A business runs on 3 engines.
- Attention
- Acquisition
- Award
I don’t want to complicate things and get you to think too hard, but the idea is that you want all of these engines to be humming mostly on their own.
If one isn’t running then you’re always going to be around maintaining your business.
With everything that we’ve gone through you should have a decent idea of how each engine applies to your Pocket Business but let’s go over each one as applied to the steps we talked about in the previous lesson.
Attention
Funny enough, this mostly applies to the last step: social media. Although you can also think about it with the first step of creating a Topic Cluster, but the attention part only kicks in after you start to rank.
Until then, it’s social media.
This is why I put an early focus on getting the long-form blog content out the door because over time the passive traffic (remember that?) keeps the Attention Engine running when I don’t want to go hard on social media.
Acquisition
The simplest way to think about this is you “acquire” someone when you’re able to communicate with them when you want.
So email.
This is why I’ve found that what works best for me is to batch a ton of emails and then schedule them or set them up in a campaign. That way the Acquisition Engine is never forgotten and can run without my guidance.
Award
This is how you make your money so it applies to your offers.
The ideal situation for a Pocket Business is that your offers can run themselves. This is why there are a number of books that I sell because a book doesn’t require support.
For my service and course offers, support is needed which means not all aspects of the Award Engines I’ve built can run on their own.
All 3 Work in Harmony
The key here is to understand that all 3 engines work in harmony. When one isn’t working it makes it hard for the others to work efficiently.
The better your Award Engine, the more you can invest back (be it time, money, or resources) into the Attention and Acquisition Engines.
The better the Attention Engine the better the Acquisition. The better the Acquisition the better the Award.
Many people fail in building a Pocket Business because they don’t have systems in place that allow all three engines to work on their own. Instead, they need to be present for one or more of the engines to work and that eventually leads to burnout.
The 5-Figure Knitter
Noble Knits is a brand run by Full Stack Engines student, Nancy Queen. She does very well with the brand, but the surprising thing is that now she only does one thing for it.
She sends one email a week and that’s it.
And yet the brand continues to pull in 5 figures each month. How?
Her blog and YouTube Channel continue to bring people to her. She’s created so much content on both of them over the years that they are self-sustaining for the time being (I only say that because if the algorithm changes and does something wonky traffic could dip).
She also has all of the offers she wants done.
So what is left? Send out an email to remind people that she exists and that’s exactly what she does. With so much content she can simply recycle content ideas and present them in different ways to the people on her list.
But do you want to know what’s really amazing about this? She was able to start a whole new brand that she loves doing.
This is the beauty of running a Pocket Business.
There Are Multiple Ways
It’s important to understand that there are multiple ways to tackle a Pocket Business and ensure the 3 engines are running.
People who love YouTube will tell you that you need to start a YouTube channel. Are they wrong?
They aren’t, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only way.
The same can be said of social media, podcasting, or other tactics. There is no right way to build a Pocket Business beyond finding what will work for you to get all 3 engines running on their own (mostly) in the future.
Remember, the Steps Are Easy to Understand But…
This is not an uncommon viewpoint for people trying to build a business on their own, but this next image will show you why this is so surprising.
If you have 123k followers (it doesn’t matter the platform) you shouldn’t be suffering like this. At that point, most things should be running on their own.
So what is the problem? Followers are not True Fans, but some True Fans will be followers. There are other things that need a deeper dive but hopefully by going through this Pocket Course you start to understand what’s most important in growing a business.
This is a good time to understand what numbers matter for your Pocket Business.
Next Lesson: Pocket Business Analytics >>>>>
