Passion, Expertise and Authority by Christopher Tracy

As with many business stories we hear about in Success magazine, and Inc Magazine, the word “passion” is thrown around as if it’s the very foundation for business success.

“Passion” is the media darling for successful startup stories. We hear people like Seth Godin talk about it. Brian Tracy swears by it. Tim Feriss thinks it’s a bonus to have.

Imran Md Ali, who is our featured guest of the month, shares with us his understanding of the word “passion” in the context of entrepreneurship.

Imran is a co-author of Kaizen Business Principles with the legendary Brian Tracy (www.BrianTracy.com) and also author of 2 other books, The 10 Step Marketing Formula and Creating Marketing Breakthroughs, which are available at Amazon and also Barnes and Noble.

In an interview with Imran, he shares with us why passion is the core foundation for business success, and why passion alone will not be sufficient to ensure success.

There are two things which he says are needed, on top of passion alone in order to succeed. The first, is Genuine Domain Expertise.

Genuine Domain Expertise is simply being a real expert in whatever niche or industry you’re in. So if you’re in the restaurant marketing industry, the definition of an expert in Imran’s dictionary, is “someone who is in the top 5 percentile in terms of knowledge in restaurant marketing.”

It simply means that you have to keep learning, and gravitate towards the top of your class (or niche)

This, according to Imran, will give you a platform to operate from. People prefer to work with experts, and experts get paid more for less work too. The reason for this is because we are living in world where expertise is rewarded, and generality is punished with mediocre pays and prospects for jobs.

Here are 2 tips Imran gives to establish instant expertise.

1) Read up for one hour each day, about a topic in your market. At the end of the year, you’d have read about 400 hours worth of material and this should allow you to establish your expertise.

2) After reading, aim to apply your new-found knowledge for free as practise for clients. So if you’re a relationship guru, give away your advice for free in the beginning to practise what you have just read. This concretizes your new found knowledge.

Another aspect of passion would be authority.

Now, in a world where everyone claims to be an expert of some sort, you’d have to climb further, harder, and longer than the rest to establish yourself as a real authority in your marketplace.

Imran Md Ali shares some of the things you can do to establish authority

1) First, get some media coverage. Media coverage is a quick path to endorsed authority. Why? We have, as consumers, been trained to trust the media. How do you get media, you might ask?

Imran advises you to create a newsworthy angle. Get a PR expert to write up a press release, and send it out to all local news channels and magazines/papers. A reporter would inevitably find your story interesting enough to feature it.

Once you have gotten this initial exposure, snowball it by approaching other media sources and showing that you have been featured before. Keep on creating news angles that the media would love and try to be a media darling, and this would pay off in the long term.

2)Secondly, create a blog or website that showcases your past and current work. This is a site that allows you to store your bragging rights. State your achievements on this page and don’t be shy about it at all.

This way, when someone Googles for your name, your blog will appear and they can find out more about you- And the best part is, your website says only the good things about you!

That’s it then. Two things accompany passion, and those are 1) Expertise and 2) Authority

Apply what you have learnt and you will soon be on your way to dominating your industry or marketplace.

Guest Interview written by Christopher Tracy, CEO of CLT Holding and Imran’s marketing client in 2011.

The Drama You Like

By ThePRtist

Drama in your business is not always a bad thing.  The kind of drama we want to avoid is drama that causes us to lose money. Drama that causes our customers to lose focus.  Drama that causes people to stop wanting to come into the business, stop wanting to get our e-mails, and stop wanting to interact with us.  That’s the bad drama.

But there’s a good drama to your business that you might be missing out on.  For example, there is a way to do business that will make it an exciting experience for your customer.  That’s drama.  That’s the kind of drama that you want.  That’s the kind of drama that you need to put into your business in 2013.  In 2013, it’s about creating an experience for your clients.  How do we create a great experience?  We’ve got to give them something that is:

1:  Unique to us…they can only find it with us.  That way, the copycats will just be that, copycats!

2: Unique in delivery:  For example, The Wright Place TV Show used to have a show called  “The High Tea”, the Mother’s Day tea, (you can catch those shows on-line) where we gave away gift bags that were worth $400 or $500 each.  It was modeled after “The Oprah Show”, you know, “Her Favorite Things”, where she would give away hundreds of thousands of dollars of product.  And that’s what I did on every show for nine years straight.  It’s a great show.  It was a beautiful delivery.  After that, different organizations started having all kinds of “TEA” events.  They had fast teas, slow teas, this tea, that tea.  But none of them could really reproduce what we were doing because they couldn’t give these great big bags and people had to pretty much admit that, yeah, they went to another tea, but it was nothing like compared to The Wright Place High Tea.

So here’s your how-to:  Remember I said I was going to go deep into how-to.

#1:  Interview at least two customers to ask them what they think would be a cool and unique interaction with you. Ask them to suggest a cool and unique event a cool or a unique product something that would be really special.  Think about what they’re saying and then put together a plan to create that experience for all of your clients.  Here’s the thing:  It may not work out perfectly, but as you do this more and more and more, you will fine tune it, so that you’re doing something your tribe is actually very, very interested in and wants to be a part of.  Schedule it for this month.  Have a 30-minute talk with different clients and just say “I want to do something unique for my clients, for my constituents, for the tribe.  Do you have any input?  Do you have any great ideas?  Do you have anything that you yourself want me to do?”  And then put it into practice.

Need messages to motivate your list to buy? I can help you do that!

http://fiverr.com/theprtist

I’d love to hear the feedback that you get from your calls.  Go ahead and put them in the comment box and let me know how you’re doing with that particular thing.

2013 3 Ways To Prepare For a Financial Disaster

So we’ve survived the Mayans’ apocalypse predictions and 2013 is looking rosy, except that is, for the dreaded bank balance. It’s especially necessary to focus on getting this in order for 2013, as banks are less and less likely to bail people out if financial problems are growing. Tackle your financial worries early and follow these 3 steps to prepare for a foreseen financial crisis.
1) Get Your Finances In Order
First things first, you need to know what you’re working with, so getting your finances in order is essentially the first order of business. Start with your bank balance now and work out your monthly and weekly expenditures. Look at your income too, what are you earning and what are you spending, this will help you work out step to, which is of course…
2) Cutting Back
No doubt you’ll have noticed some things which don’t quite tally up in the way they should, perhaps you’re spending money on a gym membership you no longer use, or the odd £20 0r £30 spent on nights out, clothes or trips that you could really do without, yes clothes are things you can live without! Why not try a month on month off trick of the mind, so you’re not actually forced to give up everything all at once, because we all know that if forced to give something up completely in one go, we’re exceedingly likely to fail – remember chocolate at lent? In the first couple months of the new year why not try going a month without buying anything material – this could mean clothes, cosmetics, jewellery, games, you name it, but you can purchase nice food and dinner out, all be it occasionally. Next month try the reverse, sparingly of course, once you’ve got the hang of this little alternating trick it becomes much easier to cut back all together in the following months – it’s the best way to wean off shopaholics for sure.
3) One Day Work
There’s always something you can do to make money if you have a bit of spare time, so why not dedicate an evening or two to mystery shopping, where you could be paid to go to a restaurant and write a short review or the food and service. There are also on-line surveys that pay cash and lots of websites where you can offer up your skills on a daily basis to make a bit of extra cash, all it takes is a bit of spare time.
You never know when a financial disaster could hit in 2013; make sure you’re prepared by reading these four tips to staying on top of your finances and avoiding a financial melt down.

Author Bio | Geoffery is a personal finance blogger in the UK. He specialises in the short term loans and finance market, he works closely with sites like Wonga (wonga.com/about-us) – a digital finance company in the UK.

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