by Tina Cherpes, MasterMinds Panel Member
Dear MasterMinds:
What advice would you offer to people wishing to take their body of expertise and “monetize” it in an entrepreneurial way?
Unlike the universal sales cycle that is made up of only four (4) phases, taking a body of expertise from concept (idea) to launch (monetization) can be considerably more complex. While there are a plethora of roadmaps available for us to follow, the most useful single resource I have EVER encountered is actually free. Pam Hendrickson and Mike Koenigs co-authored a book titled Make Market Launch It – The Ultimate Product Creation System for Turning Your Ideas Into Income.
Their decades of combined experience in the product development arena have simplified the entire process (regardless of the industry or niche we fill) of how to monetize our expertise, perspective, and know-how in seven (7) easy to follow steps. Plus it’s loaded with case studies to help illustrate the potential business impact each of the seven steps has had on business owners who have successfully applied them . Here’s the list of steps as well as a tiny snapshot of what the authors have made available to us…
Step 1: Mindset – Set Yourself Up for Success
Explores how our journey is about more than just an idea for a product—or even an amazing product by itself. It’s about setting ourselves up for what we want —personally and professionally. And how building a business around our ideas and our products can help us get there.
Step 2: Target- Identify & Connect with your Ideal Market
Illustrates why we can’t build a full suite of successful products without a specific and clearly defined audience. We need to know our ideal customer and everything about them – they call this ideal client an avatar and they provide us with a framework to build one that is uniquely our own.
Step 3: Money-Create Your Irresistible Offer
This step boils down to the idea that our success hinges on offering our prospects something they want, something they can’t wait to buy. And because very few business owners start with this step, they create products that their customers don’t buy. Even when they do buy, we need to learn how to deal with the challenges we’ll run in to of getting people to actually use the product they’ve purchased from us.
Step 4: Leverage – Get the Best Resources That Save You Money & Time
This step teaches us that as our ideas take shape and our business grows, why it’s important to reach out to people who will give us honest feedback. Even though there are times it might feel it would be easier if we did it all on our own, we can’t do it all on our own. This step is about sharing the responsibility by getting leverage.
Step 5: Create – Structure, Produce & Package Your Product
In this step we begin to create content that distinguishes us and helps us deliver on our promises to our clients by creating lasting change. This is the heart of the process. In this step—our ultimate outcome is this to learn how to provide our customers with content that is relevant and useful to them.
Step 6: Launch – Promote Your Product & Build Your List
Here, we get help creating a consistent business; one that does more than pays the bills, one that provides a consistent stream of revenue, one that supports the lifestyle we’ve always wanted to live; one that doesn’t keep us up at night wondering where the next sale is coming from.
Step 7: Grow – Build Your Power Tribe & Scale Your Business
The final step is setting up a catalyst for growth and to maintain long-term business health and success. The catalyst they describe has long been a fundamental principle for building any sustainable business; that we simply cannot run a business alone. We need to create strong long-term relationships with our customers and what they’re talking about here is creating our very own Power Tribe.
Author’s Note: In the spirit of full-disclosure, I receive no remuneration for referring others to register and receive a free copy of this invaluable resource. And while their expertise has helped hundreds (perhaps thousands) of entrepreneurs both big and small monetize their know-how; their product creation system also personally helped me transform an idea for a single information product into a full-blown, evergreen business model. And if one person willing to make a commitment to their entrepreneurial future reads this and gets help too, it would be a joy to get to pay it forward.
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Tina,
A well laid-out road map for success. Great job.
Steve