Why I changed the title of this series from “The Leveraged Expert” to “The Untapped Entrepreneur.”

It might seem a little early to be changing the name – I just started doing this at the beginning of January! But it was really important to me because, while I think that “The Leveraged Expert” makes a lot of sense, I got a lot of feedback that it was really jargon-y and didn’t mean the same thing in different contexts.

For instance, a person who is fully leveraged in their investments means someone with a lot of debt and no way to position out of it.

That isn’t at all what I mean, and so after a lot of brainstorming, a lot of soul searching, a lot of Thesaurus looking up, I needed to come up with another term – and that’s where The Untapped Entrepreneur came in.

I believe this is only the beginning!

We are at the very beginning of making money on the internet, in the same way that we were at the very beginning of the Modern English language in Shakespeare’s time.

What that means is that in 20 years we’re going to look back on this time and say “Oh my gosh. Do you remember in 2020 when it was so cheap to advertise on Facebook? When it was so cheap to get started?”

Because in 20 years the market is going to be fuller than it is today. More people will be working from home more often –  and a lot more people will be working for themselves. If you’ve been online for a little while it can kind of seem like all the ideas are tapped out and I want you to know that that is not at all true.

There are only three things you have to focus on if you want to be a part of this economy.

The first is your expertise.

The things that you’ve spent your time getting good at, whether that’s something you studied in college or something that you just keep getting asked to do at work or your, the hobbies, the things that you spend your time reading about. That’s your expertise.

The second piece is positioning.

There’s a difference between getting paid for a blog post and getting paid to speak on a stage at a keynote. Positioning yourself as an expert will get you on more stages than simply writing blog posts.

The third is a marketing engine.

Everybody needs a marketing engine. The minimum requirement is the combination of a website and e-mails and all that. Where a lot of potential entrepreneurs get tripped up when they hear me talking about webinars is that they think “Oh my God one more thing.”

Somebody has already told them that they need to be on Instagram, somebody else has told them that they need to be on Pinterest, and another person has told them they need to be on Facebook. Understandably they think “how could I possibly spend all this time marketing when I have a business to run, and clients to serve, or a product to create?” That’s where this series is headed.

We have been talking about webinars all of January, and going forward we’ll be switching topics every month. Next month we’re going to be talking about expertise: how to build your expertise and how to decide what you’re going to specialize in.

These things can be challenging, and I’m excited to dive into each micro-piece one at a time. It is overwhelming to hear “hey, all you have to do is pick a niche and then you need to get going.”

It’s a little bit more complicated than that. It can feel like, if you pick one path, you have to dedicate yourself to that path. I have seen it become a trap, especially in the personal finance community.

For example, I started blogging to get myself out of consumer debt, and by the time I was done, I was pretty done talking about money. I’m was out of debt: my story became not all interesting to me or anybody else. I mean, if you have a website called I’m-going-to-lose-20-pounds.com – what do you do after you do that?

It isn’t that it’s hard, it’s that you are so smart, you are so talented, that it’s really hard to pick your first thing. We’ll get into that all throughout February.

I’m so excited about that and I really want to help anybody following this series to tap their innate knowledge, their innate talents, and help them position themselves as an expert so that they get paid what the market will pay experts. Then you can start to build the life that you want!

If you want to talk to me about choosing your first expertise, I’d love to have you book a call with me.