Daily Content Machine

Ben and I were discussing workaholism at our meeting the other morning. We got to talking about whether or not there is such a thing if you're doing what you love.

This segued into wondering when is the appropriate time to take breaks or to take a step back from what you're doing. I've heard of people taking a year off every 7th year, which I think is a fascinating idea, but I haven't heard of smaller scale sabbaticals.

Among other things, we explore the idea of taking a step back once a day, one day every week, and one week every 7 weeks. We talk about why this is beneficial, and how in the world you can enable such sabbaticals.

If you want to be successful, you need to position yourself around success. I'm going to give you insights from the perspective of a mentor that will help you connect with the kinds of people you want to be around. I'll also give you several ways to position yourself around success ONLINE.

You're creative. You're good at multiple things. Your biggest struggle is figuring out which of the numerous things you enjoy to pursue right now.

When it comes to the work you project, I've said many times before that you need to curate what you share. This is how you build an audience.

But I'm going to throw a curve ball at this idea.

What if you really are doing multiple things and doing them well? At what point do you break one of the pursuits off into another brand or separate feed?

Is there ever a time where you'd want to project multiple kinds of content from the same brand?

We tear this topic apart and dig into whether you truly need separate feeds or if you simply need to overhaul your existing brand and redefine or evolve it.

In this episode, I share the story of what happened when I relied on someone else's platform and the consequences of selling my material there. I got locked into a price, couldn't remove my content, and had no control over the devaluing of what I had to offer. I won't be divulging specifics in the notes here, so you'll have listen for the details.

We talk about the benefits of having things on your own website and being able to control the experience.

This is a big show. I'm going to challenge you. I get real and I talk real numbers. I step out of my comfort zone to motivate and inspire you to set bigger goals—goals that make your biggest dreams look small. Ben asks if it will be a potentially life-changing episode—I say yes, but not "potentially". It will be a life-changing episode. You'll laugh, you might cry, but you'll certainly come away with a renewed vigor and a very specifically-defined goal that you will undoubtedly accomplish.

Those who can, do; those who can't, teach—right? WRONG. You should be teaching right now, exactly where you are. It doesn't matter if other people are teaching the same thing or if other people have more experience than you. Teaching what you know is invaluable, and it's not only good for establishing yourself as an expert but it helps you understand what you know even better.

Taking time to teach doesn't slow down your learning—it actually accelerates it. You'll hear why it doesn't matter if you teach something wrong and the reason you don't have to have an audience before you teach.

The key to success is actually quality AND quantity. Yes, the former is more important but it takes both—which requires hard work over time.

In this goodness-packed episode, we cover building your audience from zero, getting traction, the benefits of scheduled output, the kind of promise to make, what do you if you break that promise, why going viral is not the goal, how to grow your email list, where to place your opt-in box, what kind of content to put in your newsletters, and why word of mouth is the best kind of referral. Whew!

Everywhere you look online, you see little counters. Everything is "likable" and every "like" inflates a counter. But what does the counter mean? What does it represent? Does it convey value? Is it an indication of worth?

I had a very real conversation with a few close friends. What I've found is that we have common struggles. Notoriety on the internet is such a strange thing and if we're not careful, we can easily get caught up in the whirlwind of acclamation.

I talk a lot about my two prices, full price and free, but we haven't discussed it fully at length all in one place. Here we have the canonical two-prices episode where we compare full price and free, discuss the problem with discounts, the one exception for using discounts, why good friends pay full price, the only reason your price should ever go down, the benefits of pro-bono, how to get pro-bono clients, the reason long-term thinking and setting the bar high is the best way to make the most money, how to run effective giveaways, and why you should never, ever, cold-call clients.

In another one of our conversational-style episodes, Ben and I talk about the 3 kinds of unfinished projects, identifying resistance points, when to push through and when to just abandon dead projects. While being able to switch between micro and macro modes can be helpful, it can also result in sensory overload. We discuss ways to focus on one thing at a time—both with individual tasks, and projects as a whole.