Daily Content Machine

We all know someone who quit their job to pursue their passion only to end up hating it.

They ended up hating it because it became a job to them. What happened here? Well, they used their passion as a tool to pay their bills.

There’s an important nuance between using your passion as a tool to pay your bills and being supported from your passion.

We want to get to the place where we’re being supported from something that we love to do, but before we get there, using our passion as a tool to pay our bills will turn it into a job.

You’ll end up hating what you do because it breeds compromise.

I’ve been regularly putting out podcasts and videos for the past couple of years now and I’ve been getting all kinds of great feedback from people saying things like, “This has changed my life. I’ve been able to quit my job and move across the country!”

I was getting all these comments, emails, and tweets saying this stuff has had a significant impact on peoples’ lives.

I was having incredible conversations, but they were all disjointed in these different places and people weren’t able to benefit from them.

I wanted to create a place where these people could come together.

I wanted to facilitate a community where people could have life changing conversations together where other people could benefit from them.

That’s why we built the seanwes Community.

We all want to find our passion. Everyone wants to find their passion, but it feels so overwhelming.

There are so many possibilities in front of us and there are so many things that we could do. There are numerous things that we're good at!

It feels like we have 360 degrees of options around us. We could go in any direction, but we don’t know the right direction to go.

We don’t know the thing that will truly fulfill us and we’re stuck wondering how to find our passion.

The fear is that we’ll pick the wrong thing and find out we don’t really enjoy doing it. We think if we pick the wrong direction, we’ll end up somewhere we don’t want to be.

Deciding where to start is the enemy of starting.

How do you stand out in a saturated market?

I recently received a question from Jackie who said she’s starting a blog to help other bloggers turn their blog into a business. Now, that’s a pretty saturated market.

There’s a lot of people who blog who are trying to turn their blog into a business. How does she stand out?

Well, that’s not all of her question. She actually said she is also an attorney and she wants to share her legal knowledge with people.

I immediately saw the intersection, but she was talking about two completely separate focuses and she’s wondering: how does she stand out in both of these equally saturated markets?

You’ve got something you want to launch—a product, a course, or some services—and you’ve built a landing page for it.

You know it’s a great landing page and that it’s speaking directly to the person that you want to reach, but no one is viewing it. How do you get people to go to your landing page?

One way is to run ads on platforms like Facebook, Google, different websites, or ad networks, but what if you don’t have any money? What if you don’t want to do ads?

One of the best ways to drive traffic without purchasing ads is content marketing.

Content marketing is creating content that provides value around the topic that you want to sell on. Don’t just tell people what you want to sell, provide value about it.

What do you do when no one’s buying?

You just launched a product or you put something up for sale and nobody’s buying. It’s just crickets. What do you do?

Well, if you only have 10 people in your audience, it’s not really that much of a surprise.

If you have 10,000 people that you’re exposed to and you’re still not making a sale, then that’s indicative of a bigger problem.

If you have 10 people, that’s not going to result in a sale. For every 20 people that say they want to buy something, expect 5% of them to actually buy. 5% of 20 is a single person.

If you’re not making sales and you only have exposure to a few people, you shouldn’t be worrying about conversion rates.

You shouldn’t be worrying about trying to sell more to your existing audience, you need to expand your reach.

Tomorrow is a sabbatical for the entire seanwes team.

For those that don’t know, since 2014 I’ve been taking what I call Small Scale Sabbaticals.

I heard about this concept of people taking a sabbatical year, where every seventh year they take the entire year off either to rest, write, study, or travel.

Everyone takes a 7th day off every week and some people take a year off every 7th year, but there was nothing in between.

I thought, "Why don’t we have Small Scale Sabbaticals where every seven weeks we take the week off?"

Not only have I been taking those weeks personally, but I give my entire team every seventh week off and I pay them to do it.

What is the difference between discount and an introductory price?

I get this question a lot because one of my values is never to discount my products. My mantra is full price or free. Nothing in between.

I don’t want to discount my products because it’s a slap in the face to my loyal buyers—the people who buy from me early.

Imagine how you would feel if you bought a product and the very next day you saw that it was discounted. You would feel duped.

That experience makes the customer feel stupid and I never want to make my customers feel stupid. I always want to reward that loyalty.

If someone buys from me early, they should get the best price.

Maybe you’re thinking about creating an online course.

A lot of people want to start creating their own online courses and I’m even making one to teach people how to create an online course that’s coming later this year.

It makes sense: you record your curriculum, lessons, or videos once and then it’s an asset for you. It continues to serve you, teach other people, and bring in revenue automated on a consistent basis. Who wouldn’t want this?

I’m actually going to recommend that you host an in-person workshop before you create an online course.

That seems really strange because a workshop requires you being there in person, you have to teach people, you have to be present at the workshop, and you only make money at that one event.

Once it’s over, you don’t make any more money. If you want to make more money, you have to do another event.

Why would I recommend doing a workshop instead of creating an online course? Well, it’s not so much “instead of” as it is “before hand”.

I want you to get the most out of your day, and to get the most out of your day, you need to plan your day. You need to schedule it in advance and find focused time.

Most people work 8 hours in a day, but they don’t really get 8 hours worth of work done. They’re distracted, they take breaks, they get interrupted, and they browse Facebook.

What they really get done in a day is equivalent to something like 90 minutes of focused time.

If you had a 90-minute block of focused time for the most important work of your day, you would be as productive as most people in an 8 hour work day.