Cement Your Expertise: Create Your Own Language Identifier
I love this technique because of how simple it is, yet how immensely powerful it can be when executed well.
If you’re looking to create the perception in your market that you are an expert at what you do, one of the key techniques you can apply is to create what I call a Language Identifier.
I’ll explain exactly what this is and how to create one in a moment, but first I want to clarify some key traits of your modern day expert, or maven, a term brought back into popularity thanks to the proliferation of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point book.
There Is No True Expert
I have to begin by clarifying that there really is no such thing as a true expert.
Every person on this planet is in a constant state of change and will spend their entire life learning new things. It’s impossible to ever repeat the exact same experience, hence everything is new in the moment that you experience it. In a sense we are all students, not experts, and always will be.
Certainly some people know more than others, but even a person who knows more than anyone else on the planet about a certain subject, only knows a teeny-tiny percentage of the total knowledge they could accumulate.
You could say it’s impossible to ever become a true expert unless you can accumulate infinite knowledge. Infinite knowledge is not something generally experienced in the physically realm, so as we tend to do in our world of relativity, we use a method of comparison and say someone is an expert, in relation to someone else.
Expertise Is A Perception
The key to establishing expertise is to create the perception in a large enough group of people that you know what they don’t, and in particular your knowledge resulted in you experiencing or having something that they recognize as relevant or important to them.
The point here is that truth really doesn’t matter. Of course you don’t want to falsely project you know something you don’t, and then find yourself in a situation where you have to demonstrate your knowledge. This could lead to you being labeled a fraud, and it’s a lot harder to rid yourself of a bad reputation than it is to establish a good one.
The “truth” that matters is how other people perceive you. Every person who comes into contact with you will look at you through their own set of glasses. You have the power to influence those glasses using the power of persuasion.
What Is A Language Identifier?
How Well Do You Know Your Customer?
I’m not 100% sure, but I believe the very first email list I subscribed to was David DeAngelo’s Double Your Dating free newsletter. At the time I didn’t realize David D. was a nom de plume (fake name) and that the real person behind the newsletter was Eben Pagan, who I would later come to know as a leading Internet marketer.
In more recent years I’ve studied Eben’s work extensively, however it was my experience on his alter ego’s email newsletter all those years ago that I count as one of the most beneficial in my own career as an Internet marketer.
The reason why the Double Your Dating email newsletter was so valuable to me was because it was the only time I can remember studying an email list from the frame of two very important perception points in a completely “raw” state of mind -
- As a customer who was suffering the pain that the newsletter purported to help cure
- As a newbie Internet marketer studying how to make money online
When I first subscribed to Double Your Dating I was a young single guy struggling to figure out how to meet and date girls. I subscribed because the sales copy “spoke” to me. The benefits struck an emotional cord with my own desires. It was as if this person understood where I was coming from and where I wanted to go.
Like many young men at the same time as I was looking to gain experience with women, I was also looking for ways to make money and establish myself as a business man. In this case, the Internet was my chosen landscape to build my fortunes and I was studying what those who already had made money online did to build their wealth.
Given Eben Pagan created one of the most effective (and substantial – each email was MASSIVE) email marketing sequences in existence today, the foundation for a twenty million dollar dating empire, I had happened upon one of the best resources to study, even though I didn’t know it at the time.
Unfortunately in some ways, from that point forward as I became more familiar with Internet marketing, I found it increasingly difficult to fully engage with any online studying materials because I was constantly analyzing the “how” of what they did (the meta-analysis), rather than engaging with the “what” of what was being taught.
The Customer Avatar
I’ve been going through the recordings of Eben Pagan’s Get Altitude training, a high level coaching program for entrepreneurs who want to take their business to greater success.
One of the fundamentals that Eben teaches is to truly understand where your customer is coming from. This is not just knowing the needs and wants of your ideal customer, but understanding who they are, how they live, who they associate with, what their general attitude to life is – AND, more importantly, what are the underlying emotional conditions driving the actions they take.
To facilitate a deeper understanding of your customer, Eben teaches a concept known as the Customer Avatar.
Video: What Is More Profitable Than Selling Your Own Product?
As my Twitter followers know, I’ve been on the hunt for a stand up table to use as my work desk. I’ve wanted one for a long time because I can sometimes work long hours sitting down and my body, especially my back suffers. Standing up is much better for your body, especially your back and when I recently had Eben Pagan re-emphasize this fact in his Wake Up Productive program, I started actively looking for a tall desk.
Amazingly enough, after I tweeted about it, a staff member from Ikea representing my local branch of the store sent me a reply through Twitter pointing out some of the stand-up desks they sell. This week I went out to Ikea and bought one (well done to Ikea for being on top of Twitter marketing – I’m VERY impressed).
In this video I start with a brief demonstration of my home office set-up with the new stand-up desk and then move on to the teaching component of the video, about selling online products.
In a nutshell, in this video I draw upon knowledge gained from Eben Pagan, Mike Filsaime, Rich Schefren and my own recent experience selling information products online, to teach you what I consider a critical element if you really want to grow your online business well beyond six figures.
At the end of the video I recommend you check out what Rich is currently teaching regarding removing constraints as the next step you should take towards releasing your own product online.
If You Want Success Today, Let Yesterday Go And Stop Seeking Tomorrow
Bear with me here, this is going to sound a little strange, especially for a business blog, but I promise you there is a very powerful lesson to be found within these words – powerful for business success too.
Last night (as I write this article) I found myself sitting down on the floor in a half circle of people facing some musical instruments that were waiting patiently for their musician masters to come and start playing. I was told that I was attending a “Kirtan Session” with David Stringer and there would be chanting involved.
My immediate response when I found out where I was going was – “Will I have to chant?”
I’ve chanted before, a couple of times at least, at the end of yoga sessions at some of the more eastern-philosophy yoga schools I’ve attended. They’ve always been very short experiences, made more comfortable due to the preceding yoga workout and its mellow effects. During chant time I’d lightly sing along, enough to be included with the group, but not loud enough for anyone to notice.
You don’t need a good singing voice for chanting mind you, and it’s certainly not about performance quality, rather wholehearted participation is the main criteria, but let’s just say I try and avoid using my voice for anything other than talking. I was cast as the voice-over guy in my grade school musical and there was a reason I wasn’t singing.
So, I find myself sitting on the floor of a yoga studio on a Wednesday night in anticipation of my first Kirtan session. The musicians sit down, David Stringer the lead singer…err…chanter starts talking about chanting, a projector fires up with some decidedly yogic words lighting up the wall above the musicians, and the chant begins.
The leader begins by chanting the words, which are very simple, usually two to four words repeated over again in basic sequences. Then the audience (including the other musicians) chants the words and then back to the leader, then to the rest of us again, and back to the leader, and so on.
The whole processes is driven by the music and the leader, with the pace increasing, different inflections and melodies help make it interesting, but essentially you are chanting the same words over and over again.
And yes, I had to chant.
The Real Secret To A 2-Hour Work Day
I recently attended a network event as a panelist on the subject of social media. Before the panel discussion part of the evening began, a group of about one hundred attendees who work in PR and/or own a business, were mixing and mingling in the pre-show drinks and nibbles party.
I was standing in a circle talking to a group of people, all involved in running their own businesses. As we talked I noticed a difference between how these people worked to build their businesses (or at least how they talked about their work) and how I work on my business. They seem forever busy, and while they were brave enough to start their own business, the amount of labor hours they put in is significant.
The problems people have with their relationship to work became clearer when I mentioned that I’m doing a productivity course from Eben Pagan (Wake Up Productive), whom none of them had heard of.
I told the people in the circle how I often have a nap in the afternoon if my body feels like it, which got a laugh from some, presumably because they couldn’t imagine sleeping in the middle of a work day. I felt the need to defend myself and explain the nap is actually beneficial for my productivity (Eben suggests this in the course – though I didn’t need him to give me permission to take a nap, that’s for sure!).
My naps are short, usually around 20-40 minutes long and are not solid sleep, more like a dozing in and out of consciousness. I feel amazing once I get up, very clear and coherent – it’s like a reset button when you are feeling tired in the afternoon. Eben, and people he quoted, concurred about the effectiveness of napping for improved productivity.
This concept, the idea of “not working” when it’s designated work time based on what society tells you or how you have conditioned yourself, is something that lots of entrepreneurs and certainly employees have trouble coming to terms with. If you’re working for someone else then obviously you can’t just go to sleep on the job and if you are working for yourself the sense of obligation to keep producing is very strong – you feel guilty if you don’t work a 12 hour day.
Personally I got over the typical working day time structure a long time ago. Truth be told, I never really had to adopt it because I went from school, to university to running my own business at my own pace, so I never had the stringent nine-to-five mentality applied to my life, even if most people around me live that way Monday to Friday.
