How One Breakthrough Can Save (Or Double) Your Business
And the three places to look when you want to create a breakthrough.
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Yes, yes indeed.
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On to today’s topic!
This week I had a major breakthrough when it came to marketing the new company my brother and I have been working on, Benchmark.
(Ironic, too, because the whole point of the app is to help the people using it to get breakthroughs with their businesses…ha!)
So, today, I want to talk about two things:
- What is a breakthrough?
- How can you create them for yourself?
- Why you would even want to.
Shoot…that was three things. My bad!
What Is A Breakthrough?
Definition:
a sudden, dramatic, and important discovery or development.
a sudden advance especially in knowledge or technique
When you’ve been trying to crack something in your business for any amount of time, that moment when everything *clicks* into place, or you discover the way forward, that’s a breakthrough.
When things aren’t going as good as we’d hoped, what we need at that moment is a breakthrough.
For me, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been struggling with marketing my businesses.
I’m great at creating content, but the problem with content that no one knows about is that it doesn’t help many people, or make much money.
How To Create A Breakthrough
What I’ve learned over the years of studying this stuff is that breakthroughs generally come from some combination of one, two, or all three of the following:
- Story
- State
- Strategy
When you change your story — the way you see or describe a situation — that can lead to a breakthrough.
For me, going from “I suck at marketing” to “I’m going to master marketing my creative business. Where should I start?” was a major breakthrough moment.
Changing your state is a super interesting one to me. This can refer to your physical state, or your emotional state.
The science behind changing your physical state is incredibly interesting to me. Check out this TED Talk from Amy Cuddy:
Lastly, the strategy is the way that we’re approaching a problem or obstacle. By taking a step back and seeing if there is another way, a different strategy, can create a breakthrough.
The Effects Of Having A Breakthrough
Here’s what happened this week:
I was going into the week with the goal of generating more traffic for the new business that my brother and I started this summer.
We figured that we needed to get about 3,500 visitors to the site in the month of October to hit our launch goals.
Ok…I immediately thought about how I was going to accomplish that. My personal website gets about 700 people a month checking it out. The main source is SEO at this point because I haven’t done anything to promote that site in over a year.
Craftsman Creative also gets about 750. This is more a function of the partnerships I’ve created with the course creators and them driving traffic from their audiences online to their courses.
For whatever reason, my strategy to reach the traffic goal for the site was to…reach out one by one to my friends and tell them about this new app I created.
Umm…
Yeah. Not the best strategy. I didn’t see it at the time, but I don’t even have 3,500 people I could reach out to, let alone the time it would take to reach out to that many people.
And that not all 3,500 would respond. Or visit the website. Or purchase the app…
Yeah, terrible strategy.
Luckily, after the weekly meeting with my brother, a little breakthrough happened where I realized the faults in that strategy and started thinking about other ways to get the awareness that we wanted for this month.
I landed on an idea to create content in the form of a podcast where I could invite guests on who have large audiences and try to get them a breakthrough in their own business.
I reached out to a friend to see what he thought. He agreed to do it.
The size of his audience? Millions of people…
Now, in a 10-minute conversation, I was able to set up a strategy to reach tens if not hundreds of thousands of people that are part of his audience, which could lead to hundreds if not thousands of people checking out the site.
A change in strategy created the potential for 10x the results in 1/10 or less the time…so a massive breakthrough to say the least.
Your Turn — Where Do You Need A Breakthrough?
Now it’s time to look at your business, your creative life. Where do you need a breakthrough?
Take a look at your story, your state, and your strategy and see where you can approach the situation a different way and create a breakthrough in your own life!
With that, I have an announcement for you! A brand new podcast centered around getting breakthroughs for the guests that come on the show.
It’s a challenge for me to see if I can get someone a breakthrough by using my Craftsman Creative Coaching paired with the new Benchmark app. We’ll use the actual numbers from the guests’ business and help them change their state, story, and strategy around one area of their business so that they can have a similar breakthrough to what I experienced this week.
And if I fail? Um… I guess I owe them some sweet Rockwell’s Ice Cream or something? I’m open to ideas…
I hope you’ll check out the trailer for the show and go and subscribe.
Yes. I know. TWO new podcasts for you to subscribe to today.
I know they’ll be worth it.
Thanks, and see you next week!
Daren
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