The Authority Building Method: Why Vic Strizheus Feeds Prospects One Appetizer at a Time

Think about the last time a restaurant brought you a small appetizer before the meal you actually ordered. You were not even that hungry, and one bite in, suddenly you were. Vic Strizheus builds this entire lesson around that exact feeling, applied to how he introduces a new subscriber to whatever he is eventually going to offer them.

What does a restaurant appetizer have to do with your marketing?

Every prospect, in his framing, has a surface level desire and a much deeper one sitting underneath it. Somebody joining his list usually says they want to make more money. Ask why enough times, five, ten questions deep, and the real answer is rarely about the money itself. It is about how earning it will make them feel, the same reason, he points out, that people buy a Ferrari for how it makes them feel rather than for the four wheels. But a brand new subscriber is not thinking about that deeper layer yet. They are thinking about the surface one, so that is where the conversation has to start.

From there, he maps out the handful of concrete milestones his own prospect has to pass through to reach that surface goal: get a product to sell, get a page to sell it from, get traffic to that page, then learn to convert that traffic into buyers. Once those milestones are laid out, the strategy becomes deceptively simple.

How do you build authority before you ever make an offer?

Instead of one long course dumped on a new subscriber all at once, he delivers one piece of real, usable content for each milestone, in sequence, as its own short video or post. Teach how to pick a product, and stop there. Wait a few days, then teach how to set up a landing page. A few days after that, one specific traffic strategy. Then one specific tip on conversions. Each piece is genuinely useful on its own, not a teaser dressed up as content.

• Milestone one: help them get or choose a product to promote.
• Milestone two: show them how to set up a landing page or website for it.
• Milestone three: hand them one concrete way to start driving traffic.
• Milestone four: give them one real tip for converting that traffic into buyers.

The effect compounds with every piece delivered. After the first genuinely useful video, the response he says he sees over and over is simple.

this guy just showed me how to pick a product. Others didn’t.

Each subsequent piece raises trust a notch further, and by the time the actual offer shows up at the end of the sequence, the prospect is not being sold to cold. They are already convinced this person knows what they are talking about, because the proof arrived before the pitch did.

Why does this work better than pitching the full offer immediately?

The obvious shortcut is to skip straight to the sale: here is the product, here is the link, go buy it. Vic is blunt that this is the wrong way to run a business, because it treats the prospect’s trust as something to spend immediately rather than something to build first. His version stretches the same information out across several short, focused pieces instead, each one small enough to record in a few minutes, each one a legitimate answer to a real question the prospect already has.

None of this works, he is careful to add, if the content behind it is weak. As he puts it, “You’ve got to be a student of the game. You’ve got to be a student of the business.” The sequence only builds authority if what you are teaching in each piece is actually good, not just well packaged.

This is the exact structure he says he has used to launch Internet Traffic Formula, Big Idea Mastermind, and every major product since: identify what the market actually wants, break the path to it into milestones, and let each piece of free value do the authority building for you before the offer ever appears.

The full session breaks down how to sequence these milestone pieces for your own market. Watch it in full, free, when you Create your free account.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

You want to know what's the fastest way for you to take your business to another level. You want to know how to do that? It's actually very simple. Well, it's doing some of the stuff we've been talking about already.

Actually, all of the stuff we've been talking about already. But here is a method that will allow you to literally separate yourself from your competition faster and bigger than anything else I know. It's the method called authority building method. Another term for it is kind of giving people a preview, giving people a test.

When you go to a great restaurant and you're really, really hungry, you go to a great restaurant and they bring you an appetizer. Or maybe you go to a restaurant and maybe you're not that hungry really. And they bring you a really awesome appetizer, just a little bit of it. And you take it and all of a sudden you become hungry.

All right? Something similar you can apply in your business. Okay? So it doesn't matter what niche you're in.

It doesn't matter what you're promoting. Okay? There is always going to be a similar scenario. This is your prospect.

And I don't know if you've actually seen me explain this before or not. Okay? In my marketing or in my niche, in my industry, okay, I teach people how to take, how to grow their businesses. I teach people how to make money on the Internet.

Okay? Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay. I teach people how to start a business, how to take their business to another level, all that stuff.

Right? So my prospect, their ultimate desired outcome, okay, is they want to earn money. Okay? That's what they want.

That's their ultimate desired outcome. They want to earn more money through which, in their mind, right, they see themselves living a better lifestyle. They see themselves, you know, having more time freedom, hopefully. Doing the right thing.

Doing the things that they want to do, buying the things that they want to buy, all that good stuff. Right? But surface desire for them, okay, is they want to make money. So I'm going to take, here's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to be very strategic. See, your marketing needs to be strategic. Your business building needs to be very strategic. People have different levels of desires.

Okay? Check this out. There is a surface level desire that your prospect has, that you have. Okay?

Like this guy right here, he thinks that he wants to make more money. That's really his surface level desire. But when I start digging deeper into that, I'm like, okay, so why do you need this money? He's going to say, well, I want to provide more for my family.

Okay, why do you want to provide more for my family? And I keep asking him why, why, why, right? Maybe 10 whys later or 10 questions later, right, deeper, he's going to come down to his ultimate core desire. Which that could be his fulfillment, right?

His, the intangible stuff of how he's going to feel when he's able to provide for his family. Maybe it's, you know, maybe he's the ego type guy or gal, right? Maybe it's how it's going to make him feel. You see, people don't buy Ferraris because they want to have a car, you know, and four wheels that just drives fast.

You know what I mean? People buy Ferraris because it's how it's going to make them feel. Does that make sense? So what I'm going to do with my prospect here, okay, is in order for him to go from point A, where he's at right now, okay, to point B, where he thinks he wants.

Does that make sense? It's very important for you to understand the strategy and psychology here, okay? We say, you know, why not go for his core desire right here? Well, you can, but he doesn't think about his core desire necessarily.

Not yet anyways. Not on the surface. So I'm going to talk to him what's on his mind. So see, in your marketing, you want to enter the conversation that's going on in your prospect's mind.

Does that make sense? Like, in other words, like he doesn't, when somebody's building a business, okay, they don't wake up in the morning thinking, well, you know, I want to feel this. I want to feel significant. You know what I mean?

They don't wake up in the morning thinking that necessarily. Short-term thing. For them, is he wakes up in the morning, he says, how do I make more money? How do I make $5,000 per day?

You see what I'm saying, right? So what I'm going to do is I'm going to draw this timeline, this line, right? You can do the same thing for your business. And break it down.

There is typically, there is four things, three or four things, right, that my guy, my prospect will need to go through. There's like four milestones, okay, that he's going to have to go through in order to get to this, this end destination right here, okay? So identify them, okay, identify them, do this exercise. It's going to help you.

It's really, really going to help you. Like my market, my guy in my space, okay, in my niche, in order for him to make money and have a business here, okay, there is certain things he needs to do in the middle. Number one thing is he doesn't make any money if he does not have a product to promote, okay? So he needs to identify what he's going to do.

Okay? Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. So what I may do here is I will market to get him into my funnel by marketing the end desired outcome. As soon as he gets into my funnel, strategically, I'm going to deliver value to him and build my goodwill bank account, okay?

Fill it up as much as I can while at the same time, strategically doing this, okay? I'm going to build my goodwill bank account. I'm going to build my authority, okay? I'm going to implement my authority building method.

How I do that is I strategically, knowing what the milestones are, okay, I will deliver. I'm going to say, hey, your end result is this. Step number one, here's what you need to do, okay? I'm going to explain to him how or where he can get the product if he doesn't have a product, okay?

Or if he has a product, I'm going to talk to him about what the product needs to be like, how to research his competitors. So all about the product, okay? And see, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to keep it very simple. It's very, very important.

This is free value line, okay? We can actually say this. This is free value line, all right? So on his journey, I'm going to keep it very simple, okay?

I'm going to create positive expectancy here. And so what I'm going to do, is I'm going to deliver to him a video. I'm going to say, hey, I'm going to teach you how to create a product. Step number one for you to get here, right, you need to know how to create a product or how to choose a product, you know, what the product needs to have, all the good stuff, right?

So I'm going to deliver the product here. Then, when I do this, naturally, what do you think he's going to say? And this has been proven over and over again. This is how I market all my products right now, okay?

He's going to say, okay, great. What's next? Okay. What's my next step?

And that's exactly what I want him to say. Because, see, when I deliver this piece of content to him, what do you think his level of trust, what do you think his level of trust with me is at, at that point? Well, it got elevated a little bit, didn't it? Okay.

So all of a sudden, he sees me a little bit different. He's like, well, this guy just showed me how to pick a product. Others didn't. See what I'm saying?

Think about how can you apply this in your marketing, in your business, to what you do, okay? Next step for him, now you've got the product, what do you need? Well, you need to, what I teach is, you know, I teach people like it is. I don't tell them what they want to hear, right?

What they want to hear is just get the product and send a whole bunch of people to the, you know, if you're an affiliate marketer to that affiliate site, boom, hopefully you get some money. That's a wrong way of doing business, okay? I say, you know what? You need to have your own landing page or website, okay?

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Okay. So you need to have a website. Great.

That makes sense. These two can be, you know, a couple days apart, right? Can be a couple weeks apart. However I want to set it up, okay?

But I want him to anticipate my next piece to come out, okay? That's how you keep your email open rates high, you know, when you market to people. And all this time, I'm making sure that there is positive expectancy. Okay, and I'm making sure that I'm keeping things as simple as possible for this guy to understand Make sense and so by doing this I'm elevating myself above the so-called competition So a third step might be okay, so now you've got the product and just think through this logically right you got the product You got the website.

What's next well next thing is you need to get some traffic, right? Because if you don't have You know you can get traffic, and if you don't have a website Where are you going to send this traffic to so just kind of you know logical thinking so then I made you a Video with one strategy for how do you get traffic? Okay, I just say hey just wanted to share with you You know here is what you do next the next thing is you need to learn how to get traffic and here is one way That you can get traffic okay, and I explained to him one strategy here.

I explained to him one strategy here I explained to him one strategy So you don't have to do like a whole full-blown course on Each one of these you know milestones here all you need to do is you just need to give him enough He's given that appetizer think of these as different appetizers That's going to make him hungry or hungry and hungrier for your end product that you're selling over here make sense Okay, so on a traffic. You know if I was to promote you know high traffic Academy internet traffic formula to him You know I would just maybe take one module or one idea from a module when it comes to traffic generation I'm going to keep to be very simple.

I'm going to send it to him. It's going to make him go, wow, I can see how that's done. Again, going back to the positive expectancy, you see? So that creates another, you know, the level of trust goes up, okay?

So now you've got the traffic, what's next? Well, you need to understand how to convert that traffic, right? So into whether it's, you know, sales or prospects or, so conversions, all right? So I give him one tip on conversions.

Again, these videos can be, you know, it can be like a 10-minute video or it can be a 5-minute video. It can be just you talking to a camera like I'm talking to you right now, or it can be a screen flow video, or it can be a blog post or a report, okay, that you send to him. Make sense? So with each one of these pieces right here, his level of trust goes up, okay?

His desire to get your end product that you're promoting over here. Also increases because naturally he's going to say, you know what? If this stuff was this good, this is going to be really good, all right? So he, by the time he gets here, he cannot wait to buy your stuff.

Does that make sense? So that's how, you know, I launched Internet Traffic Formula. That's how I launched Big Idea Mastermind. That's how I launched, you know, all of my products for the last several years now, you know?

This is how I structure all of my promotions right now is basically this. It's identifying, you know, what my market really wants, okay, that my product is going to deliver, and then I just break it down, and I, in the process of marketing, I'm building myself as an authority figure, okay, that elevates me above the competition. But when you do this stuff, make sure that your stuff is really, really good, okay? Know your stuff.

You've got to be a student of the game. You've got to be a student of the business. And the cool thing is, you know what? You're learning this stuff right here.

You're right here. You're right now, you know, watching this video. You're learning about traffic. You're learning about conversions and capture mastery and all this stuff that's available to you, right?

So whatever market you're in, right, you can probably take one or two or three ideas, and you can share with your prospects, right? So hopefully it makes sense to you. In the next video, I'm going to walk you through a little method, something that will allow you to sell without selling, really, right? And create a lot of goodwill in the community and within your marketplace, and by just doing people really, really good, right?

And also, you know, filling up your goodwill bank account. We'll talk about how to do that particular strategy in the next video. See you there.