ART (Alignment, Reach, Trust) — Levers to Grow Your Authentic Business
Imagine three levers that can help grow your authentic business: Alignment, Reach, and Trust.
Increasing any one of them can help, but the best results come from increasing all three evenly.
Alignment
This means that you have offers and content that are aligned with what your audience wants. How do you know? The more aligned, the more your audience is engaged with your offers and content.
Where solopreneurs often get disappointing results is when they launch offers based on their own inspiration and interests, yet they haven’t done enough market research to create a product/service that is well-aligned with what their audience wants. This is why they get so little response from people.
To increase alignment, work on:
- Market research conversations with your audience. (My courses that cover this: CORE and Offer Revision.)
- Polling your audience so you can co-create various aspects of your offer, such as the title of a course or product.
- Netcaring with your nichemates to discover what’s working for them in terms of their offers. They can also learn from you as well, and you can grow together.
Reach
This second lever is your ability to reach, at will, enough of the right people who are aligned with your offers and content, to therefore have enough engagement and sales.
This is a common pitfall for solopreneurs — not having enough people who are seeing their good content and offers. Reach is what we are working on when we learn to distribute content and do collaborations with other content creators.
Here are my 7 favorite reach strategies. Because these are methods that have worked well for me I do teach a course on each of these:
Each of these methods has great potential. Each method could get you all the clients you ever need, if you use it well.
These are not reach strategies:
- YouTube — unless you’re going to get great at YT SEO (quite difficult) and be willing to study their retention graphs and do a lot of video editing.
- Email audience is not reach — and neither is simply posting on social media — in both cases, they’re already part of your audience… you’re not really growing your reach unless you use one of the 7 methods above.
Trust
How much trust does your audience have in your abilities, presence, and values?
The deeper their trust, the less Alignment or Reach you need to work hard at. Or another way to put it: the more trust you have with people, the more likely they’ll help you with alignment and reach.
Many solopreneurs get persuaded or charmed to work with mainstream marketers who teach them methods that actually erode trust with their people, and thereby, they can’t build sustainable and trusting audiences.
The trust has not been earned, so business remains difficult over the years.
To nurture trust, work on:
- Joyful Productivity practices
- Healthy Money practices
- Consistently creating content, especially authentic videos
- Netcaring with nichemates from a place of genuine enjoyment
- Mastery of your craft
Trust > Reach > Alignment
In practice, though, I like to recommend working on T then R then A… .
Trust comes through consistently showing up with authentic content and skillful client work. Consistency of action will grow your own trust in yourself, which then spills over into others’ trust in you.
Reach methods — different ways to distribute content and offers — becomes more effective (better time & money spent) the more you have trustworthy content and offers.
Alignment becomes easier as you grow your reach. The bigger your audience, the more accurate your polls about your offers & content, and the more likely you’ll get Yes’s when reading out for market research conversations. The research allows you to create even better Offers and Content, which then grows your Trust. This creates a virtuous cycle, where the trust of the audience leads to better alignment and reach, which in turn leads to greater trust.
I hope that this basic framework will give you some helpful direction to grow your authentic business!
