It was my 30th birthday that got me serious about starting a business. I know, right? It’s embarassingly cliché, but there you are.
It’s fair to say I over-prepared: 73 books and $5,000 of info-products before I had made one single dollar. I read them all… and I actually did the worksheets.
This is the story of why the worksheets didn’t help me with one of the most important questions you have to answer, and why I had to develop my own.
The question: who is your target market?
Step one: demographics
The older marketing books (the ones for small businesses where the definition of “small” was “less than 500 employees”) told me to do this. My reaction: snore. Snore and panic. I could gather together information about my potential audience, but it was dead information. True but useless. So what if my people were earning, say, $40,000 – $75,000 a year? Is there a “Medium-Level Income Annual Picnic” where I could meet them? I fretted myself silly: does this mean I can’t go into business? Am I just wrong for this?
Luckily, the internet was there to help!
Step two: Ideal Customer personas
Again I bought more information, and learned about the idea of personas: a character who represented the audience who needed my product, making the demographics stand up and put on some pants.
Diligently, I invented Karen, who owned a bike shop and has been thinking about starting a website because new segments of her market expect one. Karen was forty, minimally tech-proficient, and wore her hair in a ponytail.
The problem with Karen was that she was as unreal to me as the demographics. I didn’t know Karen or have any ways of getting in contact with her other than dropping into bike shops and hinting that I knew quite a bit about websites.
But she was a way to get started and to structure the writing. If you read the first two months’ of articles on Be Awesome Online, they were written to Karen. I felt totally disconnected from my business and its customers, but at least I was producing content.
Step three: Right People
I am forever grateful to this idea, which came floating into my awareness at the exact moment it was needed. I had sent out an offer: a 30-minute consulting session to anyone who signed up in three days. Despite being almost completely unknown to anyone, 40 people said yes. (All hail the power of free.)
Most of these sign-ups I didn’t know, or know well. I needed an opener to get a conversation about their website going, and in a blast of inspiration what came out was, “Tell me about the people this website is for.”
Although I didn’t know it, that was the moment my business stopped being specifically about websites, and started being about marketing.
Each session I refined my questions, until I could get a clear description of someone’s Right People in less than five minutes, which we then used as a framework to discuss their website and how it serves those Right People.
What a fantastic idea! I was obsessed. I sought out every article and resource I could find about structuring your marketing around the idea of Right People. I started thinking about who my Right People were: who I most naturally clicked with, who I found it easy to work with and develop products for.
I started using the phrase “delightful weirdos” to identify them. Every article was written for my delightful weirdos. Every product and service was created to meet the needs they were telling me they had. Everything was targeted to them.
First you get the comments. Then you get the retweets. Then you get the money.
This part happened with almost frightening speed: from tumbleweeds rolling down my virtual Main Street to full-time business in about three months, just by identifying and focusing on my Right People.
Betcha ass I was a convert. “Tell me about your Right People” became the opening line of every single consulting session, the sine qua non of my website advice. The articles drifted sideways from tech through mindset to marketing. I’d found the way to think about and structure my relationship with my target audience and how to love the beejesus out of them in ways that made them glorious and made me money. I was a rock star.
And then…
Step four: Bestest People
The generosity and love of my Right People got me to Vegas for BlogWorld, and I endeavoured to repay them by having a blast using the opportunity to up my game. I spent hours writing out my thoughts on the work I did. About what mattered most, where I made the most impact, where I was creating change that no-one else could create, trying to answer the question:
How can I kick the most ass in my business? How can I change the world?
And I had a heart-breaking realisation: there were many of my Right People for whom I could not change the world. There was something about them, about me, about us that resulted in… in pleasantness, in good times but no real impact.
I could speak to those people through my marketing in ways that made them feel magnificent, and that was awesome. (And profitable.) But I couldn’t speak to them in ways that made them BE magnificent.
There was a hole in my Right People. It wasn’t enough to identify who I could work with. I needed to get tighter, into the people I should work with.
And so, the Bestest People was born.
And so was this website.
Be Awesome Online is for my Right People, the people I enjoy advising, spending time, and laughing with.
But this website is where I plan to change the world. I’m doing that by helping my Bestest People unleash their full magnificence into their marketing.
My first big step toward that is coming in just over a week. I am so goddamn excited my brain may explode.
Are you overwhelmingly intruiged? Ready to be part of the revolution? Sign up for the weekly newsletter, right now!
Next time, I’ll be sharing the secret recipe you can use to figure out who YOUR Bestest People are. You don’t want to miss it.
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