will give you the keys to their kingdom. They will put you front and center on their stage in front of their painstakingly cultivated crowd of followers and let you do your thing. And on that day, you will get a month, 3 months, maybe even 5 months of results that would have normally taken you 20 blog posts and a whole lot of social chatter to achieve.
How’s your 12 month plan looking now?
Even if the quicker version takes you 24 weeks, doesn’t it sound a whole lot better?
With leverage, the work you were planning over the next year gets replaced with thinking and creativity. You see, you already know you have something of value to offer potential customers in your niche. So you should already be offering that value on a podcast with 12,000 listeners… like next week!
The internet is leverage. Once you really understand what that means, you will never go back to virtually shaking each and every hand of each subscriber to signs up for your email list. That’s what people are doing now with content and social media marketing. They aren’t using the leverage the internet affords them. They are acting like they are at a networking event at their local Kiwanis Club.
And it’s not just some people. It’s practically every single business owner on the web that’s doing it this way! There’s always a place in your business where leverage can replace needless work and time-consuming effort.
Start looking for ways to speed up the time it takes to reach your next giant goal for your business. Do it as if your life depended on it. As if you don’t find a way to build a fire tonight, you’ll be a blue-lipped popsicle in the morning.
Opportunity for leverage is laying all around you right this moment. Think like a Leveragist and you’ll begin to see a whole new faster and easier path to your biggest goals.