The Positioning Manual for Indie Consultants: Find the strategic beachhead that will amplify your visibility, momentum, impact, and profit.

Your best clients don't know you exist... ...and that's why they're not your clients yet. They're the clients of other , more visible, more trusted, more successful consultants. You can fix that. These more successful consultants are not smarter than you. They're probably not harder working. They probably have specialized in a way that makes it easier for them to earn visibility and trust from great prospects who then become great clients. You can make an important decision you have been avoiding; a decision that will change everything for you. You can specialize. The Positioning Manual for Indie Consultants will help. Specializing your indie consulting business has obvious benefits (visibility, momentum, impact, and profit) and non-obvious obstacles (fear, ineffective approach to deciding). This book uses a systematic approach to help you navigate those obstacles. In guiding business owners through this process of specializing, I’ve observed 3 patterns that describe how they make the decision. We tend to do one of these: 1. Leverage a head start. 2. Pursue an interest in serving a particular kind of business or solving a particular kind of problem. 3. Pursue an entrepreneurial thesis. A head start is some relative advantage that you possess. Building on an advantage is a specialization accelerant and a risk reducer. Head starts generally take the form of one or more of these advantages: - A significant depth or quality of access , or large number of connections , to a target market. - A significant amount of credibility in a market vertical or within a certain audience. - A significant depth of expertise in some area. - A significant depth of insight into a target market’s needs or business realities. - A significant ability to earn trust from prospects or clients. You can specialize without any particular head start, but if you ignore a significant head start, you’re making more work for yourself. You might decide to do this for good reasons, but understand what you’re giving up by ignoring that head start. - If you want to understand how specialization works before diving in - If you benefit from a systematic approach - If you don’t know how to choose a specialization - If you don’t know what to do once you’ve specialized... then The Positioning Manual for Indie Consultants is for you. You’ll learn: - What marketing actually is (for indie consultants, not product companies) - How specialization and positioning relate to marketing - The benefits and the risks of specializing in a platform - What marketing infrastructure helps you earn new visibility - The way fundamental marketing labor relates to specialization - How to choose the right beachhead for your business - How to navigate the risk of specializing - The tradeoffs in the 5 ways of specializing - The valuable opportunity that being bad at marketing presents The Positioning Manual for Indie Consultants can be read in a weekend, or a few hours if you power through it. Illustrated with visualizations of the important concepts and models introduced through the book's readable, friendly text, this book helps you become your own "positioning consultant" and make the critical strategy decision that unlocks a more successful version of your business. Your best clients lie ahead of you. You don't need to be smarter, more extroverted, or more confident. You need to make one simple-but-challenging decision about how exactly to focus your business . The Positioning Manual for Indie Consultants is the best tool to help you make this decision and find your best clients. Acknowledgments Introduction Section 1 How You Earn Visibility Effortless Visibility Inherited Fame Chapter 1: What Is Marketing? Your Business Might Have Been Born in a Cradle Called Crisis Direct Response Marketing The Danger of the Wrong Tools in the Wrong Context The Right Tools Visibility Is Central to Marketing Chapter 2: The Platformer Advantage Chapter 3: Earning Visibility Without a Platform Chapter 4: A Model for Visibility Chapter 5: The Visibility Part of the Visibility Model Chapter 6: The Importance of Thinking in Terms of Beachheads Chapter 7: Two Forms of Risk That Threaten Successful Specialization Chapter 8: Tradeoffs in the Five Ways of Specializing Section 2 How You Earn Trust Chapter 9: We Are Average at Trust-Earning Chapter 10: Methods of Earning Trust Chapter 11: The Relationship Between Specialization and Trust Chapter 12: The Market Power of Leadership and Management Chapter 13: A Model for Earning Trust Chapter 13: A Model For Earning Trust Chapter 14: Apply the Trust-Earning Model Chapter 15: Decide How to Specialize Chapter 16: Sucking at Visibility and Trust-Earning Is a Huge Opportunity Chapter 17: The Mechanics of Earning Visibility and Trust Chapter 18: Shine on, You Crazy Diamond Chapter 18: Shine On, You Crazy Diamond About the Author Credits