 Years ago, I received a piece of career advice that I'm so grateful for still today. It's very simple. It goes like this, go where you're respected. So, of course, this person, by the way, this person was Paul Hocken. He's an eco entrepreneur, very well known in the green business industry. And I was lucky to have gone to a career fair where he was there and shared that advice with us. And the idea is wherever you're going in your career, if you can go where your strengths are naturally appreciated and accepted, not just accepted, but appreciated and valued, and here's my cat's tail, in case you're wondering what that is. Here he is, he just jumped up onto the seat. Go where you're respected, right? Go where you're respected. For example, that's what Mango is doing here. He's respected up here. Then you won't ever have to feel like you are selling yourself. You won't ever have to feel like you have to be someone you are not, okay? And so, of course, those of you watching this probably are building some kind of business. So I'll talk about it in terms of business. How can we make selling unnecessary in business? I mean, you don't like the feeling of selling, do you? I mean, you don't like it when you feel like you have to persuade someone who's got their arms crossed and saying, well, all right, prove to me that you're worth buying from. Neither you like that experience and the person that you're trying to pitch to doesn't like that experience either. So the aim of authentic marketing, which is what I teach, is to make selling unnecessary. So how do we, how does that happen? How do we make selling unnecessary? And I need to say that I have seen this in my business for the past two years, selling has been unnecessary. I basically share, and I'll tell you what the four steps are, okay? Step number one, I am consistently showing up for you with my content, like this video, for example, I am being myself, I'm not trying to be anybody else. I'm so myself that I don't even dress up. I could be in a suit, I have suits and ties. If you want me to wear suits and ties, no, I'm not gonna do what you want me to do. I wanna do what I wanna do, right? In terms of how I express myself, I feel it's important to be authentic, just how I am, how I'm comfortable. And authentic and then relevant, meaning I'm trying to be as helpful to you as I can. Again, I express myself how I want to express myself, but the content of what I say, I'm trying to connect with you and uplift you and be of service to you, help your life and your business be better, right? That's where, that's a big part of it. And then I am consistent at doing this, and I'm consistent at doing this, not as a chore. This is really important. A lot of you feel the way when I talk with you about content, not just you, I mean, everybody, it feels like content is a chore, like, oh, I gotta do content. George, tell me some content. You've already lost if you think content is a chore because then it's not authentic to you, then it's a chore, okay? So instead of content being a chore, like when I was showing up today, I reconnected with how important this, whatever message I'm sharing with you, I believe is, and that I've seen as I talk to people about this, it's helpful for them. So as I show up for you, I'm thinking about how this can help you and that makes me feel good, right? And also I'm doing this as a continual practice of personal growth. I could have slept in more today, sure. I could have played video games this hour, okay? It would have been more fun on a shallow way, but there's a deeper fun happening right here. And the deeper fun is connection to purpose, connection to somebody else, somebody else in their purpose, what I do. And so it's a practice of letting go of the shallow fun, playing video games, surfing Facebook, surfing the net, whatever, eating junk food, whatever I could be doing, watching Netflix, I could be doing anything, I work for myself. So letting go of the shallow fun, noticing what's shallow fun and diving into the deep fun, which is a discipline, because letting go of shallow fun and trying to get the deep fun at first, it's not fun, right? Because you have to get past the shallow part and then you go to the deep part. So you do it as a discipline, but the discipline is to tap into that deep fun of connection, of authenticity, of personal growth, of lifting somebody else, okay? And so that's the first thing I do. The first overall step is consistent content that is expressing as my authentic self and being relevant to uplift and serve you, right? First step. The second step is to distribute that content more widely. I mean, if you surf Facebook, okay, if you surf Facebook, you probably see my postings all the time, right? Like almost every day you surf Facebook, well, hopefully, right? You'll see some posting from me. Now, is it because I am showing up like five times a day? No, I show up Monday through Friday once a day and then I use Facebook ads to distribute that content to you on a regular basis so that whether you're surfing Facebook at 11 a.m. or 11 p.m., you'll probably see something from me, not because I'm there typing away and, you know, no, it's because I'm using ads to just show you whenever you're on Facebook. And soon I'm gonna start using YouTube. I know some of you are watching this on YouTube and I'm gonna start using YouTube ads soon as well so that if you're surfing YouTube, you'll see me as well and Google and elsewhere. So the second step is to use paid advertising to distribute your content to the people who are most likely going to like your stuff. And learning paid advertising is a skill. My favorite is Facebook ads. I think it's the cheapest and easiest way to get your content out to the people who are most likely going to love your stuff based on look-alike audiences targeting very clear, you know, the Facebook ads allows us to do very clear kinds of targeting. So this is what some of you aren't doing. Some of you are like, well, George, I'm just posting on Facebook. Nobody's responding. I'm uploading to YouTube. Nobody's responding. Well, because you haven't taken the second step of using paid advertising to distribute your content to the people most likely going to like your things, right? No wonder, $30 a month. Do you have $30 a month to spend in your business, right, on paid advertising? I hope so. You're a business owner, and you can't spend $30 a month on paid advertising. I don't know what you're doing. I'm sorry to say $30, it's not that much. The $30 a month on Facebook ads, okay, personally I spend $200 to $300 a month just distributing my content on Facebook. I spend another couple of hundred dollars a month distributing my offerings, my product services, but just content alone, I spend $200 to $300, just on free stuff like this, just not asking you to buy this or buy that, just on free stuff. I'm asking you to spend $30 a month. So for $30 a month on Facebook, you can reach at least 1,000 people who are more likely to like your content than the rest of the population, $30 a month. That's all I'm asking you to start with, and you can grow up to what I'm doing now with 200 to 300 if you would like, $30 a month. Got it? $30 a month, for $30 a month, you can get it to 1,000 people at usually more than that, but I'm gonna say usually at least about 1,000, okay? So the second step is distribution through paid advertising of your content. Third step is to personally connect with your biggest fans. So I've talked about this recently with the concept of fan interviews. Personally connect. Now some of you I actually reach out to, and I'm sorry I haven't reached out to you yet, but I have a lot of people to reach out to. But I personally connect with at least one of my biggest fans every week. So I do four fan interviews a week, okay? If you're interested in doing a fan interview with me, let me know in the comments, but I'm still getting to all of you. But yeah, I do one fan interview a week where I am taking the beginner's mindset of just wanting to learn how you describe your business challenges and your marketing. This is what I help you with, right? How do you describe your business challenges? How do you describe your marketing challenges? Who else are you buying from? Why are you buying from them? What else are you not finding in the product and services that are out there to help you with your business marketing? I'm not, in those conversations, I'm not trying to sell you on my thing. I don't have time to sell you on my thing. I'm trying to learn about you, okay? That's all I have time for. Barely, not even if time, just beginning to learn about you, truly. So step three is doing fan interviews or doing other ways of truly one-to-one understanding your ideal audience. Are you doing that? I do one interview a week, but what about you? With my, this is private interviews, not the ones I do publicly with my clients. I post those on Saturdays, you've seen those. That's separate, I also do that once a week usually. But I'm just talking about one private conversation per week, that's what I do. What about you? If I'm doing one a week and I have plenty of, I don't even need any more clients, what about someone like you who does need clients? If I were you, I'd be doing two to three a week if I could, fan interviews to really connect and understand so that you can develop what I call that compassion, focused empathy within yourself about your ideal audience. Okay, so that's a third step is one-to-one connection with your fans to truly understand how they describe their issues that you can help them with. And then fourth is to then offer the product or service that they have been telling you that they need and that they want in the language that they have been using to describe their problems and their goals. That's it. One, two, three, four. One, content and ideally content that's authentic, relevant and consistent, okay? Two, step two, step one is content. Step two is distribution of your content. That's what a lot of you aren't doing. You're posting on Facebook, but you're not using paid ads to distribute that to the right people. No wonder you're not getting any traction. So let's step two is distribution through paid ads. And step three is one-to-one connection with your fans. Okay, fine, you have an audience but you've been trying to sell something and it feels like selling. It feels like, oh my God, you have to promote this, promote that and nobody's buying or too few people are buying. It's because you're not selling what people want. If selling is hard for you, it's because you're not selling what people want. I honestly, you could be so excited because you created this wonderful program. You created this wonderful service but it's all in your head. That's why it feels so wonderful. It's because it's in your head, it feels wonderful. But if people aren't buying, it doesn't feel wonderful to them. You know what I mean? It's people buy what they want from people they trust. People buy what they want from companies or people they trust. So if they're not buying from you, they don't want your thing. I'm sorry to say. They don't want your thing or you don't have enough people to sell it to because you haven't been doing the first two steps of content that's authentic, conscious and relevant and distribution of your content. That brings your audience and then once you have an audience, the questions are they buying what you want? Is there not buying? You're not selling what they want. You're selling what you want, not what they want. Plain and simple. But when you sell what they want, oh, you have to use whisper. Oh, oh, I know what you want. Here's what you want. Oh, wow, oh my God. Yes, right? And that takes one-on-one conversations to really understand the state of the market today. How do you understand the state of the market today? By conversations one-to-one, private conversations with your fans. That's it. What are they buying? That's the market. Where they're spending their money is literally your market. That's, and where are they spending their money? What are they getting for what they're spending their money? And why are they buying that and not yours? Right? Why are they buying that one? Oh, it's because that thing promises this and this and sometimes the promises from our niche mates are hype and we need to explain that in our content as well. Don't demonize any particular person or company but talk about the hype in your industry. This is what I do. Notice that I talk about the hype. I say, don't believe not specific people but don't believe those people who say this because I tell you it's not true. I'm telling you what I've experienced as the truth, what I've seen my clients experience as the truth. Okay, so recap the steps and I gotta go to my next call here. Content that's authentic, relevant, inconsistent. Step one, content. Step two is distribution of that content through paid ads so that you don't have to spend a year or five building an audience. That can happen in three to six months but you've got to use paid ads starting with $30 a month on Facebook and then more if you can. If you want to do it faster, spend more, period, right? Third step is understanding your market today through one-on-one fan interviews and step four is of course creating an offering what they've told you they want and they can't find, right? Or what they're buying. It's just your version of what they're already buying and whatever your version is, clearly gonna be in your own voice, in your own style, you can't help it. No matter how you try to copy somebody else, you can't literally copy someone else because you haven't lived their life. You've lived your life, you have your own voice, you have your own writing style, you have your own image, right? No matter how you try to copy them, I'm not saying to copy other people but I'm just saying some of you are so worried about copying other people, don't worry about it. Try to, no, don't try to copy but just notice what's working and do your version of that and it's gonna be unique just because you're the one doing it, okay? I hope this is helpful and any questions, comment below. Thanks to those of you who were able to join me live. Jill, DeVora, Evelyn, Suzanne, Michelle, Rebecca, Miriam, Esther, Ilsa, Sam, thank you so much for joining me live here and I wish you a wonderful rest of your day.