Archive | February, 2018

Work expands to fill the time allotted – and even more time beyond that – if you don’t have a hard deadline. Thus, if you make it a goal to finish your new ebook in 3 months, at the 3 month mark you’ll either just be finishing, or worse yet you’ll realize you’re only halfway done. If, however, you had a hard launch date, then you’ll have the book ready. Deadlines are a magnificent thing – they give you permission to ignore the email, ignore Facebook, turn the phone off, tear yourself away from the video games and television and actually get your work done.

So how can you create product in a short amount of time? By doing two things:

First, set a deadline that is almost impossibly close, such as 10 days from right now.

Second, hold yourself accountable on a massive scale. That is, call up your best marketing buddy and schedule a live webinar with him or her to sell your new product. Now promote the webinar heavily.

Guess what? For the next 10 days you’re going to move heaven and earth to get your product finished for that webinar, and on Day 11 you are going to party!

First, you’re going to be celebrating the sales you made on the webinar.

Second, you’re going to be looking forward to all the sales you will make in the future with your new product. In fact, you’re going to take the momentum that webinar created and use it to contact other marketers and set up more live webinars for their lists.

Third, you are going to feel fantastic. That new product that you thought would take 3 months of your life only took 10 days!

Fourth, you’ve now got a system for not only getting products done fast, but also getting your first sales the moment the product is completed for an immediate payoff.

How great is that?!

Okay, let’s face it: Guy Kawasaki is famous enough that if he launched a new book by burying it in his back yard, there’s still a chance it would end up on the best seller list.

Still, this illuminating article of the 12 steps he took in launching his book is a great how-to guide for anyone – whether they’re a celebrity or a complete unknown – to launch their own book (or product, for that matter.)

If you’re short on time, jump straight to item #3 – it’s worth its weight in gold to an Internet marketer. Seriously – would you like to have 150 interviews and 200 reviews appearing on blogs prior to your next product launch?

And after you read it, if you’re thinking you can’t afford to physically ship 1,600 products, remember this – it costs you nothing to email your digital product.

“But I don’t have a list of 20,000 bloggers.” No problem. Start compiling a list now by building a relationship with them. That way when you launch your next product you’ll have your own list of bloggers who already know you and are eager to review your product.

Plus you’ll enjoy one advantage Kawasaki doesn’t have – because you’re not Uber-famous, your contacts are MORE likely to review your product. After all, if you were one of 20,000 bloggers on a list compiled by a famous guy, would you even bother? Probably not, because you figure you’re one tiny wheel in a massive cog. Plus there’s no accountability when you’re just one of thousands. But when your buddy asks you to review his new product, then sure, you’re going to do the review because you know if you don’t he’ll be asking you what happened.

Thus even if you only have a list of 50 bloggers, odds are you can get a bare minimum of 25 to do a review, and most likely more. Plus you can get 10 or 20 to do interviews as well. And once you’ve got those, it’s simply a matter of leverage – demonstrating to additional bloggers how popular the previous interviews were to entice them into giving you an interview as well.

Brilliant!

You already know how important content is for communicating your message, getting traffic and making sales. But you might be overlooking a few things that makes your content truly great…

1. Write for your readers, NOT for the search engines. Sometimes we get so caught up in optimizing our content for SEO that we forget we’re really writing for our readers and not Google. Create content that is useful for people, that helps them, educates them and entertains them. Make SEO your second priority in writing your content, not your first. Otherwise your traffic isn’t going to get past your second paragraph before they’re closing your site and moving on to someone else’s.

2. Write for your readers, NOT for a certain platform. Today all we hear about is social media and everyone wants to know what to put on Facebook, or what to Tweet and so forth to make money. Again, this is the wrong approach and if taken it will cost you. Instead, identify what your users want, and THEN consider which platforms are best for delivering your content. It’s not about Facebook, YouTube, your blog and etc., it’s about giving people what they want.

3. Don’t be a control freak. It’s easy to fall into the mindset that all of your content must be published on your website so you can stay in control of it, but that thinking will only limit the number of people you reach. Instead, build your content to travel so that it can be downloaded, embedded or shared – thus capturing many more eyeballs and driving those eyeballs back to your site. Think of your content as ambassadors traveling the world to tell others about you, and sending those people to your site. The more your content travels, the more people it will reach, and the more traffic it can then send back to you.

4. Be fruitful. Are you writing one article or one blogpost a week? Try stepping it up to one a day, or even more. Release as much great content as you can, and don’t get stuck in one rigid rut, either. Develop a range of different content and see what garners both the most eyeballs and the most response. Pay attention to user feedback – they’ll tell you what’s working, what they love, and what they want more of.

5. Be open. So you planned a series of videos on topic A, and during the second video you mentioned topic B, and people went nuts asking for more information. What to do? Simple – give them what they want. You can finish your series later if you like, but right now you’ve struck gold and you need to mine it for all it’s worth. Give them great content on Topic B, interview an expert or two on that topic, offer them affiliate products on that topic, and so forth. Sometimes we hit pay dirt when we least expect it, and the most foolish thing you can do is NOT jump on it immediately. Money loves speed, and customers love to have their desires satisfied NOW.

6. Last, don’t create your content and run. When you make a blog post, go back and ANSWER the replies you get. When you Tweet, stay on Twitter to respond to the responses you get, and so forth. Your follow-up interaction says as much about you as your content, and if you do it right, it says that you’re not just looking to make a fast buck and you DO care about your readers. Which is not only the classy thing to do – it’s also the most profitable in the end.