Even if one choose to give everything away for free, it is possible to still make an income.4/17/2013
Even if one choose to give nearly everything away for free (e.g. books, white papers, presentations, etc.), it is absolutely possible to still make an extraordinary income. How? Most people want someone to hold their hand and show them precisely what to do, even if the information provided defines the exact process to follow and does so in alphabetical order using the Dewey decimal system. This desire opens the door to membership programs, live events, consulting services, etc. Therefore, the value proposition must be viewed as an initial investment whereby sacrificing a small percentage of immediate cash flow provides access to clients and allows for the realization of significantly more income down the line.
Internet Prophets: The World's Leading Experts Reveal How to Profit Online by Steve Olsher Advancing at a measured pace—step by step, from where you are to a little bit better—may seem the logical and safe way to proceed. But you can and should think in terms of skipping levels and making quantum leaps. You can move rapidly, easily, and surprisingly safely from your present level of accomplishment to a place that is several stages higher. You can do it instantly—and directly. And you can do it in virtually every aspect of your business or career activities. You can do it by not limiting yourself to following only those practices people in your industry follow.
Think about it logically. You can’t be a follower and expect to ever really become a leader in your field. It just doesn’t work that way in today’s fast-changing world. Instead, you need to see the overlooked opportunities that are all around you and act on the vast sums of untapped income and unclaimed success just waiting to be harnessed. You probably spend too little time studying the most successful, innovative, and profitable ideas people in other industries use to grow and prosper. Yet, if you start focusing on other industries’ success practices, you’ll be amazed at how easily you can adapt these ideas to your own business situation. Suddenly, you’ll see significantly better ways to produce significantly better results from the same time, manpower, effort, activity, and capital. Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition by Jay Abraham If you are deliberately trying to create a future that feels safe, you will willfully ignore the future that is likely.
SETH GODIN, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? I’m a marketer. Trust me. I’m lying to you. I know what I’m talking about here. I have made millions of dollars selling people stuff on the Internet. I have a model for how it works and what I always show you. I call it the 3Ps and the formula is copyright pending (which doesn’t really matter since I give all my best shit away for free). So here you go. • Pain. You have a huge problem right now. (At least one!!) • Potential. You are dying to know that there’s a way to solve this problem. • Proof. You’re in luck! There IS a solution, JUST LOOK HOW IT WORKED FOR JIMMY! If you understand even that tiny bit you will be successful in sales. NOBODY buys a product for what it actually does. They buy it because they were sold on the story of what the product was going to do for them. Nothing's Changed But My Change by Jeremy Schoemaker, Kate Sprouse In moving toward mastery, you are bringing your mind closer to reality and to life itself.
Anything that is alive is in a continual state of change and movement. The moment that you rest, thinking that you have attained the level you desire, a part of your mind enters a phase of decay. You lose your hard-earned creativity and others begin to sense it. This is a power and intelligence that must be continually renewed or it will die. .....Verrocchio instructed his apprentices in all of the sciences that were necessary to produce the work of his studio—engineering, mechanics, chemistry, and metallurgy. Leonardo was eager to learn all of these skills, but soon he discovered in himself something else: he could not simply do an assignment; he needed to make it something of his own, to invent rather than imitate the Master. For Napoleon Bonaparte it was his “star” that he always felt in ascendance when he made the right move. For Socrates, it was his daemon, a voice that he heard, perhaps from the gods, which inevitably spoke to him in the negative—telling him what to avoid. For Goethe, he also called it a daemon—a kind of spirit that dwelled within him and compelled him to fulfill his destiny. In more modern times, Albert Einstein talked of a kind of inner voice that shaped the direction of his speculations. All of these are variations on what Leonardo da Vinci experienced with his own sense of fate Mastery by Robert Greene Newt Gingrich, the famous Republican politician and all-about-Washington gadfly, is known to tell a story about a lion and a field mouse.
A lion, he says, can use his prodigious hunting skills to capture a field mouse with relative ease anytime he wants, but at the end of the day, no matter how many mice he’s ensnared, he’ll still be starving. The moral of the story: Sometimes, despite the risk and work involved, it’s worth our time to go for the antelope. Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time by Keith Ferrazzi, Tahl Raz Usually, companies ...fall into the trap described in Clayton Christensten’s The Innovator’s Dilemma:
they are very good at creating incremental improvements to existing products and serving existing customers, which Christensen called sustaining innovation, but struggle to create breakthrough new products—disruptive innovation—that can create new sustainable sources of growth. Innovation is a bottoms-up, decentralized, and unpredictable thing, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be managed. The amount of time a company can count on holding on to market leadership to exploit its earlier innovations is shrinking, and this creates an imperative for even the most entrenched companies to invest in innovation. A company’s only sustainable path to long-term economic growth is to build an “innovation factory” that uses Lean Startup techniques to create disruptive innovations on a continuous basis. I explained the theory of the Lean Startup, repeating my definition: an organization designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Yet if the fundamental goal of entrepreneurship is to engage in organization building under conditions of extreme uncertainty, its most vital function is learning. We must learn the truth about which elements of our strategy are working to realize our vision and which are just crazy. We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want. We must discover whether we are on a path that will lead to growing a sustainable business. In the Lean Startup model, we are rehabilitating learning with a concept I call validated learning. Validated learning is not after-the-fact rationalization or a good story designed to hide failure. It is a rigorous method for demonstrating progress when one is embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty in which startups grow. Validated learning is the process of demonstrating empirically that a team has discovered valuable truths about a startup’s present and future business prospects. It is more concrete, more accurate, and faster than market forecasting or classical business planning. It is the principal antidote to the lethal problem of achieving failure: successfully executing a plan that leads nowhere The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it.
Benjamin Disraeli Why self-publish, then? The answer is that self-publishing enables you to determine your own fate. There’s no need to endure the frustration of finding and working with a publisher. You can maintain control over your book and its marketing, receive a greater percentage of revenues, and retain all rights and ownership. A successful self-publisher must fill three roles: Author, Publisher, and Entrepreneur—or APE The first good reason to write a book is to add value to people’s lives. Will your book add value to people’s lives? This is a severe test, but if your answer is affirmative, there’s no doubt that you should write a book. The second good reason to write a book is the same reason I play hockey: to master a new skill, not to make money. In my book (pun intended), a book should be an end, not a means to an end. Even if no one reads your book, you can write it for the sake of writing it. Memoirs, for example, fit in this category. And the number of people who want to read a book of such a pure origin may surprise you. Good Reason. The third good reason to write a book is to evangelize a cause. A cause seeks to either end something bad (pollution, abuse, bigotry) or perpetuate something good (beauty, peace, affection). Silent Spring by Rachel Carson is an example. Her cause was the environment, and her book resulted in the ban of DDT and catalyzed the start of the environmental movement. (The fourth readon is that ) Writing is therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time. The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, and writing some more can help you control issues that you face. APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur-How to Publish a Book by Guy Kawasaki, Shawn Welch There are literally thousands of different ways to get recognition for your expertise.
Try moonlighting. See if you have the time to take on freelance projects that will bring you in touch with a whole new group of people. Or, within your own company, take on an extra project that might showcase your new skills. Teach a class or give a workshop at your own company. Sign up to be on panel discussions at a conference. Most important, remember that your circle of friends, colleagues, clients, and customers is the most powerful vehicle you’ve got to get the word out about what you do. What they say about you will ultimately determine the value of your brand. Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time by Keith Ferrazzi, Tahl Raz Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding.
We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You. —TOM PETERS You have alternatives, you’re just not creating them for yourself. You have to start taking ownership of managing your career. You have to start making an effort to change your brand from anonymous cog to slightly famous difference maker. "...I went out of my way to take on projects no one wanted and initiated projects no one had thought of doing. I e-mailed my boss, and sometimes my boss’s boss, ideas. And I did it almost every day. What was the worst thing that could happen? I’d get fired from a job I didn’t like anyway. Alternatively, I’d make the effort to create the job—regardless of where it was—that I thought would make me happy.” Every job I’ve ever had, I’ve made an effort to brand myself as an innovator, a thinker, a salesman, and someone who could get stuff done. When I was just a management trainee at ICI, my first job out of college, I sent a set of recommendations to the CEO. So he never responded. But I never stopped sending those e-mails. It’s just silly to think you can’t impact people’s personal and professional expectations of who you are. By making the effort, you can break the glass ceiling by expanding people’s view of your capability. To become a brand, you’ve got to become relentlessly focused on what you do that adds value. And I promise you can add value to whatever job you’re doing now. Can you do what you do faster and more efficiently? If so, why not document what it would take to do so and offer it to your boss as something all employees might do? Do you initiate new projects on your own and in your spare time? Do you search out ways to save or make your company more money? You can’t do all that if you’re solely concerned with minimizing risk, respecting the chain of command, and following your job description to the letter. There’s no room for yes-men in this pursuit. Those with the gumption to make their work special will be the ones to establish a thriving brand. You can’t do meaningful work that makes a difference unless you’re devoted to learning, growing, and stretching your skills. If you want others to redefine what you do and who you are within organizational boundaries, then you have to be able to redefine yourself. That means going above and beyond what’s called for. It means seeing your résumé as a dynamic, changing document every year. It means using your contacts inside and outside your network to deliver each project you’re assigned with inspired performance. Peters calls this the pursuit of WOW in everything you do. Develop a Personal Branding Message (PBM) A brand is nothing less than everything everyone thinks of when they see or hear your name. The best brands, like the most interesting people, have a distinct message. Your PBM comes from your content/unique value proposition, as we discussed in the last chapter, and a process of self-evaluation. It involves finding out what’s really in a name—your name. It calls for you to identify your uniqueness and how you can put that uniqueness to work. It’s not a specific task so much as the cultivation of a mind-set. What do you want people to think when they hear or read your name? What product or service can you best provide? Take your skills, combine them with your passions, and find out where in the market, or within your own company, they can best be applied. Package the Brand Most people’s judgments and impressions are based on visuals—everything other than the words you speak that communicates to others what you’re about. For everyone in every field—let’s be real—looks count, so you’d better look polished and professional. There is one general, overarching caveat in this step: Stand out! Style matters. Whether you like it or not, clothing, letterheads, hairstyles, business cards, office space, and conversational style are noticed—big time. The design of your brand is critical. Buy some new clothes. Take an honest look at how you present yourself. Ask others how they see you. How do you wish to be seen? The bottom line is you have to craft an appearance to the outside world that will enhance the impression you want to make. “Everyone sees what you appear to be,” observed Machiavelli, “few really know what you are.” Broadcast Your Brand You’ve got to become your own PR firm, as I’ll talk about in the next chapter. Take on the projects no one wants at work. Never ask for more pay until after you’ve been doing the job successfully and become invaluable. Get on convention panels. Write articles for trade journals and company newsletters. Send e-mails filled with creative ideas to your CEO. Design your own Me, Inc. brochure. Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time by Keith Ferrazzi, Tahl Raz Remember that line from Cory Doctorow’s book:
The days of companies with names like “General Electric” and “General Mills” and “General Motors” are over. The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people. Makers: The New Industrial Revolution by Chris Anderson |
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