In this transformative episode, Aurora Winter shares how you can turn your story into a powerful brand to grow your business. If you’re struggling to stand out, or if you feel stuck in a job instead of a business, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
– What neuroscience tips cut through noise to share your story effectively
– Why your brand is the story others tell to build trust and credibility
– How to use a book to scale beyond local limits and attract clients
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast, where here with us today is the one and only Aurora Winter MBA, who is an award winning, Best Selling Author. She’s also a successful serial entrepreneur, media trainer, creator of the spoken author method, and founder of same page publishing. Aurora left her lucrative career as a TV executive decades ago to become a full time author, trainer and entrepreneur using storytelling for business, she created a life of freedom, creativity and contribution. Now she helps her clients turn their words into wealth, wisdom and wonder. She’s written the book, the fantastic book, actually turn words into wealth. Got a copy of it here. Highly recommend it, and it sparked all kinds of ideas and thoughts and questions for me that I can’t wait to unpack with you, Aurora. So welcome to the show. Super excited to have you here. I want to start off with one of my personal favorite points that you made in the book, and I won’t steal your thunder. I’ll let you make it, but you make the point that our brand isn’t what a lot of us think it is. So tell us what our brand isn’t and what is it your?
Aurora Winter
Your brand is not what you think it is. Exactly right. Your brand is the story that other people tell about you when you’re not in the room and our brand doesn’t have a lot of shelf space for your story, so it’s very concise, but our brand is also the biggest way to leverage our revenue. If you don’t have a brand, then it’s a dive to the bottom. You’ll be competing with Walmart and China and the lowest price wind. You don’t want that equation. You want authority. You want status. You want some special sauce.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, you talk. When you lay this out, you tell some of Oprah’s story. And I’m wondering if you could share a little bit of like, how did that, how did that strike you? Like, where did you first learn this, or where did you first hear about that story that made such an impact for you?
Aurora Winter
Well, one of the things that is outstanding about Oprah, which most people don’t even think of, is like she is on the cover of every Oprah O magazine. It’s, it’s amazing. She realized that building a brand was really important, that it wasn’t just about, you know, the click bait on the cover, but her image repeatedly on the cover. And many people have done this, but I think she was really the first to pioneer that. And Oprah’s got a, you know, billion dollar brand. She broke through. I mean, she came from basically nothing, almost worse than nothing, because she was in the hole, had a terrible childhood, and she’s become, you know, one of the wealthiest women on the planet.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, that’s awesome, yeah? One, so someone’s okay, I’m in. I want to share my story. One of the frustrations that I’ve seen for founders, kind of at this point, is they go out to share their story, and they’re just competing against the world’s biggest brands, right? They’re in many of the same spaces, trying to break through the noise. So you go into some of like, the neuroscience behind how we can really cut through all the noise. What are some of the key takeaways for you? For the underdog, if you will, trying to build their own brand?
Aurora Winter
Well, first, I just want to address the underdog point. Yes, there are huge names out there, you know, like we’re competing with Seth Godin, we’re competing with Mel Robbins, we’re competing with all these. David Goggins. JK Rowling, but are you really, you know, as a coach, you might be the only person that somebody actually has in their circle who can help them solve that problem. So instead of thinking, oh my gosh, Tim Ferriss would do a better job. You know, they’re probably not going to get Tim Ferriss as their personal coach, right. So put that aside and just understand that you’re the answer to somebody’s prayers, and you may be the only person that they know who’s in their loose circle, or only person available to talk to them about solving their problem. And then we need to understand in order to make the biggest difference that we can we need to understand the neuroscience of communication and most people blow it in the first few seconds. They’re at the Rotary Club, or they’re introducing themselves. You know, they start by saying their name and their company name, and by that time, people have zoned out. So it’s really good to start with, what’s the problem that you solve? You want to start with a little taste of novelty. Then you want to give a little taste of social proof, and then if you want to show off a little bit of your authority that can work out and do all of those things really quickly, so that then you can get onto the deeper message, don’t send the verbal equi the verbal equivalent of an Excel spreadsheet. So quick example this book turn words into wealth. The title itself is that novelty. It’s like, what topic area are we in? And then the, you know, it’s at one outstanding non fiction book of the year that’s hitting the social proof. And then I can go into explain the 27x ROI on a story.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s awesome. I love that. And. Love the Way You broke it down. It’s interesting. I’ve not heard folks distinguish as quickly or as clearly between social proof and authority, right? Because a lot of times those are coming together. But I love the book example. I want to jump to this next question, because I see it all the time. It’s very true for coaches, very true for folks in professional services, but happens in a whole lot of industries, and that is that founders working their various degrees of success, but they come to this really uncomfortable realization, almost despite that success, that they’ve started a job and not a business, and, and, and so once you get there, it’s kind of like, what do I want to do with that? And a lot of folks, the answer is, I want to scale past that. I don’t want it to just be trading hours for dollars or all the things that go along with that. But they’re really limited to, like, they’ve they’ve built a tremendous degree of local trust and credibility, but it really falls off very quickly after that. So like, how do you get past that? How do you scale beyond that local community or impact and build trust and credibility at a greater scale?
Aurora Winter
One of the key ways I love to do that is through books. I mean, you, if you have a book on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, it’s available around the world. And if you have a non fiction book that clearly answers a problem, that has great keywords in the title and the subtitle, people can find you from from New York, from Los Angeles, where I live, from Paris, from London. They can find you if you have a very good book with a solid title. And I really love that because I mean, back in the day when I started in publishing, it wasn’t that easy to get a book published. There were all these gatekeepers. You were so very likely to get no after no after No. One of the clients I’m working with, he got 100 rejection letters, and now his books have got over 3000 reviews on Amazon and have won 10 awards. He just couldn’t get past the gatekeeper, and anyway, back to if you if you’re a coach or an author, sorry, if your coach or an expert or a leader of some kind, a book can be a great way to reach people around the world. And there are seven different ways to make seven figures with your book.
Scott Ritzheimer
I love that. And you took the words right out of my mouth, because that’s exactly where we’re going next. So another challenge that I’ve seen, especially for founders, have been doing it for a while, right? And to some extent, like your own success can create the biggest barrier. Here, you hit the kind of high, medium, six figures, and it’s kind of good, you know? It’s better than it was, but it’s not all that it can be. But if you’re there long enough, it can start to shape what you believe is possible, right? And there’s a lot of folks who’ve written themselves, I could never make a million dollars. I could never make seven figures, but you offer in your book seven ways of doing that. I was wondering if we could walk through those, because I thought, well, it’s just a fascinating concept, but there’s some really practical stuff in here as well. So I want to kick off strategy number one, attracting premium clients. And the tell us a little bit about what that is, but also tell us, like, how is that different from what most of us are doing before really setting on this strategy?
Aurora Winter
I think the authority that you get. The root of the word authority is author. So attracting premium clients at premium prices is one of the most valuable things that you can do with your book. The bottom line is, if you are good at solving a particular problem, how much is that worth depends on who is the person that you’re serving. So I always like to ask the question, you know, what am I really, really good at? Or have my clients ask the question, what am I really, good at? What do I love to do? So you want to have those two filters. But then, who is it worth the most to? I have clients who are selling their company for nine figures. My services helping them create a million dollar message, or a multi million dollar message and take it and get an award winning book is worth more to the person then a person who’s, I don’t know, retired and writing a poetry book, who has no vision for the impact or the income. So by having a book, you can, and I’ve done this multiple times, you can attract premium clients with premium price prices, because the book can serve both as attractor, but also as a repellent, it’s kind of like match.com you don’t actually want everybody to contact you. You want to have a filter. And in a book, you can communicate who you are, who you serve, and who you don’t serve. So for example, I’m pretty spiritual, and it’s fairly obvious in my book. Turn words into wealth. So people who are Die Hard atheists might go, Gosh, Aurora is not the code for me, and vice versa.
Scott Ritzheimer
And that’s a good thing, right? I think one of the things the traps is I have found, oftentimes the best client, the one that’s that you can create the best impact for enjoy working with the most are often the most, like selective in who they hire, right? Do Not always, but many times. And so if you’re like, hey, I do everything for everyone, the person who really wants one thing done really, really well, or one small subset is going to be much more selective, and that’s the person you want to work with. But you can’t do that by saying, Hey, I help with everything all the time.
Aurora Winter
Yeah, I help everybody with everything. Answer disaster. The second thing you can do with a million dollar message, which could be in a book, but it doesn’t have to be in a book, is to attract, you know, investors and launch a startup. So when I was living in Silicon Valley, after I got my MBA in 2015 I took it. I took a year off, went to Italy, got my MBA, and I came back. I’m like, I could do anything, which was a problem, because, you know, decision fatigue, but I went to Silicon Valley and I decided to help people with their startups and like, well, who is that worth the most to a million dollar message, or a multi million dollar message is worth a lot to people raising capital? And every client that I helped had had gone from no funds raised to raising seven or eight figures. So there’s a power in a clear, concise, compelling message. And the startup entrepreneurs that I helped were so brilliant, but that was sabotaging them, because they were going 14 steps down. And first the person thinking, maybe I could invest they had, like, no idea what are you talking about. They had to slow down, create some metaphors, create connection, and kind of dumb it down, and then once the person was on board, they could go deep. I mean, a great example of a metaphor I loved on your website. You know, your example of the sports metaphor, which drove home your point about the different kinds of leaders, and no, you don’t want to be the coach on the sideline who catches the ball, robbing everybody and being, you know, a foul. That’s not good. And it’s lovely when you have that kind of story, it makes it so much easier for people to hear you. Yeah, and also, sorry, go ahead.
Scott Ritzheimer
No, I love it. So one of the things that’s really cool about folks who’ve worked in the investment space is like the feedback loop is so short, right? So even if you’re not going after investors, there’s still so much to learn, because the same things that get investors to pay attention are the same things that get everyone to pay attention. And so this idea of of simplifying your message, dumbing it down, that it feels surprisingly scary to a lot of really smart people. How do you help folks to just kind of process the internal like, I don’t want to look stupid if I dumb down my message?
Aurora Winter
I don’t lean into that exactly. It’s more like encouraging people how they could make a bigger difference by, you know, in 10 seconds having something clear and concise. But you’re right. I think the smarter the person is, the more degrees they have, the worse this problem can be. I mean, my older brother is a genius. He’s got PhD, he’s got Masters of Engineering, and he’s quantum physicist, and sometimes he’s extremely hard to understand because he’s so smart. But here’s the takeaway that smart people can understand is they did a really interesting study. It’s published in the book significant objects. They had 100 distinct objects on eBay with a story or without a story. The stories were written by 100 different people, and they weren’t hype. They were things like these pot mitts are for sale. My grandmother has passed, but I remember when I’d come home from school, she’d bake chocolate chip cookies, and we’d chat after school, and she used these pot mitz. Now you’re not getting the cookies or the grandmother when you buy the pot mitz, but adding a story adds significance, and you do get the significance. And the result was that the objects on eBay with a story sold for 27 times more. Yeah, so that’s a stat, but even smart people can go, Oh, I think I should practice my stories. I love that.
Scott Ritzheimer
I think it was that same story, wouldn’t it was like a horse’s head, or something that went for like, 43 times as much, or something outrageous, like so cool. I love that the significance does pass on. It’s a brilliant insight. Okay, I want to jump to the next one here. This one, I have to admit, caught me out of the blue. I was not expecting it, especially in the number three spot, but number three was movies and merchandising. So how does this work? Because there’s not a lot of founders who have making a movie as part of their business plan, but maybe, maybe more of a should.
Aurora Winter
Well, you know, my background is in Film and Television. I’m an award winning screenwriter. I used to be head of development for Canada’s largest film and television production company, and I raised 5 million with a partner in London, England, and we went on and made eight films. So it’s part of my way of thinking. I have written the fantasy series, actually for young adults. Magic mystery in the multiverse is the first book in that series, and BBC has expressed interest in a 12 part series. So this can really happen. So, but here. Here’s the interesting thing. Well, with some of my clients who are working on fiction, we are pitching their projects as TV movies or TV series. And it’s very cool to understand that if you have a non fiction idea, there might be some possibilities. I was blown away by Marie Kondo, who doesn’t even speak English as her first language, Luca T Japanese woman who wrote a book about the joy of tidying up and Netflix, had a series following her. She’d go into people’s homes and help hoarders tidy up. It was a big hit, and that, of course, enhanced her brand and her reputation and brought many people to her. So you may find that if you’re a coach or a consultant, you have some expertise that there might be a possibility to consider, and certainly that’s where the real money is.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, fascinating, very, very cool. I like that. All right. Strategy number four, and it’s not just have a book, but there’s a specific way to use a book to scale up and make a million dollars. What is it and why do you recommend it?
Aurora Winter
So item number four, we’re going through these really quickly, is the free book plus upsell. So before I’ve written 10 books or published 10 books, I’ve written more than 10. So when I got my MBA in 2015 prior to that, I was doing something else. I actually had founded the grief coach Academy, and I was helping people through grief. But I realized, you know what, I don’t want the rest of my life to be about grief. People were coming to me and saying, Hey, how did you get on TV? How did you get on radio? How did you write so many books? And I thought, well, maybe people would be interested in having me as a marketing mentor. But my list, small list of 12,000 they knew me as the grief coach Academy founder. So it’s a pretty big pivot from talking about grief to talking about marketing and messaging. So I thought I should test this idea before going in whole hog. And I totally recommend this. If you have a new idea, you want to start a new product or service or launch a new business or pivot, why not test it for 90 days? So what I did is I called up a friend who was the director of coaching for Tony Robbins. He’d interviewed me before about grief coaching. I said, Hey, would you interview me about marketing? He’s like, Absolutely, I know who you are. I know your story of know you’ve launched several seven figure businesses. Cool, let’s do it. So I choreographed the interview. This is the part that people miss. You have to choreograph the interview and be prepared with with your answers and your stories. Anyway, he interviewed me, and we did that in front of about 100 of Tony Robbins coaches. I recorded it. I really liked it. I tidied it up a little bit. Bing, bang, boom. Over the weekend, had a PDF, okay, and that little book’s called Marketing Fast Track. So with that PDF, I then actually called some people that had been on TV before I got two TV appearances, and then I started reaching out to my list and offered them the free book with some videos to add more value around marketing and messaging. And then at the end, hey, if you’d like to know more and you’d like a Business Breakthrough call, you can do that here. So that book, once it was actually printed, people could get the book for free, but they would pay $4.77 shipping and handling. This is actually pretty key point, though. I want to circle back around to that anyway. So that book, I spent about $12,000 in advertising, and it generated $250,000 in 90 days. Wow, $250,000 in 90 days from $12,000 ad spent. So why did that work? It worked because I do know about marketing and messaging, so it was a good Messenger, and it was it also worked because it was short and clear, and the added trick, so to speak, or hack, even if people invest only a couple of dollars, even $4.77 they’re far more serious prospects than if they get your eBook for free also, then I had their contact information and could follow up. Also, even though eBooks are great if you have a physical book in hand, it’s like a silent sales person, and so it reminds the person about you. So people would get my book, they would read it, and then the book was still there on their shelf. Maybe they would call me, you know, a week or two later, or set up a call so they the free book and upsell. I’ve done it. Many other people have done it. Jeff Walker, so in the book, turn words into wealth. You can see a number of different examples, and you can see people have can offer various different opportunities to invest at different levels. I didn’t do that. I just went from the book to do you want help with your messaging and publishing your book?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I love that. I love that. So we are running short on time, and the two, two of my favorite strategies, are the ones we’re actually going to leave the reader to get a copy of. Your book to find out, but I want to skip ahead to strategy number seven. It was best for last your favorite again, I’ll leave the big reveal to you. What’s the seventh strategy and why is it your favorite?
Aurora Winter
I love this one. It’s it’s the Evergreen best seller. So one of the things I really love to encourage people is, don’t think about getting a New York Times bestseller or Wall Street Journal bestseller, or that big spike of sales for just one day. Instead, think of your book like your baby, like your child, and you want to launch it powerfully and effectively, yes, but you want it to make a difference for decades to come. It’s your intellectual property. It’s part of your legacy, and a book is like, amazing. Like Jordan Peterson said, it’s amazing that a book is like, more durable than a castle. A book can really make a difference to many people for many years. I mean, one of the things I love about books is I’ve been mentored by so many people who aren’t even alive. So your book can be like that. It can be a seed that can germinate whenever somebody reads it. So I really love people to lean into their book as an evergreen best seller.
Scott Ritzheimer
I love that. So before I let you go, I’ve got one more question for you here, Aurora, and that is, I just want to ask all my guests, what would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all. What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Aurora Winter
I think the biggest secret that I wish that wasn’t the secret at all, is that you are capable of far more than you think we all are, and we need to well, what works best is to lean into mindset first. And I the way I do that is just, you know, use me. How can I be of service? So I think when we show up as a contribution, seeking to be a service, we can achieve so much more than we think, or so much more can be achieved through us than we think.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, Aurora, absolutely amazing books. Great. This episode has been fantastic. Where can folks find more out about you, the work you do? Where can they get a copy of your book?
Aurora Winter
Well, they can get a copy of Turn Words into Wealth, wherever books are sold, or if they’d like the free ebook, they can go to turnwordsintowealth.com. And same page publishing is that samepagepublishing.com? Thanks, Scott, that’s such a pleasure connecting with you.
Scott Ritzheimer
Likewise. Thanks for being on really an honor having you here today. For those of you watching and listening, you know your time and attention mean the world to us, I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Aurora Winter
Aurora Winter, MBA, is an award-winning, bestselling author. She is a successful serial entrepreneur, media trainer, creator of the Spoken Author™ method, and founder of Same Page Publishing. Aurora left her lucrative career as a TV executive decades ago to become a full-time author, trainer, and entrepreneur. Using storytelling for business, she created a life of freedom, creativity, and contribution. Now, she helps her clients turn their words into wealth, wisdom, and wonder.
Want to learn more about Aurora Winter’s work at www.aurorawinter.com/? Check out her website at https://www.aurorawinter.com/ and get a copy of her book, Turn Words into Wealth, at https://turnwordsintowealth.com/
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