The unaimed arrow rarely hits it's mark…. The answer to Parker Worth's question.

Transcript

Auto-generated from the audio (2,560 words). Names, numbers and the odd Aussie-ism may be off — check the audio before quoting.

Hey, guys. James Rust here from Marketing Secrets for Electricians. And today, I thought I'd answer a question from Parker Worth, who is a fellow electrician looking to help other tradesmen better their lives. So for fun, I thought I'd answer the questions here. And the riddle or the answer to the question in this riddle is the unaimed arrow rarely hits its mark.

So let's have a look. So here's what I hear a lot. How do normal electricians like us, who are properly trained and licensed, who are not willing to cheat and take shortcuts and who are wanting to own a successful electrical business? How do we compete against the big guys who own the market share or the guys that charge peanuts for an electrical job? On top of that, we want to employ the best electricians so we can get off the tools and have plenty of time for other areas of life.

That's the question. Join me and follow along as we search for the answers. My name is James Rest and welcome to Marketing Secrets for Electricians. For example, there's a study that's been done saying we were seeing 5000 ads per day. That's a lot of ads, a lot of things in your face compared to 500 ads in the 70s.

That's 10 times the amount 10x in 30 years. No, 50 years. Sorry. So that is crazy. Now, there's also like a lot of people or there's a trend of people who go around and they're just talking a lot about what they want to do and they go around in circles and they're always complaining, talking about what they want to do, but they're never actually taking the action.

They kind of just get the thing they're after, the attention, whatever it is from saying what they're going to do, not actually doing what they're going to do. And I think this is because there's not enough pain to push pain or pleasure to push them towards their goal. And it's just not that important enough to them. Great job, Parker, for taking action. It's awesome to see.

And in my opinion, the sooner we start blogging or producing some kind of content, the faster we start changing our own lives for the better. That's what I've seen. So awesome job now. Let's go and look at Parker's question. Just a quick note.

If you have a question, you can go to MarketingSecrets.com and send a voice message or submit the questionnaire form and we can answer it on the show. So I'll give you a summary of what the question was. intended for. From what you've said in your question, there's two targets here, two audiences. One, the first one is make electricians lives better.

So that's for electricians. Two is getting people into apprenticeships. This is like before their electricians. So it's a different stage of their journey. So both topics are fine in the long run.

You can do both. However, each topic is focused towards the same person at different stages in their electrical journey. So let me just say that again so it can kind of sink in. It's a key distinction I'd like to point out. Each topic is focused on the same person at a different stage or a different time in their life or on their journey towards being that electrician.

What do I actually mean by that? So for this case, I'm going to use myself as an example and go back before I had my apprenticeship. I was in high school and I thought I wanted or first I wanted to be a mechanical engineer, but I was leaning more towards getting an electrical apprenticeship because I didn't want to spend another four years stuck in a classroom studying every day. I wanted to get in there, use my hands in a more practical way. Plus, I was not a fan of going and getting this huge deck.

And on top of that, not having a job at the end of all that study. So once I had made that decision to be an electrician, just a side note, I also even thought of becoming a boilermaker. And in hindsight, I'm stoked. I didn't go down that path. I did work experience as electrician and as a boilermaker.

And that helped me when I was like at the boilermaker. They're like, hey, come on, you can give your apprenticeship here. But, yeah, so grateful that I chose to be electrician. Such a better trade. Anyway, my next steps were to go and apply for as many electrical apprenticeships as I could.

So such as small domestic electrical companies, I looked at larger commercial businesses, mine sites in the areas that the country, those mine sites every hour, willing to kind of move to FIFO, fly in, fly out apprenticeships. They were cool because they are like as an apprentice, you get 80 grand a year. The army doing one of those trades or boat building companies. I honestly, I didn't really care so much as long as I could convince someone that I was worthy enough for them to take on them to take me under their wing and train me to be that electrician. That was the goal.

Because once you got that certificate, then you have like the baseline and you got like a set. Essentially, you run into trouble. You've got that trades to be where you can get a job, especially in Australia. Electricians were highly sought after. So that was cool.

And this, this, the first in my first year, I ended up applying to about 10 different companies and did a bunch of aptitude tests, which was stressful in itself. I don't think from memory, I don't even think I got an interview that year. So you could say I failed. I could have had an attitude of I was not meant to be an electrician or in this case, like I asked or was looking for what was stopping these companies from selecting me to be their electrical apprentice. And the feedback I got from my applications was that people who were being interviewed and selected, they all had done pre-apprenticeships.

And this was like, huh, the first time I've even heard of a pre-apprenticeship. So I was like, oh, well, that's, you know, it's another year. The apprenticeship went for, pre-apprenticeship went for a year. So that's like, okay, now there's a four year apprenticeship plus that. So I'm looking at five years to get my trade, which was fine.

So I was like, great. As long as I can like take some steps now today. And that's what I did. I failed all those tests and applied for a pre-apprenticeship. And instead of going, so I was in year 11, instead of going to year 12, I actually went to year 12 for one day and found out, yep, that's not for me.

That's awesome. And I went to TAFE and started doing the pre-apprenticeship and learning about the electrical trade and starting to apply for the applications when they came out the next year round. Now I did apply for the exact same companies I did the year before, and I did the exact same, or I think the exact same year later, but the same aptitude tests. And I got through to the interview rounds and I even got, or they told me, I was like in the top five of the selection or the intake for that year. And I can tell you those interviews were intense in the sense that you sit there and you got a panel like this Western Power, which was like the energy company for the area.

They have a panel there of three, three people and they just fire questions and their situational questions. They're like, what would you do when this happened? How would you handle this? How would you handle that? And by golly, you know, that's a tough interview.

And yes, so I did well the second time round, which was awesome and ended up getting an apprenticeship. However, I'm not going to go down that path. I'm going to stop the story there because if you notice from this story, what was I focused on as or trying to get the apprenticeship? What questions did I answer? What questions should I seek answers to?

What did I need to know? And for example, such things I was focused on is just like, how do I get an electrical apprentices? These are things people, you know, you're thinking in your mind, just the thoughts like this was something maybe I'd search on Google, like what is involved in getting an electrical apprenticeship? I found out, hey, I need a pre-apprenticeship. That's the answer.

What salary does an electrical apprentice get? And essentially it was like $7 an hour. And so that's the answer there. So all these questions you could have on the blog kind of with answers. So why, why do you want to be an electrical apprentice?

How many years is an electrical apprenticeship? All these questions, when you're trying to, when you've decided that, yes, I want to be an electrician. How do I do that? What qualifications do I need to be an electrical apprentice? I need the pre-apprenticeship.

These are all the questions and all the things you hunt for when you're on that path. And it goes on and on. There's heaps. You can dive deep into it. Now, do you think a qualified electrician is thinking about the same type of questions?

No, definitely not. Being an electrician, for example, I would care more about the new wiring rules coming out because I got to know them for my job. How to maybe wire up a smart home because that's a new and the latest thing that people are asking me to do. Or maybe just how to do a better job. How, what tools do I need?

How can I increase my efficiency to get a pay rise? So in answer to your questions, in answer to your question, Parker, like what would make your electrical, electrical blog better? It would be to focus on the person where they are at in their journey right now. And find out what problems they are having and dive deep on those topics. Give them all the answers that will help them achieve their goal, which essentially if it's the person wanting to be the electrician or get the electrical apprenticeship, it's that's the goal you're setting and you're giving them all the answers.

You could run a course, you could write your blog about like every article is kind of focused around this topic and that's a, that's where I was like, you could start. I'm not going to tell you what you want to do, but maybe you're not interested in that. You're like, okay, maybe you want to focus on the electrician side of things. That that's cool too. It doesn't really matter.

You could, you could take them on a journey because if they find you when you're, or when they're starting out and you give them the answers, they're going to keep following you and you're kind of taking them on a journey each week, helping them. So, you know, for example, you've taken from how to get from where they are to a electrical apprenticeship, then you're taking through how to pass the apprentice. So how to get through all the exams in the apprenticeship, how to then pass your final exam. And then it's like, okay, now you're looking at the electrician and then the electrician's like, okay, the next step is their own job or whatever. What path do you want to take them on?

Who is your audience? Who are you focused on? And this is a key part in any electrical business. Don't try to help anyone. You can help them at different stages.

So you niche down and you focus on that because it's like, it's overwhelming the amount of content and stuff out there on the web. You can search up practically anything. So by going deep and narrowing down, you find and help a select group of people who will then follow you and seek your guidance on that particular topic. You become the expert. Then once you know which audience you're talking to, I would find out all the problems that they're having and write about these problems, talk about the problems and then follow up by giving them solutions or suggested solutions or how you can help them with your problems.

And that will be the base of which I will build a blog off from there. I would also suggest checking out other successful blogs. For example, Neil Patel, he has a tool called Uber suggest and which helps you find the keywords that your audience is searching. So all those search results that come up in Google, he helps. He has a free tool that you can use to find out how many people are searching for how to become an eventual apprentice and go, okay, that's a keyword I want to focus on.

And they're asking this question. I'm going to give the answer in my blog post. Then another one that comes to mind is Brian Dean from Backlinko. And he has a strong presence and in the blog world also and his content is quite good. So these are two people that can like you can get ideas for to help build your actual blog.

So yeah, I hope that helps. I will leave it there for now. To be honest, we are really only just touching the surface here with blogs. However, I do hope this helps to point you in the right direction with your blog Parker and anyone else who is hoping to build a blog or building a blog, get focused in on who you're serving, who you're helping. Check out Parker's blog, go to or you can visit it at TheTradeGuys.com and let me know your thoughts.

So also, if you have any other questions, please feel free to submit them at MarkingSecretsForElectricians.com. And until next time, I'll talk to you then. Have you ever wondered how that electrical contractor came to be so popular? Have so many customers and what they did to get there and let's face it, a bit jealous that your business isn't quite there yet. Well, I'm doing a interview video series where we're interviewing these electrical contractors, getting the gems of knowledge and what they've learned over the course of time that they've run their business to get it to that point.

We're not only going to cover how they got there, but what what pitfalls they ran into along the way. So you don't have to go through them yourself and you can go straight to ideally having that success or implementing things straight away that lead to your business growing a lot faster than it otherwise would have. So if you're interested in getting and listening to this video series course, you can go to MarkingSecretsForElectrician.com and I'll see you there.