I am confident you understand what an ideal audience is. They may be referred to as your Avatar or Persona as well. But your Alpha is a bit more specific. To be blunt, if you shifted your thinking enough to know that your Alpha should be the ONLY audience you should be addressing with your content, you’d be a lot more successful. Here’s an explanation of what I mean by “Alpha.”
The Thought Process
This research will clarify your ideal audience from your Alpha. Firstly, determine what you are most passionate about, in your product or service offering. You know, the one thing that you could not live without if you lost all others. The one you would kill over. That’s the one. That is your Alpha product/service.
Next, think about all of the items you sell and consider their individual transaction profit. Not the one with the biggest sale, but the largest amount of profit from a single transaction. For example, if you sold consulting services, a project sold for $10,000 but took 250 hours of your time would generate a profit of $40 per hour.
Now quantitatively we rank things on something called alpha over standard deviation, which is the return independent of the market divided by volatility. Usually, to get a high ranking, you need some buying pressure. – Louis Navellier
Another project that sold for $1,500 and took 25 hours yields a transactional profit of $60. Despite the high-ticket price of the first project, the second is the Alpha project because you can generate a lot more work at $60 per hour than you can at the $40 per hour one. And, you won’t be able to take on more profitable project because your time is gone.
But, your most passionate work comes in the form of group coaching, even though you make less money than either of the two project examples above. What’s a consultant to do?
In the case of this example, you must decide whether your most passionate pursuits should be your primary focus, or whether you should pursue your most profitable transaction. Money or passion, that’s the decision. Neither one is right or wrong, it just is what it is. I would hope you would select passion over profit, because the profit will come eventually when enough passion is expended, and if it is evidenced in your execution. Choose wisely.
If you are fortunate enough to learn through this work that your most passionate offering also happens to be your most profitable, you’ve found Nirvana. You have hit the jackpot. What could be better than doing something you love and earning great money doing so? Nothing, in my mind.
If you take this exercise seriously and consider shifting your thinking toward an Alpha offering to your Alpha target audience, you might discover better satisfaction, better clients and a better bottom line.
