How to Generate $10M for your Business Through Thought Leadership – in Just 7 Minutes with Josh Steimle

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Get Josh’s email free course, you can sign up and get some emails, and it's all about steps on how to get started on thought leader, go directly to his site www.joshsteimley.com.

Summary:

Josh Steimle is an author, speaker, entrepreneur, and creator of The 7 Systems of Influence framework used by parents, educators, and business and community leaders to build influence and increase impact.

Josh is the founder of MWI, a digital marketing agency with offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, China, the UK, and the US. He is also the founder and CEO of Influencer Inc, a publishing, training, and events company that provides personal branding and thought leadership services to CEOs and other executives.

He has written over 300 articles for publications like Fortune, Time, Forbes, Inc., Mashable, TechCrunch, and Entrepreneur, and is the author of Chief Marketing Officers at Work, which was recognized in Success Magazine as one of the 5 Best Business Books of 2016.

Entrepreneur Magazine put Josh on their 50 Inspirational Entrepreneurs to Watch in 2017 list, Forbes recognized him as one of 25 Marketing Influencers To Watch In 2017, Josh was ranked #7 on Richtopia’s list of Top 100 Most Influential CMOs, and data from social media research firm Leadtail ranked Josh #11 on their list of People Most Mentioned and Retweeted by CMOs.

Josh consults with leaders in government on topics related to entrepreneurship and startups and has held various board positions and otherwise worked with non-profit entities related to adoption, education, entrepreneurship, economics, and government policy.

Here are the highlights of this episode:

3:08 Josh’s ideal Client: My ideal client is an entrepreneur between 35-45 years old who has a business doing at least 1 million US and a personal income of 250K, and it's an entrepreneur who wants to write a book. And this is a key because they think it will help grow their business.

3:35 Problem Josh helps solve: Well it's really that they got this book inside them and they haven't able to get it published. But even more than that, is that they need to build an attention and thought leadership system around that book which they can then leverage to grow their business. That's how I grew my business through thought leadership, so that's what I'm trying to help entrepreneurs do, but the book is really the heart of it.

4:16 Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to Josh: A lot of it is frustration, because they know that they got this idea for a book, it's inside. Maybe they even started writing it, but they just can't seem to get it published out there. People keep telling them "you should write a book." They know it will be great for their personal brand, they know it will be good for their business but they get busy and they just don't get it done.

4:50 What are some of the common mistakes that folks make before finding Josh and his solution:

That inertia, they just don't get started. The second biggest problem is that they get started, but they never finish. The third biggest problem is that they start, they finished, maybe they even market the book and sell a few copies but they wrote the wrong book. And that's one of the problems who help them solve is that we help them write the right book for building their business.

5:30 Josh’s Valuable Free Action (VFA): One of the things that causes writers block and gets people hang up on the book is, they don't take the idea further than just 'hey I want to write a book'. And the biggest question to ask at the beginning is why are you writing this book? is this for lead generation, is this to build a legacy, is it because there's a certain message that you want to get out there, and often people have this hazy vague idea of hey, I want to wrote a book, I want to get a book out there, I got some ideas floating around but if you sit down and really go into that and say 'wait, why am I writing this book, what do I want to see, how am I going to measure success'. Once you figure that out, it makes it a lot easier for the content to flow out of you.

6:27 Josh’s Valuable Free Resource (VFR): It's an email free course, you can sign up and get some emails, and it's all about steps on how to get started on thought leader. It's more than writing a book, it's also about social media and other things. It's really foundational, it's going through your vision, who you are, your unique blend of experiences and how to find your ideal audience and then how to start creating content. It's on my website if you go to joshsteimley.com you will see it, and it's all brand-new stuffs so it's the latest and greatest that I got to give.

7:30 How do I know what to write? The easiest way to answer that question is write about what you know. Everybody out there who's an executive or entrepreneur they've got stories from their business experience and there are lessons learned in there. That's what you know, that's what you should be writing. Now they way that you structure that, the way that you put that into the book, there are a lot of other questions there, but it's based on those stories and those experiences that's where you find the meat of what you will have to share with your audience. You might pull  form a formula out of that or some method that worked well for you, but really the stories that will draw the people in and help them remember what you're teaching.

What everybody needs is that they need a 'thing' that is the focus of that book. And that might be series of steps or a formula or a key idea, but there is some sort of success path or something that is your key finding that you're sharing with your audience.

For example, with me, with the 7 system of influence, I have this amazing experience where I was running a business, then I was able to start writing to Forbes and other publications that generated 10 million for my business, and I got to hang out with Richard Branson. All of these amazing things happened to me as I started writing these articles. That got me interested in influence and personal branding and thought leadership. That's where the 7-system framework came from. And it was analyzing my experiences in telling my stories to people that I realized 'hey, there are some patterns here, there are systems' and that became my thing. And everybody got something like that where they can look back at their business experience and say I've learned certain lessons along the way related to marketing, leadership, execution, HR or whatever it is that is your zone of genius. Everybody got something that they can look at and figure out some series or steps, formula or something that becomes your thing, and that becomes your book. If you want to write a viral book, something that becomes best-seller and everybody loves it, first start with a viral idea and that can be very simple.