I love fire more than you do.
When I was 14 I almost got arrested for juggling fire. Well, not for juggling, per se, but for drawing a crowd big enough to block the sidewalk & forcing folks into the street who wanted to get by.
Fire & street performing taught me a lot of what I use every day in my business, nearly 20 years later.
It’s all about triangles
Triangles are everywhere, and for good reason. They’re simple, strong, and infinitely variable.
Once you see it, you’ll notice them everywhere.
3 legged stools are stable on any surface. Triangle chokes in martial arts are nearly infinite in number.
Ever heard of the fire triangle?
Fire needs oxygen, fuel, and heat to exist. Remove any one from the equation, and it goes out.
Turns out there’s a “fire triangle” of doing business online. These are the 3 essential elements to successfully doing business on the internet. Get any single one wrong, and you’re not going to be toasting any success marshmallows.
</mangled metaphor>
Website
You have to have a place where you can build your presence. Some people use Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I prefer having my own website.
Hey, look! You’re on one right now!
If you’re building on someone else’s platform, they can change the rules overnight, and you’ve lost all your hard work. (Ask me about my friend who lost his 40,000 YouTube followers due to their mixup, never to get them back.)
A website is always available. Multiple people from different places on Earth can visit the same website at the same time. That’s like being in 2 places at once.
You can’t do that.
Your website is your best tool for telling people who you are & what you’re about. When we do that in the real world we call that having a conversation & that builds trust.
Your website is your virtual handshake and trust builder with potential customers & clients.
Social Media Marketing
You have to tell people you exist.
I get it. You want people to find your organically. You want to feel like people are connecting with you based on the value of your work.
You want people to like your page because you’re just that wonderful and they should just know.
You feel like if you tell people about your work, you’re being sleazy.
Well, consider this.
What if you created the cure for cancer in a lab in Antarctica? What if you didn’t tell anyone you created the cure for cancer? What if you thought,
“I’ve worked hard creating this cure. People should know how amazing it is. I shouldn’t have to explain it to them. I want them to come to me here in the frozen-ass wasteland where I live.”
For shame! How dare you hide the cure from the world like that! You have a moral obligation to tell as many people in as many different ways you’ve done this amazing thing.
Telling people you’ve cured cancer is marketing. Helping people understand how valuable the cure is, is sales.
Now, if your cure is just water, and you’re telling people it’s the cure for cancer, then you’re lying & that’s sleazy.
But, there’s nothing inherently wrong with telling people what you offer is valuable, and the best place to do that nowadays is online.
Think about someone asking you to marry them on the first date.
Sure, there might be a situation where you’d say yes (Maybe it’s me: devastatingly handsome, charming, and successful. I get it, but my heart belongs to someone else.), but the chances are you wouldn’t have enough context to make a decision. You barely know the person.
If you ask too early it’s gonna be awkward. Too many people ask for the sale right away and they wonder why they get turned down.
Think of email as a way to court your customer. Help them understand how wonderful you are. You show them you can be a good conversationalist. They have a good time whenever you show up, and eventually they look forward to hearing from you.
That’s what email can do for your business.
Put It All Together
If you apply these three things in juuuuust the right way, you’ll have a successful business that you can run from anywhere in the world.
Don’t know what your fuel is? Tried it before but it didn’t work? Let’s chat about it. This is what I do for a living! I help people turn their experience into a successful business by helping them create their own holy trinity.
If you’ve read this far, let’s talk about how we can make this happen for you. Join my secret email society with the form below.
(You can marry me!)