Franklin Taggart's Unconventional Life Blog

I use a simple framework to guide my marketing and sales activities. 1. Connect human to human - forget the technique and build a real relationship through your message. 2. Inspire imagination - Help people experience a different possibility in their mind and show how you will help them reach it. 3. Invite people to take the next step toward that outcome. 4. Deliver valuable and memorable experiences - No matter how small your message is, you have an opportunity to make a positive difference. Make it. This framework has served me well, and I recommend it to everyone. In this Coffee Break, I share a recent conversation in which the topic of delivering valuable experiences came up. I've shared the same ideas here. I offer coaching and courses to teach you how to do this. Please get in touch, and let's explore how this framework can help you. #messaging #framework #value 

In the right state of mind, every one of us is susceptible to the suggestions of others. Advertisers have been planting ideas, catchphrases, taglines, mottoes, and anything else they can slip through our mental filters for the length of human history. Every day, we witness how powerful irrational and sometimes dangerous beliefs can be, yet we constantly expose ourselves to them through the inputs we choose. Just today, I heard a well-known senator plant the seed that Americans are ready for civil war. And I know he knows exactly what he's doing. He's made a long political career out of the power of suggestion. If you hear the same messages over and over and over again, at some point, you stop questioning their validity, and they become "true" to you. After several hours of concentrated work this afternoon, I listened to a YouTube video while finishing some reports. About 45 minutes after the video had ended, there was a phrase that kept inserting itself into my awaren

  In a recent conversation with a friend, she asked what I did to build my audience. I asked her where her curiosity about that question stemmed from. She talked about recent events she's applied to be a speaker or presenter for and how much importance was placed, not on her topic or her expertise, but on the size of her audience. While she has a respectable number of loyal followers, a large percentage who engage with her social media efforts and open her emails, it wasn't enough to satisfy the event hosts. The only metric that meant anything to them was her list size. They passed on having her present - in my mind, a huge loss for them. In answer to her question, I offered that I was fanatical about building my mailing list for the first several years of my coaching and my online businesses. I spent significant time every day strategically creating and posting content in front of new eyes, doing anything I could to get subscribers. And I got subscribers. But in the process, I

I've had twenty ideas for what to talk about in this video, but when I push the record, I can't remember one. So here we are after 11 PM on a Sunday, and I have no idea what to say. What does this have to do with Willie Nelson? I saw Willie on VH1 Storytellers a couple of decades ago and remember him talking about how he wrote the song Crazy. Yes, the one immortalized by Patsy Cline. While in the show he talked about driving to Austin from Nashville, other accounts that made it to Wikipedia said it was an hour commute between his home and the radio station where he worked in Houston in 1958. This is the oral tradition here, so don't take me literally. In Storytellers, Willie came around to the idea of how he knew he had a good idea for a song. I'll talk about it in the Coffee Break, but it seems to me this information will be valuable to any content creator. How do you decide which ideas are good enough to make into something? Willie's idea test is one I've used

 I've made a lot of PDF downloads for lead magnets, starting with a first guitar buyer's guide I offered for one of the first blogs I started in 2009. Free PDFs were how most online marketers built their lists back then, and it seemed to work pretty well - until it didn't. When I started to study digital marketing more intensely a few years later, I started to collect PDF lead magnets. The Google Drive folder where I keep them now lists over 600 document files stored there, and I can probably count the number I've read completely with my two hands. I've also tried to offer mini-courses in exchange for email addresses, which worked for a while, but those ultimately slowed down as the PDFs did. Finding ways to attract new customers and clients grew more difficult as people became wise to the tactics and the lead magnets' quality declined. I remember trying to find a way to use tools like surveys, and Google Forms to both gather information and deliver value, but i

▼Watch and Listen Below!▼ A couple of years ago, I was on The Solopreneur Society website, and there was an invitation to find out my brand archetype. All I had to do was take a short quiz that would tell me some important information about my personality and how it relates to branding my business. I took the quiz and was blown away by the insights I gained from the result. I had to know how Dre Beltrami had done this Voodoo. She told me she used a quiz software called Interact. I looked it up immediately and subscribed right there. I had not seen anything like this - an interactive tool that piqued visitors' curiosity, delivered valuable information, and allowed me to be much more targeted with specific offers tailored to their needs. This was a marketer's dream! Since then, I've made several quizzes for clients and helped other clients navigate their way through the process of creating their quizzes, and I've been repeatedly impressed with the results. I've become

Thanks to all who attended this morning's masterclass. I enjoyed the discussion in my breakout group very much and have been reflecting on it all day. We were specifically talking about what it is that people are attracted to in the work we do, whether as creative people, in business, or in the causes we support. A few answers presented themselves. First, we are attracted to people we sense have the same values as ours, or at least similar values. The qualities of life we find important tend to be important to them as well. We're also attracted to personality. I shared how many of the clients who find me tend to have a similar personality to mine and how the clients with an opposite personality often find working with me to be a conflicted experience.  Lastly, we just started talking about the quality of life people desire and how it often is a driver in finding our work. They're looking for a difference that our work delivers. Maybe enrichment, enlivenment, fulfillment, or