Franklin Taggart's Blog

Thanks to Jess Kotzer and the Self Pub Hub group for giving me a place to share some POV tonight. If you're an author considering self publishing, you should check them out here: https://www.selfpubhub.org/ A couple of insights came to me tonight as we discussed authors' marketing ideas. One was a reminder of something Tom Espinola, the producer of my CD Falling All The Way, told me. He suggested that one of the ingredients for my musical success would be to create a scene for my kind of music in the area. I think this may be one strategy with merit as we continue to navigate the impact of the internet on all things creative. Right now, most of us creatives are working in silos, only looking up to see what other people are doing. I think those of us who learn to leverage the amazing collaboration potential for audience building and promotion will have an advantage. We need to make a scene. More about this in the Coffee Break and insight into how collaborating to make a scene co

This weekend didn't go according to plan, at least my plan. 

 For as long as I can remember, I've heard conversations and opinions centered on a deep concern for the future of the arts. As an artist myself, I've participated in many of these conversations, and there have been times I've been deeply worried about where fine arts, in particular, are headed. But I've recently started to see that worry as misplaced. There are a couple of indicators that fine arts remain alive and well. One of them is the ongoing high visibility arts are finding in the online realm. Maybe it's because I've followed so many artists and arts organizations on my social media, but I'm impressed by both the quality and quantity of artistic expression I see there.  The other indicator I see that encourages me is the accessibility of some of the world's major players in every field of art. People interact with creative artists like author SE Hinton, multi-disciplinary star Isabella Rosselini, Pee Wee Herman, and many others. I remember the th

 I took the Myers-Briggs (MBTI) forty years ago to find that I'm an INFP. Think what you want about that, but I'll just use it as a reference to say that my personality tends to land on the side of high sensitivity, empathy, and intuition. Truth be told, I find most marketing and sales techniques difficult to carry out and sustain for any length of time without ending up feeling completely exhausted and at odds with my own core values. The challenges I've had in all of my career and business efforts are mostly around finding ways to succeed while honoring my strengths and personality traits instead of ignoring them and playing through the pain. For me, the key to succeeding has been to focus on building high-quality, strong relationships with people and delivering service worthy of referral. It has worked, but it took time to figure out and build a system around it. An interesting observation recently is that the people who have been finding their way to my coaching tend to

 As I write this description, the north wind is picking up outside, and our temperatures here are about to plunge about 40 degrees in the next hour.  This is a welcome respite from a Summer that has had more 90+ degree days than any I can remember in my history. For the past two days, my son has been released from school two hours early due to the high heat and lack of functional air conditioning in the schools. It has been a long, hot summer. We'll finally have a noticeable break from the extremes for the next few days. More seasonably cool temperatures are expected, and we may start to see some leaves change color. A welcome respite. It reminds me of the seasons I have in my business and how sometimes the dry spells last longer than is comfortable. We tend to forget that our enterprises happen in an environment that sometimes generates extremes, and we must be prepared for any of them. In the Coffee Break, I reveal my own circumstance of coming out of a period of high creative ac

I've always felt that my intuition and hunches are reliable, but I've been told to be more reasonable and logical in my decision making. Reason and logic are great, but they haven't been as reliable as my intuitive intelligence. In fact, when I've chosen the reasonable path, it's often been a dead end. I still don't know what to make of Human Design. My woo meter is off the scale, but every time I turn around, it's affirming something about me that is eerily true. Trusting my hunches is one of those things. The implications of this realization run wide and deep, explaining why the tools and tactics of other types don't work for me, and how I need to create my own based on my own inner guidance. Sound familiar? If so, https://bit.ly/BestNextStepCall to schedule a conversation and see what your personality has been trying to tell you all along. #humandesign #intuition #hunch 

 Life is a story you tell yourself. Don't like it? Tell a better story. Considering I'm a Wyoming native, it's taken me long enough to find the Longmire series of novels by Craig Johnson. It's nothing crazy, but there were a few decades where I didn't read any fiction until I realized I was becoming a dull boy and signed up for Audible. God knows I don't have the patients to sit down and actually read for pleasure. I recently read the Longmire book called the Western Star. The story was set on a train that was traveling from Cheyenne to Evanston, Wyoming, across the Southern part of the state where I spent many growing up years. The last time I saw my grandfather was in July of 1969 when he dropped my mom, my sisters, and me at the train station in Evanston to take the Union Pacific passenger service to Cheyenne, where my dad was working for the Summer. Gramps had worked on that railroad until retiring just a few years before. Craig johnson's depiction of th

If perfectionism has been something you work with, you've probably heard in recent years that "done is better than perfect." I'm guessing the roots of this motto are from the lean or agile movements. God knows I haven't had a software upgrade in decades that worked as it should from day one. This all started today because the computer I've used as my main video workstation for the past four years has started to sound like a jet engine preparing for takeoff, and the monitor crashes from overheating are becoming more frequent. Planned obsolescence has become so normal that we tolerate less than mediocre products as if there isn't a higher possible bar. SaaS services have been offering similar experiences. Short beta tests that don't address most of the bugs are released into the wild, where people like you and I are the second and remaining phases of development and testing. And I mention several of the Saas subscriptions I use have started charging more

If you're ever in Longmont, CO, stop in at Babette's Artisan Bakery for a breakfast or lunch sandwich, some wood-fired pizza, and don't forget to wrap up a loaf or two of their amazing sourdough bread to take home with you. Find their hours and more about them here: https://www.babettesbakery.com/ We found out about Babette's from some foodie friends who would drive from their home in Genessee, about an hour away, to stock up on their favorite bread and desserts. We've been going there for the past several years, including the pandemic years, and we tell everyone we know about it. Yes, their food is expensive, but we've already spent the money on gas; we'll pay what it takes. It's that good. There's more about Babette's in the Coffee Break today, but I wanted to make the point that if you focus on exceptional work, people will do whatever they must to get it. Make your first priority mastering the craft of what you do, and don't settle for a

All the recent changes in my life have me reflecting on what matters most. Figuring out what I'm doing now that I'm only doing one thing. I want to do it well. I looked back at all I've done for the past 13 years, and the one thread that keeps showing up is helping people start and build strong relationships. This hasn't been limited to one area of my life; it's come up in several. And it's also been the common thread in all of the work I've done with people in my coaching role. Identifying the key relationships they need and then finding ways to cultivate them. Relationships are the context for everything we do as humans, and yet we often do our creating and planning outside of that context. Then we wonder why our efforts fail or don't land quite as we'd hoped.  And the same dynamics at play in our personal relationships also show up in our professional relationships. They go through similar stages, are affected by personality and preferences, and r

What if 96 percent of people looking for a service like yours were ignored by the top-performing competitors in your industry? By now, the easiest to find customers in your industry are finding the companies who can afford the most expensive ads, keywords, and the top of page one on Google. But imagine if you found a closet full of bankers' boxes with people who wanted your service but couldn't access it as easily as the customers your competitors have the resources to reach. Wouldn't it be worth it to find ways to serve them? That's what Scott Schang did. He used blogging as a way to teach people who had been refused mortgages on their first try how to succeed on their second. The sales in his division tripled. Now Scott teaches other mortgage vendors how to reach their customers through content marketing using blogs, videos, and other channels. He's taken his most successful content and packaged it so that other people in his industry can share in the success he&#

Today was a day full of great conversations. A recurring theme today was the question of how audience building has changed for people over the past few years. We also wondered aloud how the pandemic and quarantines have impacted how we attract and gather people to our causes. In my case, my enjoyment of participating in social media has changed pretty drastically in the last few years. It used to be a more enjoyable and manageable activity. Still, it has gotten increasingly sophisticated and demanding, and it's hard to know how to reach people there without just sending them DMs. The number of content options has also made it challenging to know how to reach people. I know I can repurpose TikTok videos as Shorts and Reels, but whatever happened to just posting pictures, and why aren't as many people seeing them? The strange thing is that visits to my blog have increased over the same period. And again, I don't know why. I haven't increased sharing of my posts. In fact,

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

A great gig tonight that may be my last, at least for a while. Gigs like this make me remember that music is worth it sometimes. Thanks for all your interest and support over the years - 43 years now. I'm always questioning how and why things work or don't work. Business is a fine laboratory for such studies. It's a mystery how something will work beautifully once, and then the next time it will sink like a stone. Even with excellent systems in place, you can still get mixed results and not have a clue why. For this reason, I find experts, expertise, and any combination of the two to be suspect. The best batters in the majors are lucky to average .300. This means that the most expert batters worldwide are successful less than a third of the time. I love to learn about business and marketing, and it's been a lifelong study that I enjoy immensely. I've had a lot of business ventures, and most of them have ended as learning experiences more than successes. As Edison sa

▼▼Happening Tomorrow!▼▼ Even if you're not currently having any business problems, you will not want to miss out on this masterclass. It is going to be the best use of your time this year. You'll learn a repeatable, 15-minute technique to discover the core problem hamstringing your business, no matter the size of your business.    Once you discover the problem,  you'll find the solution that will have the biggest financial impact on your business today.    ... and the more impact you get, the more impact you have to give...   A 90-minute investment of your time tomorrow will pay dividends for the rest of your business-owning career.  And I mean dividends in every sense of the word... but especially dollars and time.  You have everything to gain and nothing to lose. Register here! https://bit.ly/NextStepMasterclass Meet the Coaches!