In this training, award-winning book and business coach, Ellen Violette, shares why you need to know what makes you unique, what makes up your uniqueness, and how to start discovering yours by delving into two key areas: your passion and skill set.

Resources mentioned

Bestseller Book-Writing Blueprint PDF
www.booksbusinessabundance.com

3 Key Points

Figuring out what makes you unique is the key to give you financial freedom.

Where your passion and skills intersect and offer what the market is hungry for, you have the best chance for success.

You can’t wait for an aha moment to hit you, you have to take action to find where you can make the biggest impact.

Transcript 

To be successful both in your book writing and in your business as a whole, you have to find what I call your unique you or “Profitable Core”.

[0:33] And that is the essence of what you have to offer that people want and are looking for. It will be unique to you,   and it is the key to giving you the financial freedom that you want and deserve.

Most people don’t make money online, because they don’t have a “Profitable Core” – they don’t know what makes them unique and what will make people want to work with them and buy from them instead of anyone or everyone else in their niche. Instead, they try to buy turnkey systems that someone else created. And all that does is make the seller rich because they sell their system to a lot of people who are then all in competition with each and have nothing unique to make them stand out from the crowd.

[1:14] Or, they go and they copy someone who’s already got a system and again they’re just a copycat.  So what I recommend is find a model that you like, but make it unique to you. And to do this you really need to figure out what it is that makes you special!

[1:30] So what makes you unique is:

• Your inborn talents and skills
• Your experiences
• Your education
• Your passion
• Your personality
• How you look
• Your voice
• Your personal style
• Basically, all of who you are!

[1:45]  When you focus on these areas and figure out the best niche for you, based on your strengths, you have the best chance for success. And this is true whether you are online, offline or both.

[1:58] A lot of times what people do is they create a product first and then try to find a market for it. And the problem with that approach is that you could spend months or even years on an book or product only to find out that there is really no interest in it and no one to buy it so you’ve just wasted all that time, all that money, all that energy, and it can be really painful.

But, if you don’t love what you’re doing it’s difficult to stay motivated and follow through. In fact, I see people try to write a  book that they aren’t passionate about and they even can’t finish it let alone create a whole business around it!

[2:28] So I’ve come to the idea that you MUST be passionate about what you are doing. I also say this from experience! When I wrote my first ebook, It was called The Moving Cure, How to Organize Your Move to Save Time, Money & Your Sanity and has since been renamed Help! This Move is Driving Me Crazy! We were moving a lot and I thought it could be useful in helping me get investors because we were buying, fixing, and selling houses. But I didn’t love it.

[3:08]  In fact, by the time I got about 3⁄4 of the way through I was bored out of my mind and wanted to quit. I was miserable. I had actually looked for an ebook coach but there weren’t any. At that time, people saw books and ebooks as being different. Now we just write one book and publish them in different formats.

[3:27] I ended up hiring a regular coach and it was expensive plus he didn’t have a system so I had to make a mistake and THEN he’d tell me how to fix it-what I did wrong and it wasn’t a great way to spend my time or my money.

[3:41] And that’s when I decided there was a better way so I taught myself how to do that and at that point, I became known as “The eBook Coach”. So that became my motivation to finish it. Because how could I be any kind of book coach and not finish my own book? So I had to get it done. But I knew I’d never write another one again that I wasn’t passionate about again!

[4:07] So, you need passion, Passion is important because it is what excites you and motivates you to want to get up in the morning to work on your business, and it is going to carry you through those rough patches as an entrepreneur and everybody has them, so get ready. When you are only motivated by money-for most people-that can get old pretty fast.

[4:29] But passion alone can also be dangerous. In fact, too much passion leads people to jump in feet first and just start writing without finding their market and knowing what you have to offer, has money to spend, and can’t wait to spend on your topic.

[4:47] You also need to figure out the right angle to take within the marketing place. And this takes research that most people aren’t even aware they need to do let alone how to do it.

[4:59] Then there are the people who don’t know what they are passionate about they wait for lightning to strike. So, for instance, I was working with someone who knew he was an expert and he had all the skill but he wasn’t sure what his passion was and he kept waiting for that “Aha!” moment, when he thought it was all suddenly going to come together and he wasn’t going to move forward until he found it . He was completely stuck.

It’s easy to see why this doesn’t work- it takes action for anyone who doesn’t know what their passion is to find it. And as you move forward and take action what happens is you may find it, well you look for it and you may or may not find it,  but you will learn along the way and discovering what you like and don’t like.  So, you have to take action for you to find the answers.

[5:47] And one of the things I always tell my students is if you are standing in the dark and you want the light to go on you can stand there and wish forever and it’s not going to go on. You have to walk over in the dark and turn on the light and then you can see. So that’s what you have to do; you have to be willing to move through the darkness to get to the light and that happens by taking action.

[6:07] So for me, by writing The Moving Cure and finding out I didn’t like it, it led me to the idea of becoming a book coach. If I had not written the first one, I would not have known that.

Sometimes, you need to try new things. And you’ll find either you like it or you don’t and if you don’t like it, go back to the drawing board and try something else. And if you like it, you can pursue it further and see if it turns out to be your true passion.

[6:35] So, how do you find your true passion if you are not sure? I want to give you a few exercises from my 3 Days To eBook Cash Authoring Program. The first one I learned from Kim Castle of Why Brand U and what I have people do is take out a sheet of paper, which you can do right now and make a line down the center of the page. Or, you can do it on the computer. But on the right side you want to write, “Tingle”; on the left side you want to write “Rage”.

[7:00] What I want to do is give you a minute to write down everything that makes you tingle without thinking about it. You can stop this recording and do that now. Give yourself a minute.  And then what I want you to do is the same thing with “Rage. Just write down all the things that make you really, really angry to the point of rage.

[7:24] Then what I want you to do is look at your hobbies and write them down And then what are you willing to invest money in? Write those down. What do you like to talk about with friends? At work? What interests you? If you are already writing, what do you like to write about? Whether it is articles, blogs, social media, what do you write about?

[7:51] These are some of the questions that you can answer for yourself to get yourself started thinking about what you are really passionate about.

And what you want to do is look for patterns. So what you want to see is, do the same topics come up in different exercises? Then, make a list of the ones that are recurring because you want to find the ones that keep coming up over and over and over

[8:20] Another thing you can do is try different things that you are drawn into and see how they feel to you. When you find what your passion is about and skilled at, that is where you’ll find your best opportunities for making money online.

[8:30]  The thing is, sometimes you just can’t find it right away. Sometimes it takes time, but if you just can’t figure out what you are passionate about right now, I suggested starting with what you are good at and explore in different ways how you can use the skills you already have. That’s what I did when I was starting. I had been a copywriter and editor in different types of businesses, so that’s where I started; I started as a copywriter.

[8:58] The other thing is to just continue to try things and move toward what feels good and move away from what feels bad. I also recommend reading The Passion Test by Chris and Janet Attwood or if you’re ready to take the next step you can grab a copy of my Bestseller Blueprint at www.booksbusinessabundance.com

[9:18]Now if you are passionate about several things, you want to pick the top three or four where you also have the skill to put it into action. You are generally going to find three or four that overlap, and then you want to focus on the one that will be easiest for you to do.

[9:31] Next you have to look at what you are skilled at because if you aren’t good at something you are not going to excel at. It is just that simple. So, if you want to be a copywriter,  and you are slow and maybe you can only do one job a month, and you get paid $1500 but your monthly net is three grand, that is not going to work and you are going to go under very quickly.

[9:49] You have to have the skill to succeed, as well as the passion. I always use the example, I love to sail-and I do,  but I do it maybe once or twice a year and, actually, I haven’t done it at all the last few years. And each time I take a lesson. By the time I go back, I don’t remember and I have to learn it all over again. So, obviously, that’s not something I could teach someone else. I still love it but I don’t have the skill to teach it.

[10:13] Once you understand what you are skilled at, and you know your passion- and a lot of people don’t know what they’re really skilled at because it is so easy for them, they don’t think everybody would pay them for that skill… so you may have to ask other people to help you out.   That’s how I used to feel with my web person. I had someone I used to work with and she was so brilliant at the tech but she didn’t realize it because it’s easy for her. And I would say to her, “You’ve got to teach this to other people,” and she would say,  “But it’s so easy.” And I would say, No, it’s not, it’s hard for me and for others who aren’t technical as well!”

So , in that case,  you’ve got to ask people around you who know you well, “What am I really good at?” Or, “What impresses you about me?” because sometimes you just can’t see it.

[11:00] Then, go back to your list and look at what you are both passionate about and have the skills to succeed at and circle them.

Once you’ve figured out your passion and your skills, you’ll want to look at what niches are viable based on what you discovered about yourself and what would make you happy to work on in the long run.

In the next part of this training, which will be in a few weeks, I think,   depending on how I’m feeling we’re going to talk about finding your niche. So, that’s it for today. Again to take the next step you can get my Bestseller Book-Writing Blueprint Guide  at www.booksbusinessabundance.com

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