Content leads to Clarity to Clients
Channel: George Kao
Date: 2018-02-14

When creating your authentic business, you might get stuck defining your “niche”, or figuring out your “target market.”

Maybe you’re trying to get clarity too early in your journey.

This is the typical reasoning:

Get Clear ➜ Create Content/Offerings ➜ Get Clients

In my experience of personally coaching hundreds of authentic businesses and creating a lot of content on this topic, the above formula is not how it works.

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Read a better-formatted version of the rest of the article here:

https://medium.com/@georgekao/when-creating-your-authentic-business-you-might-get-stuck-defining-your-niche-or-figuring-out-74ee5715858e

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When you try to get clear on your niche, your messaging, your offerings — without enough engagement with your market — you are probably thinking it all up in your own head… your ideas are ungrounded from reality.

This is why so many entrepreneurs “fail” by creating products, programs, services, or events, that nobody wants.

It’s heartbreaking to see it happen.

Unfortunately, it happens all the time. The people that you try to sell to? You find that they don’t care about your product/service. You’re baffled, because you thought the offering is the greatest, and that they really need it.

What happened? You fell into a trap of believing that you can get clarity without first getting engagement.

Creating a successful authentic business works more like this:

Create Content ➜ Engage with Fans ➜ Get Clarity ➜ Get Clients.

You see, the clarity about your niche, your messaging, your offerings, your target market, your ideal client… those don’t come in the beginning. They come much later, after you’re well into the journey of creating content.

I described this process The 4 Layers of Authentic Business: https://medium.com/@georgekao/the-4-layers-of-authentic-business-7e40c53ab598

Creating content allows you to…

Test your ideas
Practice expressing your authentic self
Find your voice and style
Allow your true fans to find you
Engage with your true fans to find out what they most want from you
In other words, you first build an audience with your authentic voice (which means, whatever you are already passionate about and however you like to express it!) and then you get clarity about what they most want from you, which then allows you to create offerings (products/services/events) that they would love.

If you’d like to learn my methods of creating content, I offer a webinar series on authentic content marketing -- http://www.georgekao.com/contentworkshop

“But where’s my audience?”

What if you’ve been creating content, but you’re not getting enough engagement? You’re asking: “Where’s my audience?”

You’re then dealing with a problem of content visibility. I’ve written a blog post sharing some ideas about content distribution.

Since you’re building a business, I would recommend that you set aside at least $30 per month for paid advertising. This will speed up your audience growth by a lot. You’ll build your audience in months, rather than years.

The most cost-effective platform for paid advertising right now, according to many marketing experts, is Facebook Ads. (I offer an affordable webinar training about Facebook Marketing.) By running Facebook Ads effectively, you’ll be distributing your content to thousands of the right people, those who are likely to engage with your content… your potential true fans.

To summarize:

Start by creating authentic content
Learn to distribute it effectively
Don’t worry about first impressions
Know that you’ll get to quality through quantity
Engage with those who enjoy your content by truly caring for them
By doing this, you will reach true clarity about your niche, grounded understanding about what your offerings ought to be, and true fans who will spread your work forward.

Feel free to ask me questions by commenting below. I look forward to hearing from you. ❦