Sharing as a Strategy

I advocate sharing your best with your audience if your goal is to be seen as an expert. Give them your best advice, express your opinions, share your top tips and tricks, tell them about great tools you have found and share the benefits you gained by using them. I regularly encounter resistance to this strategy. The worry seems to be that if you share your best, they won't need you. This is a false worry.

When you are expert at anything, you will lose a layman pretty quickly - always before the point where they could accomplish the same results they would get if they hired and worked with you. It is usually beginners that sharing your opinions will help... to a point. There will be a certain number of followers that will read everything and use your advice to follow your plan. Content is published in very small packets so it would take a lot for someone to be able to piece a whole plan together. Those people will find someone else to follow if you are not publishing the content. You would rather they follow you because then you are the expert they refer.

The number of people that can follow through on their education, without hiring you, will be very marginal. People will need to hire you for motivation, inspiration, support, accountability and understanding. As an expert, it would be difficult to accomplish what you teach - without a you in the equation.

You will gain clients who:
  • realize they cannot be successful without your help
  • simply do not understand the more complex parts of what you teach
  • succeed on their own, attribute that to your help and refer to you
All of those are positive outcomes.

originally published in Work Better, Not Harder April 14, 2015

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