Daily Content Machine

It's written!

My first book has been in various stages of the back burner for the past three years. At the end of 2015, I said, "Enough! I'm going to finish it once and for all!"

In July of this year, I set aside a month to write this book. I ended up finishing all 75,000 words of it in 14 days (not including over 10,000 more words spent journaling about the writing process).

It's called Overlap: Getting from the life you have to the life you want.

The book is for the person who wants to achieve greatness. It's for anyone who wants to create additional streams of income or become a master at their craft. Whether you're a leader or simply broke, without the support of their family, and feel like you don't have enough time in the day, this book will give you clarity. It will help you create the life you want.

There are 26 chapters (you can see the full list at http://OverlapBook.com. Before this recording, I asked the members of the Community which of the 26 chapters they most wanted to hear my talk about.

Here were the top three chapters people were interested in:

1. Increasing Your Focus

2. Teaching What You Know

3. Choosing What to Be Known For

In this episode, I give you an in-depth look at the three above chapters to give you an idea of the depth of this book.

Overlap is being printed as a beautiful, clothbound, embossed, hardcover book. I wanted to produce an item that felt as timeless as the message it contains.

The book is available for pre-order now and there's a special bundle order that includes an exclusive print for anyone so kind as to support the project in its early stages.

I hope you enjoy.

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You've heard us talk about the Community at seanwes, but this episode is really about engaging in a community of any kind.

If you don't have time for a community, are considering joining a community, are part of a community, or run a community, this episode is for you!

Time is scarce and we don't have a lot of it. You may feel like you barely have time to read this sentence, let alone engage in a community.

But a community isn't a time sink, it's a time investment.

What you invest in time with a community, you get back in clarity. It's not that you can't afford to spend the time, it's that you can't afford to spend years heading in the wrong direction!

If you want to be successful, you need to get around people who are successful. These people can help you get where you want to go faster. Find people who are already doing what you want to do and position yourself around them.

Just like you would schedule time to meet with a mentor or a coach, schedule time to interact with a community. This is where you will get clarity and breakthroughs.

I want to talk about this concept I call Gold Miner.

A gold miner is someone who is always looking for something positive out of every situation.

What a lot of people tend to do is they try to find someone who mostly shares gold—this is good, you want to find people who mostly share gold. But what you don't want to do is completely ignore people that you disagree with, who maybe share things you don't like, or have different views than you, or things that you would consider junk.

It's easy to pay attention to the people you mostly agree with and who give you things you appreciate.

But a lot of people tend to ignore and avoid people they disagree with. Even if there was something good, they don't see it because they throw everything out.

A gold miner doesn't care how much they have to dig through. All they care about is finding that one little bit of gold anywhere they can find it.

Every situation you encounter, every conversation you have, every book you read—you're looking for that little piece of gold. You're looking for the million-dollar idea.

This sounds simple in concept, but most people don't do this. Most people aren't gold miners. Most people are looking for the one little thing they disagree with so they can disqualify the person as a whole.

We're going to talk about money today. We'll be covering the product spectrum, starting with the problem, not the passion, becoming passionate about the problem, and the one thing you lack that's keeping you broke.

You can't just do what you want all day and expect that to lead to making money. Yes, it is possible to reach a point where the way you make money involves doing things you enjoy, but you don't get there haphazardly. You get there purposefully.

Time is money. People will give up their money if you give them time. To give them time, you need to do work for them or solve a problem for them.

You need to be good at doing work that someone else doesn't want to do or can't do. If you're fortunate, that thing is something you happen to like doing.

There are two ways to reliably make a living doing what you love:

1. Become passionate about the problem. Get good at solving the problem. When you're good at something that makes you money, this can turn into something you're passionate about.

2. Become passionate about a thing. Get good at doing that thing. Find ways to solve problems that other people are willing to pay for by doing that thing.

Everything else is an exception and an edge case. Those edge cases are like winning the lottery. It's not impossible, it's just not probable—which makes suggesting that you play the lottery bad advice for someone looking to make money.

We're going to talk about the one thing you lack that's keeping you broke.

Virtual reality is coming.

It's not just for video games. It's not just science fiction. We already live in virtual worlds. Look around you. Everyone has their face buried in their phone screen.

What will simply happen is the screen will no longer be something you hold in your hands. The awkward straps and head gear you see with early virtual reality devices is not how it's always going to be.

Computers used to be the size of a city block. People thought a computer would never, ever fit inside a home.

The inevitability is that virtual reality will become more seamless, effortless to use, prevalent, and get closer and closer to looking like real life.

It doesn't matter whether you like the idea of it or not. This is the future you will live in. And it's not something you can put off thinking about.

You need to be preparing right now. If you want to succeed in an increasingly digital world, there are things you need to be doing right now to prepare.

You need to be able to interact with humans and do it well. You need to be able to present yourself with confidence and speak fluently. All technology does is make human interactions more seamless. The eventuality is that online human conversations will become indistinguishable from face-to-face interaction.

In this episode, we paint a picture of the future you'll live in and give you some practical things you can, and should, be doing today if you want to succeed.

Dark social is traffic to your website that comes from sources that can't be tracked in your analytics.

Every time you share a link in Messages.app, or Snapchat, or in a private chat room, you are engaging in dark social.

These conversations can't be indexed by search engines. Your links open up directly in the browser and don't have any referral data. Marketers are somewhat worried because the amount of traffic coming from dark social is increasing.

What does this mean for you as a creator? Well, a lot of things. It really just harkens back to the principles of word of mouth. We will revisit 7 ways to encourage more word of mouth referrals in this episode.

But beyond just being aware that people are sharing links to your content in places that can't be tracked, you should also be engaging with these people one-on-one as much as possible.

As things have become increasing automated and people are scheduling social media posts now, we are understandably yearning for personal interaction. Actually engaging with someone in real time, one-on-one, is incredibly powerful.

Of course, that kind of engagement doesn't scale. But it doesn't matter. You need to be doing the unscalable things.

Today, we're building off of the last episode on creating products.

In the last episode, we talked about the order in which you should create products. You first start with something small, then launch something big. After that, you want to go back and fill out the spectrum.

You need more products on the shelf. You need more products at all levels. At every price point someone wants to give you money, you need to have an offering.

Today's episode is jam-packed with creative ideas for quickly getting more products on the shelf. We talk about things like selling your process, templates, scripts, copywriting checklists, launch plans and so much more...

The best part? We're not just talking about making new things. Yes, we do give you a TON of ideas for quick products you can crank out in a short amount of time, but it doesn't have to be new work. You can repurpose what you've already made.

We're going to help you make money from work you've already done. You have so many potential products right now under your nose that you're not even aware of. You're going to get a ton of ideas from this episode.

Don't know where to start with products? Should you start small? Should you go big? This episode will help.

We break down the most sustainable order.

You want to get to something that’s big as soon as possible, but that doesn't mean it's where you should start with your very first product.

If your first product is too big, you can easily get overwhelmed and never end up shipping. You'll end up biting off more than you can chew.

I recommend that you start small and ship a small product to prove to yourself that you can do it. You're going to work out the kinks and learn a lot. You'll make mistakes too. Better to do that at a small scale first.

Launching a small product first lets you iterate and develop processes. You'll learn what it takes to market and sell. You'll learn about payment processing. You'll learn about delivery of goods (whether physical or digital).

All of this informs your big product. That's the next step: maximize revenue. This becomes the fuel to all of your other ventures. This flagship product makes everything else you want to do possible.

If you're feeling overwhelmed with selling products and don't know where to start, this episode gives you a clear order in which to approach things.

We talk about maximizing the value and return you get from products, whether to go digital or physical, implementing a sales funnel, nurturing leads, up-selling, tiers, and setting yourself up to completely fill out your product spectrum (that's a teaser for to the next episode on Creative Ideas to Help You Quickly Get More Products on the Shelf).

This episode title is tongue in cheek: The reason you can't MAKE money is because making money is illegal. That's called counterfeiting.

This isn't just a silly play on words though. It's to illustrate an important concept: You don't MAKE money, you GET money.

You have to go GET money. Someone else has your money. A stranger has your money. You need to go get it from them.

Who are the people you want to reach? Who has your money and what do they want? What can you provide them? How can you give them a solution to a problem they have that they're willing to pay to make go away?

You need to figure out a way to create value and exchange it for money.

This episode is about selling. The degree to which you are sold you will sell. Read that last sentence again, it's important.

If you're not selling, you're not sold on your product. You don't actually believe in what you're selling.

This episode will remind you that you are a BUSINESS and help you focus on the things that matter.