Franklin Taggart's Unconventional Life Blog

  I attend networking meetings every week and I'm amazed to see the change that takes place in people from when you're just having a normal conversation with them and the point where they are asked to introduce themselves to the group. I almost have to do a double-take because the charming person I was just talking with has turned into a robot who is rushing through a canned, formulaic phrase that ends up not giving anyone a reason to talk to them after the intros are done. I've had my share of elevator faux pas', too, mostly because I never realized just how important they were in the process of creating memories and delivering value. A few years ago, I attended a workshop at the SBDC where we were given an elevator pitch exercise that had a formula that I had to question. It was the most uninteresting way to present yourself that I had ever seen. About a month later I was putting together a workshop on marketing messages for the same SBDC and I created a short exercis...

I feel lucky to have gotten this far and to have only a few regrets. I don't want to dwell on it, but there is a link between one of my top regrets and the course I just launched. If I could go back and do one thing differently, I would choose to have been more assertive in creating opportunities and inviting people to join me. I had a habit of waiting to be invited to join people, so I was left out of many things I would have loved to join. My passivity was the thing that led to my exclusion. What does that have to do with elevator pitches? As it turns out, quite a bit. If you listen to the way many people introduce themselves to a new group, you might be surprised to find their introductions are passive, and they don't offer an invitation for the next step in a relationship. In my own case, changing my elevator pitch to a more assertive style of creating an appealing invitation and telling people how to accept it was the turning point in my feelings of confidence and success ...

  ▼▼▼Watch and Listen Below!▼▼▼ The online education industry has been in an explosive growth cycle for the past two decades and it doesn’t appear to be slowing. Online courses offer small business owners a way to scale and grow their revenue without having to add more time-based services or personnel. Today’s guest, Jason Van Orden helps authors, academics, and speakers turn their expertise into new streams of scalable income such as online courses. He draws from more than seventeen years of experience, including creating multiple successful brands, launching over 60 online courses, teaching more than 10,000 entrepreneurs, earning seven figures in online course sales, and generating 8 million downloads of his podcasts. His mission is to help visionaries with impactful ideas to connect with the people they serve best and the problems they can most uniquely solve. Since 2005, Jason has helped thought leaders to reach a larger audience with their ideas, create new income str...