Chapter 6 - Who You Always Wanted To Be - Yourself

[Diamond Website Conversion]

Chapter 6 emphasizes the importance of remaining true to who you are. There can be a lot of pressure to present yourself in certain ways, and to try and sell things in a certain way. More important that sticking with the industry standard is being yourself. When you are trying to be something that you are not, your audience will sense it and will wonder why you are being so “phony.” Not only that, but chances are you will feel awkward and uncomfortable and will not have near so much fun as you might have.

In remaining true to yourself, you still need to answer the audience’s So-What question. You need to present your own So-What value. A perfectly fine (or even amazing) product or service can be dead in the water if the audience doesn’t have confidence in the person telling them about it. In this chapter the author talked about a personal biography. Look at the steps on page 64 and go to http://www.sowhatbook.com
to look at some examples. What sort of things about yourself would you include in your own personal biography?

[Diamond Website Conversion]

The Personal Biography Generator was a bit hard to find on the website. To save some people time, here are the questions to help create your own personal biography.

1. Your full name and title.

2. By what name do you like to be addressed?

3. Your company/firm name/address.

4. What year did you start/join your current company?

5. What industry are you in? How many years have you been in the industry? (Please list your previous employers as well.)

6. What do you enjoy most about your work? What do you like least about your work?

7. What is an area of your work that you feel you are uniquely qualified to perform? Why (Client meetings, delivering seminars, money manager selection, etc.)

8. What is the first thing your customers/clients should know about you

9. What do you believe is your primary responsibility in your work?

10. What do you believe is most important to your customers/clients regarding why they work with you?

11. What is your primary market niche or specialization?

12. What is your educational background? What college(s) did you graduate from? (i.e. Bachelor of Arts, Communication, Harvard)

13. What professional certifications and designations do you hold?

14. List any additional notable accomplishments both personally and professionally (i.e. awards received in the military service, community, professionally etc.)

15. How have you grown your business (i.e. seminars, referrals etc.)?

16. Personal information (please answer each separately)
a. Married (include spouse’s name if applicable)
b. Children - if so how many
c. Hobbies
d. Special Interests
e. Town/state you live in now

17. How do you normally use your personal biography (email or printed)?

[Shelby]

In my personal biography I would make sure to include information that I believe makes me unique; experiences that have impacted my life, highlight personality characteristics, my strengths. I would definitely tailor it to my audience. Keeping the audience in mind really does make it so much easier to choose what's most important to include.

[Anne]

In thinking of before, during and after from an email perspective, I feel like I have better insight now as to why our store page conversion rates are what they are.

Our subject lines for each email are carefully considered (before). We work hard at communicating the benefit of our products to the email reader (during).

And finally, when they get to the I'll-buy-it stage (after), we let them down with product pages that do little to demonstrate how knowledgeable we are on a particular subject. In fact, some store product pages have even less information than the email. We really need to improve our after stage!