How to focus your best marketing on your most qualified prospects 🔎


Hello Reader,

When I was 19 I was a street musician for a year. I hitchhiked across North America, surviving off the kindness of strangers.

(I tell this story in my book, Marketing Yourself. I'll tell you a bit more about how this story relates to marketing in this article.)

I would roll into a new town, play music on a street corner for a few hours, put my hat on the ground with a few coins in it. People passing by would pay me enough money for tacos and cigarettes for the day. The money was nice, but what I was really looking for was couches.

During that year that I wandered across America, it was easy for me to sleep on the beach, or a highway underpass, or the backyard of a church, but once or twice a week I could convince a complete stranger to let me crash on their couch. And I slept better on those nights.

But I had to go to places where people were curious about a strange musician they found interesting. Sitting on a soapbox at the train station was great for volume, because there were lots of people walking by. But I rarely had a good leisurely chat that built a relationship like I did in small beach towns.

Tourist towns were great, because on the boardwalk, there were always people wandering around in search of something interesting. They weren’t on a commute, they were curious and relaxed. That was my target market. Locals with leisure time.

What I was doing is known as ‘busking out.’ I didn’t charge admission for my performance, I played for free, and anyone who wanted to could drop a dollar in my hat. It’s 20 years later and I’m still busking out, offering free value to my target market, and inviting people to contribute.

Busking out focuses your best marketing on your most qualified prospects. You can demonstrate expertise, and build trust, by solving simple problems for a narrow niche in a free presentation.

It's more efficient and more effective than marketing broadly to a general audience. Thousands of people would pass me in an hour at the train station, and I’d make a few bucks. I generally made more money with less people in tourist towns.

Lesson: The size of your audience isn’t as important as the alignment they have with you.

Busking out was how I met Peter Cook, one of the authors of The Thought Leaders Practice. He reached out to me on LinkedIn, and said, 'Hey, do you want a copy of my book? Send me your address.' So I said sure, and he sent me a book, and it was a fantastic read. (Here's my video book review.)

A few months later, he said, 'I'm coming to Wellington. Would you like to have coffee?' I said, sure! And he invited 80 other people as well.

He gave us all a free presentation, and at the end he made an offer to join his program, Thought Leaders Business School.

Now, if he had pitched me on LinkedIn to join this program, I would have ignored him. But instead, he invited me to a busk out, offered free value, and then made an offer.

I never demanded a dollar before I played a song for strangers, because that wouldn’t have worked. Busking out attracts your target market to you by providing value to the people who have the problems you want to solve. You can demonstrate your expertise (and build trust) by solving simple problems for a narrow niche in a free presentation. It's more efficient & more effective than marketing broadly to a general audience.

If you'd like to see how I use free presentations to sell a program, come spend an hour with me on Thursday at 11 am NZ time / Wednesday at 3pm Pacific time:

Everyone who attends will get a full PDF of my book, Marketing Yourself. This will not be available on the replay, so if you want to read my book, click here:

GenAI Training Newsletter

Generative AI improves your Productivity, Creativity, and Strategy - but only if you build the GenAI Habit. Learning how to incorporate GenAI Training into your day will help knowledge workers prepare for the future of work.

Read more from GenAI Training Newsletter

'The new workflow for me is I think with AI and work with my colleagues.' - Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft Hello Reader, LLMs are changing fast. What worked well last week might be garbage to use today. If you're still using just one AI model for everything, it's like playing a round of golf with just one club. You need to be able to select the best tool for the job. This 3-minute tutorial shows you how to test multiple LLMs—side-by-side, in real time—so you can instantly see which one's...

'We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.' - Archilochus Hello Reader, You know that feeling when you're juggling five ideas, six tabs, and a dozen half-finished chats with ChatGPT? Your brain is buzzing, your files are scattered, and your best insights are lost in the mess. Now imagine turning ChatGPT into your command center. All your notes, files, and conversations—organized by project, remembered forever. As of now, Projects are only available...

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." — Alvin Toffler Hello Reader, We are living through a revolution of intelligence, from human to artificial. The illiterate of the 21st century will be those humans stuck in the 20th century's methods of working. Those of us preparing for the future of work are unlearning, and relearning, how we work, through our relationship with AI. Professionals who take the...