I asked senior lecturer Alan Charlesworth, “Give me your definition of marketing.”
Mr. Charlesworth is a very to-the-point kinda guy. Extremely practical instead of theoretical.
Instead of a fluffy definition, he said: “Marketing is about selling.”
Listen to the episode here:
Youtube: https://youtu.be/r1Uk-kpH5wk
Spotify/Apple: https://anchor.fm/talking-business
In YRC, everything revolves around selling. That’s why we start with qualitative market research, build an audience of buyers, and presell before we make something.
By now, you should be comfortable with things like Fishing and Tribebuilding. Don’t worry if you’re not, I’ll do a short recap in this piece.
Today, we’re going to talk about Farming. (Finally! hahah)
Once you’ve identified the Audience you wish to serve, you’ve studied where they hang out online, and you’ve diagnosed:
Their Star Problem(s)
Their Willingness To Pay (How much $ they will spend at most)
Their Consideration Set (Set of all alternative options which includes non-consumption)
Now it’s time to start doing two things:
Fishing
Tribebuilding
Fishing helps you make money TODAY.
You’re doing cold outreach in order to try and get sales or pre-sales.
But the cool thing is that even if you don’t make any, you’ll still get the following benefits:
Building the habit of doing outreach daily (important cuz no one’s coming to you, you have to go to them!)
Testing your positioning statement which allows you to tweak the Star Problem and Audience
Kill the idea if absolutely no one likes it which means you saved valuable time and money
Tribebuilding means you’re gonna build your audience of buyers.
The cool thing here is that once you’ve got a big enough group of people who believe what you believe, have the Star Problem you identified, and are Willing To Pay a certain amount of money to fix it…
Selling becomes as easy as simply saying: “Hey, I got a solution to X for $Y. Looking for 10 early birds to see if I should even make this thing. Here’s my PayPal/Lemonsqueezy. Full refund if I don’t get 10 sign-ups.”
The downside is that it takes a lot of time to get there… which is why you should start today.
Here’s how:
PIGGYBACKING
Let me quickly introduce one more bit of YRC lingo… A Tribe refers to the subset of the audience that aligns with you, your style of communication, your beliefs, etc. Once they go one step further and raise their hands to say: “Hey, I got this Star Problem and I trust that you can help solve it.” We’re talking about a List.
So the difference between a Tribe and a List is a sale at the price of $0. E.g. your Twitter/LinkedIn following is your List. So are the people that have opted into your email newsletter.
But the people that engage with your Reddit posts are your Tribe.
The first technique is piggybacking.
Growing an audience when it’s already sufficiently big is easy. You can write about pretty much anything because you’ve got enough eyeballs on it that it’ll resonate with a subset of your Tribe.
But what if you’ve got almost no following?
The mistake here is to make a bunch of content. If we take Twitter as an example, you’ll just be tweeting into the void. No one will ever discover it barring some lucky accident. (And even then, that most likely won’t translate into followers.)
So here’s what you do instead: you piggyback off a thought leader in your space who already has the audience you wish to serve.
Click to zoom
HERE’S HOW TO PIGGYBACK
1. Find 2 thought leaders in your space
2. Turn on the bell so you get a notification on your phone when they post
3. Be the first to comment SOMETHING REALLY HELPFUL
Now sit back and piggyback off of their reach.
Two things will hopefully happen:
i. People will like your reply. And since you’re first, you’ll become the top reply with a ton of likes. (Which means it’ll snowball.)
ii. A portion of those people will follow you.
FARMING
Fishing is called fishing because you present a piece of bait and then you’re patient.
You wait to see if the fish will bite.
If they don’t… you don’t change the fish. You change the bait. The fish don’t care that pizza is your favorite food cuz they want worms. So you use worms as bait and try again.
Farming is called farming because it’s a different way to eat. You plant a seed, nurture it, and eat next year.
There are two kinds of farming:
Farming in your own garden
Farming in someone else’s garden
Farming in your own garden means you take the initiative to post.
Tweeting, writing on your blog, making a Twitter thread, a Reddit post, posting on a forum or community, uploading a YouTube video, make a LinkedIn slideshow are all examples of Farming in your own garden.
This has two benefits:
It crystallizes your thoughts which makes you better at your job. (When I first started speaking and teaching, I’d been explaining stuff for so long, I felt like a fish in water.)
It may help people find you and thereby growing your Tribe and List
But again… if your following is small, there’s a good chance you’ll just be wasting a bunch of time.
So instead, in the beginning, spend most of your time Farming in someone else’s garden.
Jonathan Stark calls this Answer Bombing.
The idea is very simple.
You just go to a clubhouse (remember that you already found those in our Research-First loop), and look for cries for help.
If someone needs help with X, you do as good of a job as possible to help them solve it.
People purchase your products because they’re are location A and they desire to get to location B.
That’s the same reason why they ask questions. So another way of thinking about helping them is to close the AB gap.
Click to zoom
Don’t be lazy here because… doing a good job answering their question will make you better at your job. You’ll internalize your Audience’s Star Problems, the language they use (which’ll inform your copy later), and where and why they’re stuck. You’ll also get better at communicating the solution the more you practice.
If that wasn’t good enough… your answer can become a YouTube video, a TikTok, a tweet, a thread, a LinkedIn post, a Reddit post, a blog post, and an email.
So that little bit of work for your answer bomb can be repurposed for your Farming in your own garden.
In YRC, my students have to do quite a bit of work but once you realize most of it can be repurposed it’s much less intimidating.
Here’s my own checklist for Fishing and Tribebuilding:
Click to zoom
That’s it. If you do both Fishing and Tribebuilding daily, you won’t have a shortage of sales.
An audience of buyers is a killer asset to have. I hope this gives you a tangible action plan to start building yours.
Chop wood. Carry water.
RJY
If you’d like me to personally help you monetize your expertise and get to at least $10K a month, then come join YRC. Over the course of 30 days, you’ll learn everything you need to know to get started as a solopreneurship, get paid for what you know, and you’ll build the habits of Fishing and Farming every day.