I often get people asking to add my face to the nice little carousel on their website.
They offer a generous cut of whatever profits they get and ask me to be an “advisor” with an “o”. When I ask “what do you expect from me?”, they say “… to provide business development and publicity, I guess?”
No idea how that help could look like and never tell me what they actually want.
They know precisely what it is: to put the face on their website and trade it for some dough from visitors who may recognize it. An ideal scenario for these folk if I go as far as advertising their wonderful tokens on this list.
Some of them at least genuinely say that they want “exposure” and “PR”
(funnily enough, none of these people are ever signed up for this newsletter, I checked some of their e-mails in my list. So they actually have no clue what this thing is even about)
That kind of stuff is just too embarrassing to say upfront.
Which is why I don’t work with people who are easily embarrassed by honesty. My business is in selling depth, not reach.
So here is my big takeaway for all the businessfolk out there: never outsource your audience or expect that someone is going to bring it to you.
Figure out and learn how to talk and sell, but never expect that other people are going to bring you clients on a silver platter.
They won’t.
The only way they ever will is if you are already good at this and don’t even have this problem. Like in that old anecdote about how bankers will never help when you’re drowning and then bury you in lifebuoys when you get to shore.
My Turkish friend has a way more crude way of saying this same thing about audience building, something I would never come up with.
He says “You don’t hire some dude to do your wife, do you? Why would you hire some agency to sell to your audience, then? What’s the point?”
Learn the pleasure of effective communication yourself. I can help with that. Otherwise, what’s the point?