Multiple Streams of Income and Refining Your Message with Melanie Benson | POP 799

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A photo of Melanie Benson is captured. She is a business and marketing consultant. Melanie is featured on the Practice of the Practice, a therapist podcast.

Which common leveling-up blind spots are holding you back from success and growth? What is it that truly makes you unique? How can you take actionable steps to turn your uniqueness into your business superpower?

In this podcast episode, Joe Sanok speaks about building multiple streams of income and honing in on your message with Melanie Benson.

Podcast Sponsor: Therapy Notes

An image of Therapy Notes is captured as the sponsor on the Practice of the Practice Podcast, a therapist podcast. Therapy Notes is the most trusted EHR for Behavioral Health.

Is managing your practice stressing you out? Try TherapyNotes! It makes notes, billing, scheduling, and telehealth a whole lot easier.

Check it out and you will quickly see why TherapyNotes is the highest-rated EHR on TrustPilot with over 1000 verified customer reviews and an average customer rating of 4.9/5 stars.

You’ll notice the difference from the first day you sign up for a trial. They offer live phone support 7 days a week, so when you have questions, you can quickly reach someone who can help, and you are never wasting your time looking for answers.

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Use promo code ‘JOE’ to get three free months to try out TherapyNotes, no strings attached, and remember, telehealth is included with every subscription free. Make 2022 the best year yet with TherapyNotes.

Meet Melanie Benson

A photo of Melanie Benson is captured. She is a business and marketing consultant. Melanie is featured on the Practice of the Practice, a therapist podcast.

Melanie Benson, Authority Brand Amplifier for Expert-preneurs, shows her clients how to stand out in a crowded market and attract high-paying clients and opportunities.

She’s the host of Amplify Your Success Podcast, is author of Rewired for Wealth, co-author of the best-selling Voices of the 21st Century and Entrepreneur.com’s Start-Up Guide to Starting an Information Marketing Business, and has been featured in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Woman’s Day, and Parenting.

Visit Melanie Benson’s website, and connect with her on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

FREEBIE: Check out Melanie’s 7-Step Plan to Get Visible and Learn How to Avoid the 17 Biggest Mistakes When Podcast Guesting

In This Podcast

  • Some common leveling-up blind spots
  • What is it that makes you unique?
  • Hone in on your messaging
  • How to be a great podcast guest
  • Melanie’s advice to private practitioners

Some common leveling-up blind spots

1 – Not recognizing how valuable your skillset is.

You may be slow or nervous to level up because you may think that your skillset is not valuable, or is already in the market. However, your approach is unique, and it may fully resonate with your ideal audience, so pursue it!

Maybe it’s because you’ve been doing it for so long, it’s like the friend you take for granted … but there are people who are searching for it.

Melanie Benson

2 – Not seeing the opportunities.

Your skillset can be reworked and repackaged into something new, not related to in-session therapy, that can be made available to a searching and willing audience.

There’s this whole opportunity … to take that expertise and package it in a new way and bring it into the course-creation, coaching modality and transform lives even faster.

Melanie Benson

Just because you are a therapist doesn’t mean that your income has to come purely from offering therapy. Your skills and knowledge can serve other purposes that can also earn you an income.

3 – Not challenging the stories your mind creates.

Do not blindly follow the thoughts that your mind gives you, because sometimes the information that it bases these thoughts on is not true, or self-preserving emotions like fear and anxiety are driving them.

What is it that makes you unique?

No two people are alike, and the same goes for coaches and therapists. You could have two therapists trained in the same way, and they would approach clients and handle situations differently.

That is where your value lies, in how you approach your practice and what your unique personality and life experience bring to the table.

Your superpower is what makes you unique. What is it that makes you the standout expert, coach, consultant, [or] therapist … that people will want to work with?

Melanie Benson

Hone in on your messaging

If it feels daunting to you to put yourself out there, here’s a simple process:

  • Focus on your ideal clients and the people that you like to work with. Specifically, focus on those that bring you joy while you simultaneously work together to get them great results.
  • What is the common process that you take these ideal clients through? What is the similar journey that you and these clients go on in their work that brings them those great results?

[This process] starts to reveal where your superpowers are.

Melanie Benson
  • What do you hear over and over again from all your clients? There is similar feedback that they give you from what they struggle with, to what they want to achieve, and how they receive your guidance.

How to be a great podcast guest

Before you learn how to be a great podcast guest, here are some tips on things that you should avoid doing:

  • Winging it
  • Not having a clear message
  • Not having a basic structure of how your conversation will look

To be a great podcast guest, try Melanie’s ROCS method:

  • R: relevant
  • O: outcome driven
  • C: credibility-boosting
  • S: specific

It’s easy for you to remember because every time you give a talk … or teach something, you’re using that framework.

Melanie Benson

Melanie’s advice to private practitioners

Find a message that, when you share it, your heart soars, and you feel that you are expanding your impact on the world.

Books mentioned in this episode:

BOOK | Melanie Benson – Rewired for Wealth: How to Train Your Mind and Become a Money and Success Magnet

Useful Links mentioned in this episode:

Check out these additional resources:

Meet Joe Sanok

A photo of Joe Sanok is displayed. Joe, private practice consultant, offers helpful advice for group practice owners to grow their private practice. His therapist podcast, Practice of the Practice, offers this advice.

Joe Sanok helps counselors to create thriving practices that are the envy of other counselors. He has helped counselors to grow their businesses by 50-500% and is proud of all the private practice owners that are growing their income, influence, and impact on the world. Click here to explore consulting with Joe.

Thanks For Listening!

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Podcast Transcription

[JOE SANOK] This is the Practice of the Practice Podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 799. I’m Joe Sanok, your host, and welcome to the Practice of the Practice Podcast. I am so excited that you are here today. We are covering everything around starting, growing, scaling, and exiting a private practice, which actually dipping your toes out of private practice is something that we’re going to talk about today. I’m really excited to, because after 799 episodes, we’ve covered a ton around the basics of private practice but one thing that we only hear, and there cover is side gigs, leveling up outside of your practice. building e-courses or being a guest on podcasts. I have this group called Audience Building Academy that you’ve probably heard about. We have a cohort that starts every six months. It’s a six month milestone-based program where we walk people through month by month what to do to build an audience, to potentially grow an income outside of your private practice with all these skills you have. I’m really excited though to have my friend Melanie Benson, who has authority brand amplifier for expert entrepreneurs. She shows you how to stand out in a crowded market and attract high paying clients and opportunities. Melanie has a proven track record of accelerating results for her clients, not uncommon to see three to five times revenue increases in the first six months. She’s also the host of the Amplify Your Success podcast and is author of Rewired for Wealth and co-author of the bestselling Voices of the 21st Century and entrepreneur.com startup guide, just starting an information marketing business. Melanie, welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast. I’m so glad that you’re here today. [MELANIE BENSON] Thank you, Joe. Thanks for having me. I’m super excited to be a part of this amazing conversation that you’re creating. [JOE] Yes it’s great to have you here because you’re such an expert on podcast guesting and multiple streams of income and leveling up. It’s just, I’m really excited to have this conversation and also to have a conversation with someone I’ve met in person. It’s always fun to hung out with someone and just feel a sense of their vibe. It’s just different when we’re doing an interview with people that are we’ve known each other for a while. [MELANIE] Yes, we’ve hung out. [JOE] We’ve hung out, we’ve had drinks, it’s been great. So let’s just start with maybe what are some of the blind spots that therapists, counselors, social workers have in regards to their ability to level up outside of their practice? [MELANIE] I think like any expert in, you have an expertise as a therapist, you’ve been doing a body of work, you’ve been creating results, you’ve been guiding people through these transformational processes, helping them heal things they’ve been stuck with probably for a lifetime. I think sometimes in our blind spot is this, you don’t recognize how valuable that process or that thing is that you do. Maybe it’s because you’ve been doing it so long, it’s like, it’s like the friend that you take for granted but there are people who are searching for it and there are struggling with it, but therapy probably isn’t where they’re going to go looking. So I think there’s this whole opportunity, like what you’re talking about with audience builders, to be able to take that expertise and package it in a new way and bring it more into the course creation coaching modality and transform lives even faster. That I think is such a golden opportunity right now. This isn’t going away. We’re going to continue to thrive. I have a therapist right now who we’ve been working on taking her modality and moving it into these online worlds. It’s like, I’m like, you have no idea how hungry people are for this. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity there. Can I just share a second one that’s coming up for me as we’re talking? We may get into this more later. I think there’s some buzzwords these days best kept secret, imposter syndrome or imposter moments depending on how you, how you’ve heard that. I think the other blind spot is our minds form these stories about where we are in the world. If you don’t understand that this is a, like, you may be looking at all the people who’ve been putting out content for years. I’ve been in business for 22 years as a coach, I have so much content, I have so many things figured out, and I often hear people joke, come to me and say, wow, okay, how am I ever going to be able to do that? I feel like I’m never going to be enough. Like we can’t compare where you are right now to where someone else’s who’s been doing this for a really long time, and let that be a measure of what’s possible. We have to recognize those imposter moments or when you feel like you’re doing all the right things and people aren’t seeing you, it’s just an opportunity to dial in a little bit more and optimize your message, your visibility strategy, and your client attraction methods. [JOE] Now, when people say to you Melanie, you’ve been doing this so long, you’ve got so many tools, why should I even become a coach, consultant, make an e-course? Like why wouldn’t they just work with you? Why, like, how do you help people reframe that to understand their unique value set? [MELANIE] Well, I’ll share something I learned very early on it, when my first couple years, I came out of the corporation model, like I was working for a Fortune 500 company. I took coach training and I’m like, bam, I’m just going to hang my shingle. Of course, people are going to just show up on crickets again, nobody was coming to my work. Somebody said something to me, I started to get into that, like, I’m never going to get this right, this is really hard. I got really down on myself and a mentor said to me, he said, “Look, there is somebody out there who needs your unique way of doing this even if from your perception you are doing it like everybody else.” He’s like, you’re not. There are people who like, there can be two coaches standing side by side and one of those coaches is going to have a different energy and a different way of holding space and a different way of asking questions and you will. That there’s somebody that needs that. So I think, and I’ve seen this, I collaborate with a lot of people who do very similar things as me, but because their mindset, their experience, their training, the way they do coaching or mentoring is different than me, we’ll attract different people even though we appear to do similar things. So I think if you just really dig deep and understand what your superpower is, and I do, I teach something called building a golden bridge and that’s understanding the messaging, which is very hard for a lot of people that are good at what they do. They’re like, but don’t people just get it, or they, I’m sure you see us all the time, Joe, where people talk about the process to get someone to an outcome rather than what that person is searching for that client is searching for. When you really understand how to build a golden bridge, you start to recognize, oh, okay, yes, people really need this, they’re hungry for this outcome. I can help them create. So maybe if I could just share like a shift that I went through to really like go from starving and barely making a thousand dollars a month to building a multiple, six figure business practice as you, as you call it. I literally had to change my mind about messaging. I had to realize it was my job to learn how to create a message that other people really understood, not just how I was going to get them there, but what was going to be better or different by going through my coaching process. So that was a little bit of a superpower, oh, sorry, the superpower piece is the fuel for that because understanding your superpower is what makes you unique. What is it that makes you the standout expert or coach, consultant, therapist, if you will, that people will want to work with? [JOE] What should therapists notice as they go through that process? Because I think when I think about the average maybe person in Next Level Practice or Group Practice Boss or even Audience Building Academy, they’ll say, well, I don’t know, I’m just a therapist. I’m just like, I do therapy and I’m good at trauma or anxiety or depression or couples or whatever. It’s not a big deal. Whatever, I just did the training. That would be their typical response. How would you react to that? [MELANIE] Okay, so yes, that’s exactly what my brain was going to in the beginning too. If I’m working with somebody around their messaging and helping them design like an offering, what I do is I ask them, and if you’ve been a therapist for a while, you should start to notice that there is a similar process that you will take your most favorite patients or clients through. When you look at that, not from a, I’m in the moment just doing the work that I do, but really looking at what is my most favorite clients who get the best results? They do the work, they show up, they get results, they’re fun to work with. They bring you joy. They don’t just like drain you and you look at like, what is a common process that I’m taking them through that starts to reveal where your superpowers are. The second leg of it is what do you hear over and over and over again from a client? I’m sure there is similar feedback that they give you. So one of the thing, we’ll just take me for a second and Joe, if you want to share, maybe something that you’ve heard over and over and over again like that you started to realize like, wow, this is making me unique, my clients would tell me, you bridge the conscious spiritual like transformation work and practical action-based tactics so I can get both from you. That was one of the things I started to realize, like, oh, so everybody doesn’t do that? Some people are just one or the other? When I realized that my ideal clients wanted that I was like, okay, I got to make sure that’s part of how my clients who are searching will hear my uniqueness. [JOE] Even in my own work over time noticing the push and pull between slowing down and killing it for a while they would only see in consulting the speed side of it. So a lot of my clients would say, it’s like drinking out of a fire hose. We get so much done in such a short period of time. But then as we talked more about when they actually were successful, not just working with me, it was as we set strong boundaries around their personal time that they were spending that time genuinely relaxing, genuinely slowing down. Then when it was time to work, it’s like the pressure had built up and they just got so much done in a short period of time. So that structure that I see in Slow Down School, that structure I see in Killin’It Camp and in Thursday is the New Friday is really that same structure over and over of aggressively slowing down and then aggressively getting crap done so fast. [MELANIE] Yes, I was thinking of another one, I mentioned before, I have a therapist who’s been a client for many years on and off. As we were working on this new course that she was going to put out in the world and these training system, I asked her, I said, so what is it that your clients just are blown away that you do? She has a way to speed up the trauma healing and recovery process. She had a process that she learned that was unique to her and I’m like, then that’s it. That’s one of your unique factors that other people would find very valuable,. So anyway, like I just think it’s nice to hear different ways that people can tap into that [THERAPY NOTES] Is managing your practice stressing you out? Try Therapy Notes. It makes notes, billing, scheduling, and tele-health a whole lot easier. Check it out and you will quickly see why it’s the highest rated EHR on Trustpilot with over 1000 verified customer views and an average customer rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars. You’ll notice the difference from the first day you sign up for a trial. They offer live phone support seven days a week so when you have questions, you can quickly reach out to someone who can help. You are never wasting your time looking for answers. If you’re coming from another EHR, they make the transition really easy. Therapy Notes will import your clients’ demographic data free of charge during your trial so you can get going right away. Use the promo code [JOE], J-O-E to get the first three free months totally free to try it out, no strings attached. Remember telehealth is included with every subscription free. Make 2022, the best year yet with Therapy Notes. Again, use promo code [JOE] to get three months totally free. [JOE SANOK] So one thing I teach, and I’d love to hear if you agree, disagree, if you would adjust it from the way you teach things is that most of the time highly trained people like master’s degree, Ph.D.’s, they’re very comfortable with building the product. So they’ll spend months or years building this “perfect” product and then it’ll be crickets, there’s nobody that wants to buy it or they don’t know how to market it. They’ve in a sense wasted all this time because maybe their people don’t want an e-course, maybe they want a membership community or they want individual coaching. So what I tend to teach, and that’s where Audience Building Academy comes from, is build an audience and then survey the audience, talk to the audience about what they want. So I always start with, let’s build the audience, have a basic direction of your niche, but we don’t need to land on are you launching an e-course? Are you launching a membership community? Are you launching downloads? Like let’s just build the audience first. So hearing that, how do you teach it? Do you have a different approach? Do you agree with parts of it? Disagree with approach? Like what do you, do you tend to teach in that area? [MELANIE] It’s a great question and I love what you’re doing because I think we, a lot of people have been teaching the opposite and it’s setting people up for failure. I will say that I start with somebody’s goal and their priorities and so if somebody is cash strapped it’s like, okay, I got to make stuff happen right now. I’m going to guide them very differently than if they’re doing this as a side hustle, which is what I recommend. Do not do what I did, which is like leap and try to find my wings on the way down and go, oh, well this is not working. I’m going to have to figure something out. That’s the hard way. I don’t recommend that we put ourselves in financial stress. What I suggest is similar, the audience first is where you start to work out what your message is. So I found myself in one of my superpowers is helping people uncover their message. I like to think of the message is like the magnet and it’s the message that stands out there as a part of your brand positioning, your client attraction, your speaking and your whatever you’re going to put on a website. Like any place you’re going to be in front of potential clients or opportunities, your message is what people touch first, it’s what gives them that first impression. So I say uncover a message that is so compelling, it lights you up, it makes you passionate, it wants you to get out there and spread it in a bigger way or amplify it as I, as one of my brand names. Then that will help you build the audience and then you start to figure out what is the audience hungry for from you. I think there’s so many different ways that we can design meaningful, powerful, transformational processes, whether it’s a online course or a hybrid type coaching with on-demand training, which is where I tend to lean. I do a lot of that these days. Or for some people they’re going to dive straight into what I call VIP or high-ticket offers where instead of booking yourself out with lots of coaching clients or therapy clients, you’re going to go right to developing some immersive or accelerated experience that you can offer to premium clients who are ready, who are willing and able to invest more to work with you father. So we had to find what’s right for you because what your audience will bear and what’s the best way to deliver what your magic is, your superpower. So I love that methodology and I think where people get screwed up is, yes, but I need cash now. [JOE] Yes [MELANIE] I need to get some cash going to make all this work to pay for all this. Again, another life-changing insight that was given to me early on in my entrepreneurial career is invest today in the business you want tomorrow. We have to do the groundwork now to build something that’s powerful and sustainable and the cash will come. But if you jump ahead and try and put something out before you really know what your audience wants from you may spend a lot of time and money building something out that isn’t going to sell. That’s heartbreaking. Not that I’ve ever done that before, like 10 times. [JOE] Well, I think it’s also then if you’re focusing on just getting the cash, you’re probably not going to accept the right clients. You’re not going to have the clients that are going to make the right referrals and if they do make referrals of other people that aren’t the right referrals, then you’re going to be stuck with all these clients you don’t like working with. So for me, if I’m backed into a, like, I don’t want to be backed into a corner to then say, oh, financially I have to take this client, otherwise I can’t pay for my mortgage or something like that. That to me doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t feel like I’m going to be doing my best work. Like I really want to be able to, whether it’s one-on-one consulting or even Next Level Practice that is super cheap to be able to say like, I want to be here in this session. I want to be able to have these conversations and hang out with these people and I feel like I add value. So I want to shift a little bit into podcast guesting because we both agree that building an audience is important and you and I both love podcasting. That’s originally how we met was through podcasting. So what makes a good podcast guest when it comes to being a professional? Like it’s one thing to just try to be funny and just like just shoot the shit with people but what’s a way that for you, what goes into being a good podcast guest for therapists that want to position themselves to build multiple streams of income? [MELANIE] Well, let me just take a back step for a second and share how I got to realizing that podcasting was such a powerful platform for us for client attraction. When I first made my leap from struggling from a thousand dollars a month to getting into a multiple six-figure business, what was working was when other people would invite me onto their stage or onto a teleseminar because yes, the OG method was Tele seminars way back in the day. It was like literally like turning on a faucet of ideal elites. I would stand on a stage, I would have so many clients coming in, I would be on a tele seminar. I literally, that Tele seminar, especially if it was archived and available, would bring me clients for years. Then I got to a point where I didn’t want to be on the road, until seminars weren’t really a thing anymore and that’s when podcasting emerged and I was like, this is gold because people are going to have you in their pocket. They’re walking their dog, they’re driving to work, they’re at the grocery store, at the gym, whatever they do, they’re tapping into content and getting inspired and learning. You have a captive audience that is bonding with you when you are in their ear. Second the other thing that happens for a lot of people is, where am I going to find my prospects, right Joe? It’s like, okay, there’s a gazillion things I could do where, how do I get in front of them? Well, oftentimes if you’re guessing on someone else’s podcast, you have a competitor or a colleague who serves your target audience, inviting you to take to join them on their podcast, and you get to borrow their influence and you’re tapping into a very powerful lead pool. So I saw podcasting as a golden opportunity. What happened for me was I l took my speaking career and learned how to have a conversation. Again, the messaging would always be the key piece of it. That conversation, because I knew how to organize sound bites and stories and bring a compelling inspiring call to action, people were reaching out handover fist to work with me from podcasts. So what makes a good podcast guest? Well, first of all, I’m going to tell you what doesn’t make a good podcast guest, winging it. I can’t tell you how many really talented, super smart people would come on my Amplifier Success podcast and they were all over the place. They made no sense. They didn’t have, I know you’ve probably had this a million times, they didn’t have like a concise message and it was like pulling teeth to get something concrete out of them. I would ask them later, like, how’d it go? Did you get some great connections? Did you have some people reaching out? Did you get any more bookings? No, it was crickets. It’s like, okay, I know what’s happening. People don’t know how to structure the conversation. What I think happens is we’re like, I got this. I know how to have a conversation, I can talk to the cows come home. But there’s a difference between having a conversation where you’re talking with a buddy or a friend and it’s a natural conversation and having a compelling conversation where you’re intentional about what you are bringing into that conversation. So you give your best chance for someone who needs what you do to say, oh my gosh, this is exactly what I’m struggling with. How do I get more? That’s what I want and what I think happens is a lot of people understand podcast guesting is so hot, I’m going to go guest on a bunch of podcasts, but they don’t have a framework of how to show up. So they feel like it’s a waste of time, Joe and, they’re like, okay, I’m out. I’m not going to do it anymore. It doesn’t work for me. It’s just simply they don’t have, they don’t know how to be a great guest. So I have like a whole list of things that make people [JOE] Yes, I know. We could have a — [MELANIE] Do you want me to cover, but yes, this, we could go forever, but you tell me what else you want to know. [JOE] So one thing that in Audience Building Academy we talk about is having a playlist of like different stories or research or ways that you think about things. Before I share what I share, I would love to hear for you, what are some of the like essential things that people should be able to draw from in a podcast interview? [MELANIE] Love it. There’s a strategy I teach called seeding your credibility. You’re either going to get this immediately or you’re going to go, oh my God, this feels so weird. Like, I don’t like talking about myself. I just want to acknowledge and honor that some of us have a harder time boosting up our credibility. It feels funky or off for you. The way I teach this is to find the most natural way for you to do this so there’s different strategies you can pull from. A couple of my favorite are having a way to talk about what you do inside of a framework. For instance, we even talking about messaging a lot, one of the ways I teach or I will talk about it, is something called the ROCS Method. So I have a framework that I use to teach messaging. ROCS Method is ROCS, relevant, outcome driven, credibility boosting and specific. I use this in all of my messaging strategies with my clients and within my own business. But that gives me a very memorable, specific way to convey something that can be complicated or have a lot of moving parts to it and I can just do it like in one sentence or I can expand on it and make it bigger. So I think that’s one of the great ways to do this and it’s easy for you to remember, because every time you give a talk, every time you’re going to teach something, you’re using that framework and so it becomes like — [JOE] Give us an example of the ROCS method in just like a sentence or two. What would that look like if we’re talking about how to amplify your message, like if that’s the topic then how would breakdown what a ROCS method, couple of sentences would be. [MELANIE] Sure. So relevant basically means what your, so let’s take this, let’s say you want to be on podcasts, what happens is when you start pitching podcasts, you’re pitching usually to get on great podcasts and a million people are pitching to get on these podcasts. So we got to find a way to get your topic to stand out. Let’s say, well we’ll just take mine because it’s right in my head, I’ll take one of my free resources 17 Mistakes that Guest Experts Make that Cost them Leads and Clients when being a guest on a podcast. Relevant, if you’re looking to get on podcasts this is for you. Specific at the end is 17, there’s 17 mistakes that people are making. Outcome driven, well if you want to avoid losing leads and clients, you know okay, this is something that’s going to help me. My rule of thumb is you got to have at least three of the four to really create a topic or title of something that is going to be catchy. So some people are like, ooh, that feels weird. So don’t pick the one that feels weird. Do the other three. That’s one example. I’m working with a transformational coach right now. We’ve been working on her titles and she had some titles that were really great, but what was happening was it, if this wasn’t thing, something you were familiar with, her titles wouldn’t make any sense. So we took her catchphrase, which is something that everybody also needs, is a few catchphrases and we turned that into her title. I won’t remember it perfectly, but it’s something like the ambition paradox where high achievers get stuck and feel unfulfilled in the pursuit of success, so the high achiever, or sorry, the ambition paradox was where the specificity and relevance started to go in. That’s another example of how you can maybe soften some of the specificity, but still really bring something that’s unique and reflective of your superpower. Is that making sense? [JOE] Oh, yes. Yes, that’s, I mean, I know that we could just go on and on. [MELANIE] Yes, we could do a whole class [JOE] Oh my gosh, we really could. So when you think about maybe just a couple quick hit areas that if someone wanted to go from being adequate at being a podcast guest to being great or even good, adequate to good, here’s like two or three just like quick hit things that they could do right away. [MELANIE] First of all really do the work to uncover where your credibility is. I covered one, but don’t be shy about sharing what makes you a powerhouse. People want powerhouses, it helps them put you in a bucket called, I need to listen to this person. Second be organized. Some of being a good guest is what you deliver in the conversation, but a lot of it is what you do before and after. If you are not getting your materials across to the host in a concise way, and you’re not getting them what they need, they’re going to get frustrated. They’re going to feel like they’re chasing you down. They’re not going to want to put their best effort into the podcast. A lot of people don’t realize, but podcasting is not an inexpensive endeavor, and the host is taking on 90% of that on their own. If they’ve got a sponsor that might help offset some of it. So do your best, share it. The third thing is be organized and share it on the backend when it goes live. This is a really powerful media exposure. If you were on a TV show, you would be sharing it everywhere. “Hey, guess what, I’m on Good Morning America today.” So it’s the same with a podcast. Those are three, there’s a list, but be organized, be organized, be organized. [JOE] Oh, so awesome. Melanie, the last question I always ask is, if every private practitioner in the world were listening right now, what would you want them to know? [MELANIE] I want you to like really find a message that when you share that message, your heart sores and you feel like you’re expanding the impact you have on the world. Sometimes you need to have some support clarifying what that message is, get it, invest in it. I spent 18 years trying to figure out my message on my own. When I got some help, it was like the super, I just felt like my wings spread a million miles wide and everything started flowing so much easier. So find that message, amplify that message, and know that the more consistent you are sharing that message, the easier it is to see you out there in a sea of people who share similar things in the world. [JOE] So awesome. Melanie, if people want to follow your work, if they want to listen to your podcast, where should we send them? [MELANIE] Well, amplifyyoursuccesspodcast.com. We’re on every platform out there, so whatever you listen to podcasts, you’ll find us, and we’d love to have you as part of our community. If you’re dialing in this podcast piece and you’re thinking, okay, well I want to make sure I know what to do well, and you’d like to start on that journey with me, I would like to share a resource with y’all. It’s a gift. It’s the 17 mistakes that I mentioned earlier that people commonly make. So let’s find out what those mistakes are, let’s make sure I show you how to do it in a way that’s more effective and strategic and allows you to feel confident getting your message out there in the most authentic and powerful way possible. So if you go to melaniebenson.com/practice podcast, you’ll get access to that resource. [JOE] So awesome. We’ll have links to that in the show notes. Melanie, thank you so much for being on the Practice of the Practice Podcast. [MELANIE] Thank you for having me, Joe. [JOE] We covered some ground today. That was amazing. Sometimes we just get stuck in growing our practice. There’s nothing wrong with that, but the skills that you have most likely transcend the individual work that you’re doing. Whether it’s growing membership communities, being on podcasts, starting your own podcast, growing in your social media influence, there’s so many ways that you can go after what you’re excited about, what you’re skilled at, and there’s people out there that want to hear your unique voice, so go after it. Also, our next cohort that I mentioned of Audience Building Academy is starting in March of 2023. If you want to be on that interest list you can just go over to audiencebuilding.academy and check that out. We have all the details right there for you. Also, we could not do this show without our sponsors. Our sponsors help really us be able to do such creative and innovative shows here. Therapy Notes is our sponsor today. They are the leading electronic health records out there. Use promo code [JOE] at checkout to get some free months and they’ll also help you transition from your current EHR. Thank you so much for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have a great day. We’ll talk to you soon. Bye. Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. This is given with the understanding that neither the host, the producers, the publishers, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.