You've selected an audience and you have identified a problem they have that you can help them solve. Now, how do you create a product that will have your clients screaming, “Where have you been all my life? I just have to have this!”

The secret to landing that first client, getting high-ticket corporate clients and filling your online courses, coaching programs, and events is to position your expertise as the missing piece to achieve the outcomes they are seeking.  Your clients are “here”. They want to get “there”.  The distance between these points is where you show up.

Your clients want a guide to show them how to get from here to there. Some experts seem to think that the tour of their house, the photo in the helicopter, the Jag in the garage, and other such trappings are what establish credibility for us. I think most people could care less about all that. I don't think your clients don’t care about this, either. What they do care about is whether you get them or not. They want to know you are a credible guide who can help them get the outcome that they want faster.Your product is how they bridge the gap between here (where they are now) and there (where they want to be). Focusing on this gap is the key to getting out of the overwhelm of trying to figure out what to offer and what to include in your offers.

The Biggest Mistakes Content Creators Make

Most people think that the more content you include in an offer, the better the offer sounds and that more sales will result from said offer. Sounds logical, right? So we get busy creating lots of content. We write, record, design, and we keep adding things until the offer we are creating in our minds becomes so gigantic we are pretty sure it will never see the light of day. This approach is entirely illogical.

The biggest problem with most programs, online courses, and events is that the content is much too broad. Most of what I have seen in online courses, programs and offers could easily be narrowed in focus and achieve much bigger impact for the student and the creator. Often when you are struggling to “fit it all in,” it’s likely that you have enough content for multiple offers.

Getting specific in the focus of what you are offering increases the impact of your program and increases the success of your marketing. (Getting specific works when putting together proposals for clients, as well. There typically is an opportunity to narrow the focus of the proposal, which results in higher close rates and higher investment from the client on your proposals.) I know that it is counter-intuitive. You would think that the broader your topic, the more people would be potentially interested, right? Wrong. The broader the topic, the more likely it is that people will not even notice the marketing because they don’t immediately see that it is relevant to them.

Let's say that a marketing expert who creates a course for coaches, “All You Need to Know About Online Marketing”. It includes a bazillion videos that will take you so long to create that, by the time you are done, all of them will be outdated. It would be better to create the course, “3 Steps to Finding Coaching Clients on Instagram ”. The content is targeted, you can create it quickly, and your audience consumes it quickly. Now, you stand out because coaches are asking, “How do I find clients online?” They are not asking themselves, “Geez, how can I become an expert in online marketing?”

Your offer has to address the big question your audience is trying to figure out. Your offer is not your end-all, be-all body of work that includes everything you ever learned about your area of expertise. This is not a farewell tour with a playlist jam-pack full of all your greatest hits. It’s the first empowering step for your audience in your journey together. When you put in too much content, you overwhelm your audience and you become overwhelmed creating the content. It’s a lose-lose game that is playing out in coaching, consulting, and online courses right now. Focus on incremental results and and you can create one-to-many experiences that transform in the same way that your one-to-one work does.