How it is that clarity sends me an email about a subject I have been searching for via Google a few days after my search. Are you spying on me?

Hi there, I know this can be a frustrating problem.. I've been on Clarity since 2012 when its creator, Dan Martell, invited me and several others to the launch event and asked us to sign up as experts. For the first few years, I had hardly any calls. Also, it seemed like only those in the IT startup space were getting any traction. This was frustrating for a small business advisor like me who mostly works in the world of bricks and mortar. Things started to change for me after a few key things: 1. I started to drive my own 'tribe' to call me on Clarity. This increased my reviews and call stats on the platform and I believe this made my profile more attractive to Clarity 'native' traffic. 2. Clarity has been growing its reach. I'm meeting more and more callers who are not in the 'online startup' space who found me on Clarity. 3. More and more of the 'online startup' people are actually creating real businesses and have real business problems that I can help with... meaning they're actually having sales, organizational problems, partner concerns, etc.. not just chasing Angel Investors with their ideas. 4. I started to regularly check for public questions I could answer and I know this has led to several calls. I hope this helps, If you'd like me to review your Clarity profile and give some specific direct feedback, just arrange a call. Thanks David www.DavidCBarnett.com

Given the other discussion about lack of females showing up as experts, perhaps a Ladies Only category might be of interest to some. Throwing it out there #itsachickthing

What a great question / thanks for asking. Here's how some of the top experts are getting more calls. 1. Link Clarity on Social Profiles ( http://clarity.fm/me <- click to get your link) - Obvious: Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook - Others: Email Signature, Blog Widget https://clarity.fm/account/widget Pro Tip: Schedule Tweets, Facebook Post or LinkedIn Message every week promoting your URL (I use www.bufferapp.com to do this) 2. Engage On Clarity - Use your VIP link to offer free calls to build your reputation & ratings (+ Reviews) https://clarity.fm/account/vip-link - Answer questions on Clarity (5% of question end up in a call request) https://clarity.fm/questions/f/status=open - Promote your Clarity profile link (Views = Quality) / View above - Ensure (if you have the skills) you set your Areas of Expertise and use Keywords that people search for .. essentially anything that helps them make money (Fundraising, Marketing, Sales, Biz Dev, Legal, etc) 3. Engage Outside of Clarity - Quora: Many of our experts have migrated their questions from Quora to Clarity Answers (Copy/Paste & Answer). It's a hack, but legal and fair. These answers show up on their profile so it help build credibility. - Quora #2: Answer questions on Quora, and at the end of your answer, link your Clarity profile URL - LinkedIn: Engage in Q&A within groups and add your Clarity profile URL at the end of your post. - Guest Post (Other People Blogs) and at the end of the post, write "If you'd like to discuss further, call me on Clarity" - About.me - Add your Clarity URL - Forums: Depending on your expertise, you can find Forums to help others (answer questions) but always end with your Clarity profile URL I'm assuming you seeing a trend... The more calls you do on Clarity + Ratings you get + Answers that get voted high quality (for a Topic) the higher you'll rank within our search. That being said, 70% of my calls come from me promoting my Clarity link and I'm personally making $3-4K per month right now (and that doesn't include any #3 tactics (Yet! :).

The way I see things, a pay-per-minute phone consultation ought to involve no sales pitch whatsoever. Nobody wants to pay for that, and nobody should. Consulting and sales are utterly different roles. Mutually exclusive, in fact. Is your value proposition external to the call or internal? A consulting call ought to be self-contained. By the time a client hangs up, they ought to be in a better position than where they started – with no further obligation to pay us. So ask yourself what the purpose of the phone call is. If your goal is to sell a product or service – a useful WordPress plugin in this case – then the call is a sales presentation not a consultation, and it ought to be free. The hard truth of sales is that a large percentage of prospects (the majority, usually) won't buy, even after a 30-minute presentation about the virtues of your offering. Time spent talking to dead ends must be factored in to your price and recouped by successful sales. Adding that cost as a fee for the sales pitch itself won't work out well. This is sometimes a tough distinction to make. In my own case, I offer a number of services (e.g. brand name creation) that go beyond the scope of a 15-minute phone call. When someone is paying me $5 per minute, I don't want to squander their time and money by explaining some other paid service! So the rule I've set myself is to stick to problems I can solve on the phone. When it's appropriate to explain the broader services that I offer, I try to do so in a non-paying context. Mainly through email. There's nothing wrong with using a free Clarity.fm call for a sales pitch. But it does sound like you're using phone calls in order to pitch a purchase; so charging for such calls would probably backfire.

Half the people on Clarity, including myself, can do that. The real question is: who understands your business and your marketplace? What level are you at? How many employees do you have, what gross revenue target do you have, is your marketplace expanding or contracting? The usual thing, though, is lack of focus on revenue-generating activities. I'll give you that one as professional courtesy. People do everything they can to appear "busy" in order to avoid selling. Are you and your people focused on getting and closing orders? I'll bet if I surveyed what they're doing, a lot of their time is eaten up with grunt work that makes them look busy but doesn't lead to sales and money in the door. After that, I'd look into positioning.