Becky Norwood is the owner of Spotlight On Your Business. The business’ flagship product, a sixteen-week live course called Journey to Authorship helps professionals write and publish a book to shed light on their business and grow their authority. She shares some of her trade secrets here.
INTERVIEWER: So, tell me what your business is and what you do?
BECKY NORWOOD: The name of my business is called Spotlight On Your Business and with that, my signature…
INTERVIEWER: Service?
BECKY NORWOOD: Journey to Authorship is a sixteen-week live, interactive group training for helping people who know that they want to write a book, but have no clue where to start. The first week is all about making sure who their avatar is; that one whom they are writing for. We work on describing everything about that person, and to help them understand that writing their books needs to be directed to that one person but at the same time, it’s also going to read by many more, and we want their book to attract the kind of people who they want to talk to. And then, we go into their vision and their mindset. We start from the very beginning, understanding the marketing that needs to be done. I get them to start blogging right away.
Their vision then expands beyond having their book written. Once their book is written, they have to think about what is needed afterwards: not only the marketing, but the potential products that will result due to sales of their book to create additional revenue streams. Each week in my class, I have a guest interview with someone who has already become a best-selling author. I have one of my resources who I promote on Spotlight On Your Business, she is a content writer. She doesn’t write books, but she writes content for websites. She writes on social media and blogs. She’ll come in and talk about the importance of what’s needed, and how to do it the right way. And then someone else will come in and talk about what’s needed for a really good website, and then someone else talks about social media so that the participants are getting a well-blended education; not just information from me, but a full, well-rounded course.
INTERVIEWER: Who do you work with? Experts in specific industries?
BECKY NORWOOD: Right. My experts who I bring in, I’ve had people like Andy Falco. I’ve had Sandi Masori. I’ve had really a whole cross-section of people whom I have interviewed to show the broad spectrum of the types of books that are being written, and what it has done for them. That’s the whole direction where this is going.
INTERVIEWER: Okay, I understand the program, Journey to Authorship. Can you tell me about Spotlight On Your Business?
BECKY NORWOOD: Spotlight On Your Business is a compilation of—it’s kind of a two-section piece of the business. One section is all the resources and instruction in what they need to learn. Maybe they can’t afford to hire somebody to do their social media, so they need to learn how to do their own social media. So, I have somebody who has a course on how to do social media. I’m not teaching the course; I’m promoting the person who is an expert. It’s the same way for how to do a webinar. They may know they want to do webinars, but they don’t know how. How to do a podcast, how to do a video. So, I’m promoting people who are already experts. They’re not providing the service; they’re teaching you how to do it yourself. So, that’s the learning and resource center.
The other half of the business is that I have discovered that I don’t necessarily need, nor want to do all the services required to promote a business or a book. And so, I have found really excellent copywriters. I’ve found really good editors. I have a person who is fantastic with formatting books. I have people who offer content services, so they actually write the words that go on the website, the social media, and the blogs. Then I have somebody who builds websites, really amazing, really different WordPress websites. I have a really good service called Books Go Social, and it’s a service that gets books out into a huge audience of half a million people, and gains a lot of exposure for them. Then if I get a book client and give them a price for it, it’s incorporating all the people who provide the services as well.
INTERVIEWER: So, it sounds like one side of your business is a do-it-yourself resource and the other side is a done-for-your-services resource.
BECKY NORWOOD: Yes.
INTERVIEWER: Okay. Excellent.
BECKY NORWOOD: And I have found that so many business owners, or so many authors and people who have worked with authors, are always in a search mode as to how they can get these services done, and so this is going to be like a shopping type of thing.
INTERVIEWER: Yeah, like a hub.
BECKY NORWOOD: Yeah, right.
INTERVIEWER: Excellent. So Becky, how did you come into this line of business?
BECKY NORWOOD: You know, when the economy changed, I had never really been on social media. I had never been on any of this. I saw so many people, including myself, who lost their businesses when the economy hit such a low time. I have been self-employed all my life. I started working when I was eight with my own business. By the time I was eighteen, I was pretty much running my own business full time. I have never have worked for anybody else, and to lose a business was unbelievable. At that point, social media was coming into much more widespread use. There is so much in the ensuing years, the things that are now available to promote either our books or our businesses. The tools that are out there are amazing, but I find that a lot of business owners need to learn how to use them, and that’s what started it for me. Once I understood, I found out about this type of stuff while doing some internet searches, thinking to myself, okay, what I am going to do now? And I started the training and attended events to learn more, and it’s developed into a bright business.
