Jim Connolly

How to become one of the highest paid people in your industry

August 6, 2020 by Jim Connolly

A reader emailed me with a great question. She asked: “What’s the most direct route to becoming one of the best paid service providers in my industry, Jim?” I told her I’d share my answer here, as I know it’s something many of you will find useful.

Sometimes, the best answer to a problem seems too simple to be correct. Too good to be true. Thankfully, when it comes to attracting the very best clients and fees, the simple answer is also the right answer.

Drum roll please…

You attract better clients, better projects and better fees, when you solve better problems.

What do I mean when I say “solve better problems”?

I’m suggesting you deliberately choose to apply your skills (in whatever area of business you’re in) to the most challenging work. I’m talking about the really tricky stuff. The demanding work, which requires more thinking, deeper problem solving and greater effort.

Here’s why this approach is so powerful

Very few service providers deliberately choose to solve the most pressing and valuable problems. The vast majority do what’s expected. In other words, they work hard doing their best possible version of what their marketplace expects from someone in their industry.

If you’re willing to embrace solving better problems, it presents you with a double opportunity.

By seeking out the most challenging work, your fees are not only higher, you also find yourself with very little (often zero) meaningful competition.

Hold on. There’s another benefit.

The providers who focus on solving the best problems aren’t only (by far) the highest paid, with the least competition. They also get to work every single day, on the most interesting and professionally rewarding projects.

Let’s recap. By shunning the middle ground and choosing to solve better problems you get:

The best clients. (Clients who pay the top rates because they value your skills are always the best to work with).
A chance for you to earn the highest fees in your industry or profession.
Far, far less competition. Read this.
The most interesting type of work.
Bigger and better rewards on every level.

Easier said than done?

Yes, of course it is. But that’s precisely why this opportunity exists.

The serious marketing problem that no one talks about

August 4, 2020 by Jim Connolly

I was in a coffee shop once, when a guy with a very obvious hairpiece came in. He had natural, thick brown hair around his ears, with a jet black wig on top. Of course, no one mentioned it to him. People just smirked when he wasn’t looking. Whether this guy needed the hairpiece for vanity or medical reasons, it’s entirely possible he has no idea that his wig is so poorly matched to his natural hair.

A very similar kind of silence happens regularly in business. And when it does, it costs you a fortune.

Allow me to expand on that.

We check out the Facebook page, Linkedin or Twitter account of a potential vendor. We notice their updates are mostly just a series of desperate sales pitches and quotes from famous people. We don’t tell them they put us off by looking so needy and bland. We silently move on.
We start reading a poorly-written piece of marketing and quickly discard it. We don’t email the company and tell them their content is losing them business. We silently move on.
We go to a website to check out a potential service provider. We then see that their site is amateurish and decide not to consider them. We don’t call them to let them know their site created such a bad impression. We silently move on.

So, faced with all this silence, how do you figure out if what you’re doing is working for you? Simple. You ‘listen’ to what your results are telling you. That’s where the most accurate signal is.

For example.

Your website should be a 24-hour, business generating machine. If it isn’t, it’s telling you something. It’s telling you that it urgently needs to be improved.
Your newsletter should regularly attract sales, sales leads or new clients. If it isn’t, it’s telling you something. It’s telling you that you need to quickly improve your strategy.

The lesson here?

Don’t wait for someone to tell you your marketing sucks. Because they won’t. Your friends don’t want to upset you. Your competitors don’t want you to become a threat. And strangers don’t give a rat’s ass.

Instead, listen to what your results are telling you. Follow the direction of travel and see if you’re happy with where you’re likely to be next month, next quarter and next year.

Then act accordingly.

This is unreasonable, right?

August 3, 2020 by Jim Connolly

I’ve had an idea that could help your business in multiple ways. It’s an unreasonable idea. Yes, I know that sounds weird.

Allow me to explain.

If a product or service is only reasonably good, it’s nothing special. It’s just okay. It’s certainly not good enough to motivate people to buy from you, hire you or tell all their friends about you.

So… this got me thinking

The opposite of reasonable is unreasonable.

What if someone decided to embrace an unreasonable mindset to their business and the services they provide?

I believe it could lead to some significant improvements. Improvements that would encompass their whole business. Here are just a few examples of what an unreasonable approach might look like, which immediately came to mind.

A business owner could choose to:

Be unreasonably committed to customer service and the total happiness of their clients or customers.
Show unreasonable persistence when it comes to delivering projects on time and keeping their promises.
Have an unreasonable attitude to life long learning and developing their potential.
Set the bar unreasonably high on the quality of work they’re willing to ship. (This will help you) get it right.
Have an unreasonable passion for helping others to succeed.

Surely, any business operating from that kind of unreasonable mindset, is going to get noticed. They’re going to retain their clients for longer, too. And yes, they’re going to give their clients and their marketplace something interesting to tell their friends about. That’s a lot of important boxes checked, as a natural consequence of being unreasonable.

In short, if being reasonable isn’t working for you, you now have an unreasonable alternative to consider.

4 Proven ways to quickly attract more customers

August 2, 2020 by Jim Connolly

How easy do you make it for prospective clients or customers, to spend their money with you?

That may sound like an odd question. After all, every business owner should be making the purchasing process as effortless as possible. As you know, this is often not the case. In fact, we regularly encounter challenges that stop us from choosing a particular vendor.

Thankfully, it’s not that hard to significantly improve your sales (or client acquisition numbers), by paying attention to the following 4 areas.

1. Make it as easy as possible for people to contact you

A common mistake most business owners make, is to require too much information on their contact forms. When someone is making an initial enquiry via your website, you need their email address, name and message. That’s it. Just the most basic details so you can contact them.

Every additional piece of information you’re asking for, loses you enquiries from prospective clients.

Ask for the minimum amount of information to get the maximum amount of enquiries.

It makes absolutely no sense to have unnecessary hurdles in the way, which are reducing the number of enquiries you get. And as you know, fewer enquiries means fewer clients. Remember, you can get whatever information you need, after you’ve connected with them. At this point it’s a lot more comfortable for the prospective client.

You’ll get everything you require, without losing all those valuable enquiries.

2. Be open for business when they need you

Most businesses copy the opening hours of their competitors. A better model, is to base your opening hours on the needs of your marketplace.

If you’re available when your marketplace needs you, but your competitors are not, you win. Being available doesn’t mean using a call-handling firm to take details. It doesn’t mean having an AI bot on your website. It means having a member of your team available, who can provide an informed, human connection.

Sounds like a bit of a pain, right?

Exactly!

That’s why your competitors aren’t doing it. And why the opportunity to gain a huge advantage could be staring you in the face.

3. Provide flexible payment options

I’m often amazed at the limited payment options offered by small businesses. That’s never a smart move, but during a global economic crisis, it’s a potentially fatal error.

Thankfully, it’s totally avoidable.

Thanks to services like PayPal, it has never been easier for small business owners to accept payment via credit card, debit card and charge cards. And if you factor the payment fees into your prices correctly, all those additional transactions needn’t cost you a penny.

Important: If you use a lesser-known payment provider, because they’re a little cheaper, be aware that many (and I mean many) prospective customers won’t trust them. Consider the cost to you in lost sales, against the gains you make from lower transaction costs. There’s almost always a significant trade-off, in my experience.

4. Use Risk Reversal

I do this with my Pick My Brain service and people love it. It works like this. If someone uses the service and doesn’t believe it’s worth the fee, I offer them an immediate, 100% refund. It means they can hire me with total peace of mind. No one has ever requested a refund, but the offer shows how confident I am, that I will provide massively more value than they pay for.

Clearly, this type of risk reversal doesn’t work for every business model. However, if you think it could work for you it’s definitely worth exploring.

Take a moment to review the suitability of those four options for your business. Any one of them could potentially bring a significant improvement to your business.

Why people criticise you and how to deal with it in just 3 steps

August 1, 2020 by Jim Connolly

Here is a simple, powerful 3 step process, to help you totally overcome the impact or fear of negative criticism. It will show you why people criticise you and how to deal with it… fast!

Broadly, all of your critics can be divided into 1 of the following 2 groups:

Those who want to help you and encourage you.
Those who want to hinder you and see you fail.

It’s the second type of critic, which I want to talk to you about today. It’s that type of negative criticism, which stops many of us from being willing to stand out. It stops us putting our work or art out there. It encourages us to keep our head down. To follow the crowd.

The power of a critic

If you want your business to stand out, to attract lots of word of mouth referrals, it’s essential that you stop negative criticism from influencing you.

Why?

Because just about everything you need to do in order to market your business successfully, is visible and wide open to criticism. Anything you do, which is different enough for the marketplace to value it, is also visible enough for critics to criticise it.

So, you either learn to deal with it or do what most small business owners do, and run a business in the shadows, which is not a wise marketing move!

3 Steps to deal with negative criticism

Fortunately, dealing with negative criticism is relatively easy, so long as you learn to accept it for what it is. Once you understand why criticism happens, it eliminates its negative impact and allows you to focus all your effort on putting your best work out there.

Because I publish lots of material to a large audience, I get negative criticism regularly. In fact, the better my work, the more likely it is that at least one person will criticise it or criticise me for writing it.

Here are the 3 steps I used, to totally eliminate the negative impact of criticism.

1. Consider their motivation

When someone feels the need to negatively criticise your work, they are satisfying a need they have. It’s always about them, not you or your work.

Even if someone is negatively criticising you because they hope it will help you improve, it’s to satisfy their desire to help.

So, whatever the intention, criticism is always about the critic!

Understanding this is a key part of disempowering the critic’s influence over you and how you feel. When you accept that it’s NOT about you or your work, you see criticism for what it is: a selfish act perpetrated to feed a need the critic has – positive or negative.

Of course, even if the motivation is negative, if they are an expert in the field, you can still learn from what the critic says. Scientists often negatively criticise the work of their peers, people who really know their subject. That kind of criticism may be negative, but it can bring value with it.

This brings us nicely to the second step.

2. Consider the source

Is the person who is negatively criticising you, qualified to criticise you? Most criticism is unqualified. That’s to say, the person criticising your work doesn’t know enough about the subject or what you’re trying to achieve, to offer anything other than an uninformed opinion.

Negative criticism from an unqualified, uninformed source is of so little value that it’s meaningless.

It makes zero sense to pay it any of your valuable attention.

3. Use negative criticism as weights in your mental gym

With each piece of criticism that you run through the previous 2 steps, you build your resistance to the negative impact of critics. Just as lifting weights builds your muscles, processing negative criticism builds your emotional defences. Each time you are criticised and see it for what it really is, it becomes easier. Less daunting. Less fearsome.

Pretty soon, you learn to be fascinated by criticism and what it tells you about the other person. You quickly learn that if no one is criticising you, you are either invisible, doing work that fails to stand out… or both.

In short, don’t try and avoid negative criticism. If you do, it will rob you of your voice. No criticism means no impact! And you deserve to be heard.

Tip: If you found this useful, you can get my latest ideas delivered direct to your inbox, for free, right here.

10 Proven ways to get free publicity for your business

July 31, 2020 by Jim Connolly

Here are 10 motivators, which inspire people to spread the word about you. See which ones you can adapt and apply into your business.

People will share your message, if it’s baked into your product or service. When you see someone using a laptop in public, the logo is visible on the lid.
People will share your message, if it makes them look clever. This is why social networks are packed with Einstein quotes.
People will share your message, if they care about you and they believe sharing your message will help you.
People will share your message, if they want you to notice them.
People will share your message, if it makes them appear generous to their friends.
People will share your message, if they think it will make them look ahead of the curve or cutting-edge.
People will share your message, if it’s remarkable. Extremely satisfied customers tell their friends when they receive an amazing service. Read more here.
People will share your message, if they are part of your community and want others to join them.
People will share your message, if it says something they aren’t brave enough to say for themselves.
People will share your message, if they believe it’s of great value and that their friends need to know.

Here’s an additional tip.

Think about the last time you freely gave positive publicity about a company, product or service. Now consider what it was about your experience, which motivated you to spread the word. Then, spend some time looking for ways to adapt and incorporate your version of that motivating factor, into your own products or services. This can be really effective, so give it the time and effort it deserves.

With the unique challenges facing business owners right now, the ability to generate earned publicity, rather than paid, has never been more valuable.

Stay strong my friend.