Ask Us Anything 5

Once again, Jonathan and I dip into the mailbag to answer a handful of simmering questions on building your authority business…

When moving from freelancing to consulting, how should I approach building my website portfolio? What kinds of best practices do you suggest?

How do I make sure I don’t lose my technical edge as I transition to more strategic consulting?

I’m not comfortable traveling or mingling with people whose vaccination and cautiousness status I don’t know—and yet it feels like everyone in my industry is anxious to attend events again. Is it possible to grow my authority business 100% virtually?

I’ve built a YouTube audience of 2,000 and an email list of about 1,000 by sharing a passion of mine. While I love doing it, it’s eating up more of my time and I’d like to monetize this—where should I start?

Quotables

“Encourage the client to share specific benefits—probably with numbers—some kind of absolute or relative numbers of the improvement that they attribute to your contribution.”—JS

“Think of your website, not as static, but as a living breathing thing.”—RM

“You can go into the lab and when there’s something big—something game-changing—that enables new things for you that your clients care about.”—JS

“It’s a little bit like riding a bicycle. You can not have ridden one for 10 years, but when you get back on you remember how to steer, you remember where your feet go. You know what to do.”—RM

“Think of someone who you perceive as an authority. Have you ever met them? Probably not. Have you even been to a conference where they were? Probably not.”—JS

“You can become an authority pretty much entirely virtually IF you design your business model to match that.”—RM

“It gets down to who needs, who stands to benefit the most from your superpower and how different do they perceive you to be in terms of the options for solving this problem.”—JS

“When talking to people who are already engaged in your worldview, they’ve signed on. And they’re going to tell you what they want, not just from anybody to solve the problem, but what they want from you.”—RM