You might not know it but there are different phases for your business. Some people might call these seasons.
While there are different types my focus here today is on one of them and that is the concentrated growth phase for making money.
The other big phase is the learning or understanding phase where you gain an understanding of your business, your audience, and yourself. This almost always comes before the concentrated growth phase whether you want it to or not because if you don’t know those things then it’s hard to understand where to focus your growth.
But once you have even a little bit of an understanding about these things then you can start to move into concentrated growth. So what is this concentrated growth?
It’s when you have a very specific game plan and you execute it for a period of time so when it’s time to start making money online then this is the phase you really want to be in.
This is a concept that is important to understand if you wish to become a solopreneur or build a Pocket Business.
It’s not that you can’t or shouldn’t make money in the other phases. You most definitely should always try to make money, but in this concentrated growth phase you have specific targets that you’re going for and you’re focused (concentrated) on very specific types of content.
If this sounds good to you then we should dive in.
Close to the Problem, Closer to the Money
A lot of people tend to make the mistake of believing that if they want to make more money online then they need to produce more content. This is kind of correct, but the execution is almost always off.
And the reason why is because of the type of content they are putting out. Because this is the concentrated growth phase you might think that it’s important to create content that reaches as many people as possible and that’s not true.
- You don’t control the algorithm so hoping to reach more people can lead to distress
- General content does a terrible job of converting people into customers
Sure for a lot of the bigger people, it’s simply a numbers game. They reach a large amount of people and therefore can make a solid amount of money. But again, because you don’t control the algorithm your goals should be different.
It’s great if your content blows up and reaches a ton of the right people but we aren’t going to count on that. Instead, we’re going to focus on those people closest to the problem.
The closer someone is to the problem and the more times they’ve come across it without solving it, the more likely they are to look and buy a solution for it.
Take my signature program, Full Stack Engines, for example. If you’ve been trying to build an online business for a while and don’t feel like you need to be selling every single day to build something amazing, then it’s a great place for you.
With that in mind what should my content be about?
- Need to make more sales, but don’t like the idea of selling?
- Want to make more money but marketing has got you overwhelmed?
- Feel like your content isn’t doing as well as it should?
These are the different problems my audience has. The more I address these problems and present solutions, the better off I’m doing.
The key here is understanding that the problem I address has to be solved in some way by my content. I can’t bring up the problem and then tell people to go buy my offer. It has to be that I solve the problem and then I can introduce the next problem and say how my offer will help.
I don’t always have to do it this way but the point is to get the audience to see how the offer is going to help them on the rest of their journey toward the desired outcome.
This is also why so many people struggle initially when they are looking for profitable niches. They don’t understand why those niches are profitable.
Start Making Money Online Today: The Game Plan
Ready to get things started? This is the approach I took to Pocket Business once Full Stack Engines was complete and I felt I understood my audience well enough to begin the Concentrated Growth Phase.
All of this is assuming that you’ve created some type of offer that you can send people to. If you haven’t created an offer yet then you can still understand what I’m talking about in this post, but it doesn’t mean much without an offer.
If you want something simple to start then creating an ebook or an email course is a solid starting point.
Step 1: The Desired Outcome
If you don’t know what people want then it’s hard to help them out. This is one of the main reasons why there is always an Understanding Phase first because it can take some time to understand the Desired Outcome of your audience.
It would be easy to say that the Desired Outcome of my audience is to make more money, but if I don’t want to sound like everyone else then I need to be more specific.
When I talk about niche this is what I mean because your niche is really the Desired Outcome + the Unique Mechanism in which will help them get the Desired Outcome.
So yes, my audience wants to make more money but they want to do it the following ways:
- Selling without selling
- Building happy customers
- Loving what they do
- With an Automated Income Machine
If the people that I come across don’t want those things then what I tell them doesn’t work. If they simply just want to make money by any means possible then they’ll need to go somewhere else and that’s okay.
It’s not my job to change what they desire. My job is to work with existing desires.
The key here, and this is where a lot of people mess up, is that they mistake needs for wants. You might know that your audience needs something and so that is what you present them with first, but it doesn’t work.
Why?
Because they want what they want. You have to show that you can help them get what they want, the Desired Outcome, and then you can start to talk about their needs.
Step 2: The Unique Mechanism
How are you going to solve their problems and help them achieve their Desired Outcome? If you’re going to do it the same way as everyone else then people aren’t going to listen to you.
They’ve already seen it and tried it so you telling them the same things isn’t going to help. You need a Unique Mechanism that makes them perk up their ears.
My unique mechanism is a Full Stack Engine. If you build one of these then you’ll have an automated income machine that produces happy customers, gives you more time for yourself, and doesn’t get destroyed by algorithms.
Now that I have the Desired Outcome and Unique Mechanism, I have my Marketing Theme. All the content I create should center around this marketing theme because I want to attract the right people to bring them closer to my offer.
Step 3: Layer 1 & 2 Content
Now it’s time to create my content, but my content must contain what is necessary to attract people. This means it has to do a great job of applying The Pocket Business Framework.
- Get them to notice you
- Get them to pay attention to you
- Get them to trust you
- Convert that trust into money
Every single piece of content I create should be doing at least one of these steps. If it’s doing none of these steps then it’s a waste of time.
So what is Layer 1 & 2? It’s the components that I need to put into my content to ensure it’s working hard.
- Layer 1: Outcomes, Problems, Mechanisms
- Layer 2: Opinions, Experiences, Worldviews
Layer 1 is the basic stuff that has to be there. If that isn’t included then people won’t care about the content at firs glance. Take this blog post as a great example.
The purpose is to show you how to start making money online which is the outcome. So far you’ve seen a couple of opinions and I’ve talked about my experience which might get you to either pay more attention to me or trust me.
That means my content is putting in the work that it should.
Finally, I have to make sure that the content is leading people back to my offers. The content doesn’t have to do that directly, but you should see a path. Once you’re done with this post you might be interested in Full Stack Engines to see how to build your Automated Income Machine.
Or maybe you’ll go and check out the Free Pocket Course.
Step 4: Consistency
Now, the name of the game is distribution. I need to get my content out in front of as many of the right people as possible.
This doesn’t mean I need to go viral. It just means I need to get content out there so the right people have an opportunity to see it.
The reason why this is considered the growth phase is because it’s time to put in concentrated work. I know the type of content to create and so I need to create as much of it as I can in a specific period of time.
I usually go for 100 days.
That gives me plenty of time for growth due to the nature of the content. But that doesn’t mean growth ends after 100 days. The whole point of the 100 days is to get content out there that builds the perfect foundation for my business.
Because I know the marketing theme of my business, each piece of content is optimized to lead people to the offer in some way.
Imagine 100 days’ worth of content doing that. We’re talking about:
- blog posts (hi)
- emails
- social media posts
All of these are working together to build an amazing system that in turn becomes an Automated Income Machine.
You Want Things to be Repetitive
It might sound boring but the goal is to get to a point where things feel repetitive to you. It won’t look that way to your audience, but to you, you know the exact content that you’re going to create and what needs to go in it.
Everything becomes optimized to the point of boredom. But if you’re still curious about your topic then the boredom will never set in.
You’ll find ways to keep it interesting. Even after doing this for over 20 years, I’m having a blast writing this post because I’m coming at it from a new angle.
You should get to a point where you can take days or weeks off without a major impact on your business. If you can’t do that then things are automated as of yet.
That either means you didn’t do enough in the concentrated growth phase or you didn’t quite gain the right understanding in the learning phase. But that’s okay, that’s just part of business.
Simply keep at it and eventually, you’ll have your Automated Income Machine. If you want to dive deeper into this concept then check out the Pocket Course.