By now you’ve completed, started on, or have a plan in place for your first authority piece.

To wrap it up, I want to talk about how to market it.

There isn’t much to marketing an authority piece.

It’s just like marketing your services, but it’s much easier – and harder, too.

It’s easier because your authority piece is free or at a very low cost (like asking for someone to opt-in to your mailing list). This means more people will be exposed to it, and get it. It’s a greater reach.

You want that. You want to reach as many people as you can, in the hope that some of those people are your ideal client.

But only to a certain extent. If you’re marketing your piece to a mass audience where you know your ideal client isn’t part of, it’s a waste.

It’s much better to reach only 1,000 people where 40% of them fit your ideal client definition than to reach 100,000 where only 0.1% fit your ideal client (400 vs 100).

This is not just in terms of the raw number of ideal clients, but also in terms of the levels of activity. Reaching 100,000 could be 100x the effort than reaching the 1,000 (or it could be 10x or 1000x).

At the same time, marketing your authority piece is harder than marketing your services.

When you’re marketing and selling your services, many times it will be 1-on-1 sales. You’re talking directly to your client. They raise objections, which you can defuse right away, and you get a feel for what they’re thinking about.

With an authority piece, or any type of broadcast marketing, you have to put the marketing out there first. You don’t get 1-on-1 feedback. You can’t course-correct as easily.

Marketing your authority piece is not just easier and harder than your services. It’s different.

But this difference is good. It means you can stay interested in marketing because you’ll be exposed to a variety. 1-on-1 salesmanship for your services, and broadcast for your authority piece.

Going into the marketing section of this newsletter, keep this in mind. A specific tactic could work great for your services, or great for your authority piece. Or it could work (or fail) for both.

This gives you some flexibility that makes it easier to sample different tactics. And sampling different marketing tactics is an important strategy.

Eric Davis

P.S. You could look at your authority piece as a free or low-cost product. Since it’s something that’s packaged up for easy consumption by your ideal client, it’s identical to a product except for the price.