Al McBride 0:02
So welcome to the dealing with Goliath podcast. The mission of dealing with Goliath is to sharpen the psychological edge of business leaders with skin in the game, who want to be more effective under pressure, uncover hidden value, and increase profitability. With expert guests across the business spectrum.

Al McBride 0:18
We deliver gems of wisdom, delving into their methods, their thinking and approach to business life and problem solving. This is the double espresso shot of insight through our short interview format, where a quick and concise with five questions in just nine minutes. I’m your host, Al McBride.

Al McBride 0:37
My guest today is Ellen Finkelstein, um, guides experts who have knowledge that they want to share with the world so they can make an income with information based online business while helping others so they’re out there trying to save the world excellent stuff.

Al McBride 0:54
She started her first website all the way back in 1999. It’s good time to start and has 11 books published with McGraw Hill and Wiley as well as having self published 10 ebooks, and has built an email subscriber list of a whopping 22,000 and social media audience of over 100,000. Those are crazy numbers, their elements great stuff.

Al McBride 1:17
On a personal note, I have to say I’ve known Ellen now for quite a number of months, as we’re in a mastermind group together. And she always has a wealth of insights and value for everyone. She’s always great contributor to the group. And it was delivered with humility and hope and humor. So I have to say it is a pleasure to have you on the show today. Thank you for joining us.

Ellen Finkelstein 1:38
Thanks for having me.

Al McBride 1:40
And where are you coming to us from today? Because I always get it wrong. It’s not Idaho. It’s not Ohio. It’s Iowa. Right?

Ellen Finkelstein 1:49
Yes, it’s Iowa, se Iowa,

Al McBride 1:52
Iowa out in the fresh air. Excellent stuff. Beautiful to have you on the show. So let’s dive in. Let’s dive in. So who is your ideal client on what’s the biggest challenge that they face?

Ellen Finkelstein 2:05
My ideal clients are, I like to usually say speakers and writers, but they might not think of themselves as speakers and writers. So I say experts, they’re people with knowledge that can help others. And their problem is number one, they don’t know how to reach enough people with that knowledge.

Ellen Finkelstein 2:21
They want to get it out to the world, but they just don’t know how to get it out there. And number two, they don’t know how to make an income with that knowledge. So that those are the two problems.

Al McBride 2:30
It’s a very good observation, though, that as you say, how you see them or how other people might see them as writers and speakers. But that’s not necessarily quite how they self identify. It’s a very, very good point. So watch for that group of experts. What are some of those common mistakes people make when they’re trying to solve that issue that problem,

Ellen Finkelstein 2:53
so many of them have never gotten their knowledge out of their head. And so you know, it’s just still sitting there. So that’s a big mistake. But if they’ve written it out, they spent too much time putting their knowledge in a useful format.

Ellen Finkelstein 3:09
So very often, people who have something they consider precious, you know, that knowledge they’ve gained over their life experience, or however they’ve gained it, they really want to make something big out of it. And so that ends up taking way too much time and they spent too much time creating it, and not enough time building a business around it.

Ellen Finkelstein 3:28
And another mistake they make is that they try to work alone, they don’t partner enough, and they just might not know how to partner they might have been in a completely different environment. Maybe they gained this knowledge at work and and in an office, but now they’re trying to go in on their own and get it out to the world.

Ellen Finkelstein 3:46
And they have no idea who they could partner with or how to how to do that. And then finally, I would say they don’t work on growing their email list enough. And so they, they again, they don’t know how they don’t promote themselves enough to build that list.

Ellen Finkelstein 4:05
And part of that is done with partnering. And then also, when they start building their lists, they’re often either afraid to email them, they think that it’s gonna bother them, or they don’t know what to say to them and so they don’t maintain the relationship over time so but that by the time they get that knowledge out, people don’t even know who they are.

Al McBride 4:24
Right? This is so many interesting issues there because I like personally say I’ve fallen victim to most of them, you know, spending way too much time building content to be as good as possible. But as you said, and it’s because it’s your baby, isn’t it because it’s this is over me.

Al McBride 4:42
But as you said, breaking it maybe into smaller chunks and getting those rolling and but as you say it’s also this people fall into that trap. I think I’ve done it a bit long time in the past hopefully I’m out of it. But it’s that what do we call it you know the the Field of Dreams The approach the abilities and they will come idea doesn’t really work out?

Ellen Finkelstein 5:03
Unfortunately. I mean, occasionally it does. There are some people who were lucky, but it’s not the typical,

Al McBride 5:07
it’s far from the typical. Exactly, exactly. But as a lot of different layers of issues there, so So how does one free valuable action that wouldn’t solve the problem for this for your, for your ideal client, but will at least point them in the right direction, start them, making some progress toward that goal.

Ellen Finkelstein 5:33
So I think the first thing is that if, whenever you’re creating content, I’m a strong believer in outlining it first. And so I think that’s the first free step that you can do is to write an detailed outline. And I think of it like a table of contents. So like you see the book up there, you know, that was a book that I used to write, and it ended up being 1200 pages, and the Table of Contents is really long. pages and pages and pages.

Al McBride 6:03
Mammoth book,

Ellen Finkelstein 6:05
it is a mammoth book. And when you write the proposal to the publisher, you have to create a table of contents as part of your proposal. And they want the chapter heads. In this case, it’s big enough that it has parts, it had seven parts, and then it has chapters. But inside each chapter, it has headings, and subheadings.

Ellen Finkelstein 6:23
And when you write those all out, you organize the whole thing. And after that the writing of it, or even if you speak speaking out, you can speak out from an outline as well, depending on how you’re getting your knowledge out there. But once you do that, it all flows so much more easily.

Ellen Finkelstein 6:38
And then the result is also much more organized. So when I found that people just try to write, they, at the end, it’s so disorganized that they have to go back and spend so much time reorganizing it that it just takes so much longer. So take that time to organize. So that’s my, I’m going to give you two free girls spoil

Al McBride 6:57
me Give me two.

Ellen Finkelstein 6:59
So that’s for the content to just outline it thoroughly first, and then right within that outline, like you, you have a heading, you press enter, and you type the content for that heading, and you get to the next heading, press enter you right within it so that you’re just it’s always there guiding you for the monetizing of it creating a business, I would say make partnering an essential part of your business.

Ellen Finkelstein 7:24
Right? That and you just have to find out who else serves your target market reach out to people and there are lots of different ways to partner but that has, I would say, reach out to people and have a meeting with them and say how could we work together. So I would say that that is a something that you could do right away.

Al McBride 7:43
It’s a great approach. I love the first step of the plan and the structure because it puts the whole grid. And it also, you know, when I do a lot of coaching people fall into these these issues of huge big problems or huge, big challenges. But when you start to really break it down, as I said, suddenly, they’re just much more manageable.

Al McBride 8:05
You know, I know it sounds super simple, but it’s it’s putting that plan together, it’s quoting the outline. And then as I said, it’s far more approachable. So I couldn’t agree more. And the partnerships, relationships are everything. You know, even more, even more now with, you know, all those online stuff, it’s probably all the more important again. So that’s, that is super stuff. So what is one free, valuable, valuable free resource that you could direct people to that would help them with that.

Ellen Finkelstein 8:36
So I would like to give people some help with partnering. Because I think that is daunting when people are just starting out. And even people who are experienced, it’s called Five Ways to multiply your business with partnering. And it’s a originally it was a Facebook Live that I did for an hour, but then I had it transcribed. So it’s a document. And it has five ways to partner. And the URL is Ellen helps.me, slash partnering.

Al McBride 9:07
Very good. And of course, that’ll be in the show notes beneath the YouTube video. And of course, in the podcast and on the blog as well. Just ya know that that’s outstanding. So can you give us a few insights on what’s in there on?

Ellen Finkelstein 9:23
Sure.

Al McBride 9:24
Because you’re saying five ways that that’s that’s that’s a lot, because a lot of there’s sort of, there’s one or two ways, but let’s see if I can do this

Ellen Finkelstein 9:31
by heart. So the first way is to swap freebies. Right? What that means is that you in order to grow your list, you should have some free offer that helps people with an immediate problem. And when you when you promote that people go, Oh yeah, I have that problem. I’d like that.

Ellen Finkelstein 9:48
And it could be something as simple as a checklist or worksheet or a template. It doesn’t have to be something that big. But and this thing that I’m offering the five ways to multiply business with partnering is a freebie. So it’s an example of one. And so you find somebody else who serves the same target market. And I promote that person’s freebie.

Ellen Finkelstein 10:10
And that person promotes my freebie through email to our email lists, usually, you could do social media as well. But the thing that’s so beautiful about it is that if it’s really appropriate for my list, you should only promote things that are appropriate for your list, then I can give that person 100 new subscribers in a couple of days in a few days.

Ellen Finkelstein 10:10
And if that person does the same to me, we’re sharing our list. We’re doing that. But we’re also offering our lists something that is new and different that we think is valuable. So it’s a great benefit for our list. It’s free, it’s easy to do, you just send out a couple of emails, and it’s done.

Al McBride 10:44
As he said, if there’s value there, then there’s value of going both directions, which is the key thing. Absolutely. Right. Right. Absolutely. So what’s one key question I should have asked you. What about a great value? But I didn’t quite ask you.

Ellen Finkelstein 11:02
So we talked about it. But I would say how do you grow your list? Right? It’s a good question that stumps a lot of people when they’re starting. And by this, we mean subscribers on an email list. And I want to emphasize that going to list even though I talk about online businesses, offline, businesses, brick and mortar businesses are discovering email as well.

Ellen Finkelstein 11:25
So for example, during the pandemic, restaurants that didn’t have an email list, maybe they had a Facebook page or something like that, but they had no way to really connect with everybody. Because how many of their, their visitors, you know, their past diners have, you know, look at their their Facebook page.

Ellen Finkelstein 11:46
But if they connected, if they collected email, emails, as people came in, maybe they offered them 10% off their next meal or something like that. Then when they shut down during the pandemic, and start started switching to delivery and curbside curbside pickup and delivery, they could email everybody that they had and tell them about it. It’s so so those were the people who really were able to make that switch and survive because they had that connection.

Ellen Finkelstein 12:17
And then online businesses obvious you have to have a list. And so but growing the list can be hard. And so I just want to So the answer to that that I want to give you is to create a great freebie that answers an important need. I actually mentioned this before, don’t make it too long. And then use autoresponders. to, to so autoresponders are the emails that that you give people.

Ellen Finkelstein 12:48
After they sign up that you do that to your email service provider. And these are the most open emails you’ll ever send. And so you use those autoresponders. To create a relationship with people, one of the things I say is you need three things for an online business, you need an audience, often, that’s your list or the list of your partners.

Ellen Finkelstein 13:09
And then you need a relationship with that audience. And either that’s you do that with your autoresponders. And by just regularly sending out emails and giving people information that’s helpful to them. And then the third thing is you need an offer that’s relevant to those. To those that specific audience. I’ve

Al McBride 13:26
heard you talk about the relationship before that. It’s that emulation, it’s the same. It’s the echo of know, like and trust. It’s just a different way of creating enough familiarity. And as you said, that leads to trust. Yeah,

Ellen Finkelstein 13:39
and I do like to say that it’s not just know, like, and trust, that’s what everybody says. But it also that people need to know your expertise, they need to see you as an authority that you know, something that they need to know that they know that you have a solution to their problem. So it’s no like trust, and I don’t know.

Al McBride 14:00
they see you as a credible authority, yeah

Ellen Finkelstein 14:03
Yeah, so I but I want to add more about going your list. So you have this more. And then you use autoresponders you should stay in touch with your listing, I say at least weekly, although it depends on your field and your audience. And then do partnerships.

Ellen Finkelstein 14:19
We talked about partnership partnering up but do partnering just for growing your list not necessarily for selling so you can do a joint webinar with somebody and giveaways or like my, my favorite way of growing your list. I’ve done it twice, and gotten about 900 people in a couple of weeks to my list by organizing a giveaway. So good. So that question is how do you grow your list? And those are some answers.

Al McBride 14:47
Those are some great answers. There’s, there’s more, far more from you most definitely. So please do check out the links connected with this. As I said, change the world marketing.com slash get started. And we also had another one as well, as he said, well just reiterate it again. It’ll be,

Ellen Finkelstein 15:08
yeah, it’s a different URL, because it’s a redirect to make it shorter. But it’s Ellen helps.me slash partnering. So at change the world marketing.com slash get started, you’ll get my main free offer, which is 13 steps to create a successful online business and some great video training as well. But this partnering, one will be specifically about partnering,

Al McBride 15:30
outstanding stuff,

Ellen Finkelstein 15:32
lots of goodies,

Al McBride 15:34
loads of goodies. That’s one thing you have lots of different levels of fantastic free value there to bring people up to encourage them to move them along. And I’ve seen a lot of the the quality of your work and of your output. So I’m fully behind it. I have to, I have to say it’s excellent stuff. So thank you so much for being on the show today on

Ellen Finkelstein 15:58
my pleasure. Thanks

Al McBride 15:58
for having me. been great having you. Cheers.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai