The topic I want to explore today is what I call the hustle.
It’s basically the part of your entrepreneurial journey we’re you are not well known yet you’re still trying to establish a name.
I’m actually going through this right now because other than LinkedIn, I spent about eight years more or less neglecting every other social network out there. The good part about that is that I was able to be fairly successful in maintaining my mental health during this time. The bad news is that I basically started from no following. Because of this, I’m having to do a lot of hustling to try to rapidly build a follower base to be able to expand the reach of my show of the things that I’m saying doing beyond a single social network.
Of course, as I’m going through all this, I see people who already have an audience and I get infected with insane jealousy when they’ll do something. Like they’ll have a screen capture of something that they put on that they repost on LinkedIn will be something that’s true but fairly simple. It’ll be something like ‘Great leaders are focused on their people instead of themselves.’
Yes, of course that’s true.
If you have somebody who is already New York Times best selling author, they’ll put that up there and they’ll have 500 comments and 20,000 likes. And of course it’s frustrating because you work and work and work at work to try to come up with all these profound ideas and somebody who’s famous put something up that’s fairly simple and straightforward and they get just they get tons of press.
But that’s how social media works.
You have to go through the hustle in order to get noticed and in order to gain followers. And so the thought of today is really about going through that hustle is about going from no audience to having an engaged audience. In my observation, there’s not really a shortcut for this. I think there’s a lot of ways you can make it take longer than otherwise necessary. But unless you’re sitting on just a boatload of money, there’s not really a way to make this happen fast.
Essentially what you need to do is you need to produce content, need to distribute it, need to engage with people.
This is a really hard process to go through, but I think it’s really critically important for our successes to entrepreneurs because the extent of our reach in a lot of cases will determine how successful we are in marketing our products and services.
When you’re first starting out, you won’t usually have a ton of ad budget. Also, when you’re first starting out, you don’t have an elaborate value ladder built out. You might have one or two things that you’re doing, but it won’t be an interconnected system yet.
The way that all of these successful online marketers do things now that’s different from the starting entrepreneurs is they’ll have say, five or six or seven sales funnels and they’ll have three or four that are being stacked on top of one another. So they might have a lead magnet that’ll be something like ’99 Secrets to company finances’ or ’45 HR secrets for hiring managers’ or something like that.
That’ll be what’s called a lead magnet that takes you into then that will get you on a follow up sequence and that might take you to a book, a book offer where they say, hey, come to this landing page and we’ll send you a book for free. Just help us cover shipping for $5 or $9 or something like that.
So then you go forward and they say – hey, we want you to attend this webinar where you’re going to learn secrets from our master class. Well then the webinar of course is where the master class gets pitched. And then let’s say you sign up for that and then of course the next layer is where you’re going to say, okay, well we have this coaching group or there’s a special consulting group or there’s a special inside circle master mind.
But when you’re going through the process of trying to become your own entrepreneur, you don’t have that big value ladder built out yet because generally speaking, if you try to build that out before you do anything, you’ll go bankrupt.
So that means that you have to figure out how to hustle through the process of making a living, running your business, presumably taking care of your family and building out this elaborate information marketing machine that really frankly is necessary in order to be really successful as an entrepreneur in the current world.
My observation about this process is that it’s kind of like the ordeal and the ‘hell week’ ordeal during Navy Seal training. It is extremely difficult. It requires facing a lot of your own fears and insecurities. It requires going through a consistent feeling of failure. But then ultimately I think that it’s something that’s necessary in order to really achieve the goals that we all have, which is really to generate that next level life and more importantly, to really to have a positive impact on the people who we’ve been called to serve.
