The Transcript

Greetings, superfriends! My name is Sonia Simone and these are the Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer. For those who don’t know me, I’m a co-founder and the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital.

I’m also a champion of running your business and your life according to your own rules. As long as you don’t lie and you don’t hurt people, this podcast is your official pink permission slip to run your business or your career exactly the way you think you should.

Note: Links to extra resources are in the Show Notes!

So, today I want to talk about something that I teach all the time to our paid customers, so folks in Authority, Teaching Sells, etc., but I’ve only touched on it on the blog or the podcast.

And that’s the two points of clarity you need to get to in order to move forward on anything.

Your business, your career, your family life, your fitness plan. Anything.

So let’s get into it.

First, you have to know your constraints

I’ll take these first because they’re the easiest to identify. This is all the stuff we gripe about. smile.png" alt=":)" class="wp-smiley">

Money may be a constraint, time is usually a constraint. If you have three kids under five, you have a significant constraint. You may not have a network yet. You may not have a good internet connection.

Abilities can be constraints as well — these are the kind that we can get a little creative about. If you don’t feel confident about your writing, and writing matters to you, write more. Or record your voice. Or make videos. Or do the thing that you feel needs work.

Then sometimes we have false constraints. One of the biggest is, “I’m not creative.” People who feel held back by this don’t realize that creativity comes from doing, not thinking. Creative approaches won’t come to you until you’re regularly doing that kind of work.

Sometimes a lack of confidence is another false constraint. Each of us has a unique psychological makeup, but often lack of confidence — or lack of self-esteem — comes from a lack of experience. The more solid work you put out, the more confidence you have.

Not always, sometimes highly capable people get into that Imposter Syndrome thing — but if you’re waiting for confidence to get some work produced, that’s counterproductive.

Will power, again, a false constraint that appears very real. If you lack will power, it’s because you haven’t made what you’re working on a habit yet. Will power does improve the more you use it, but it’s also finite. When you deplete today’s will power, you have to wait for the well to refill.

Habits beat will power. Use very tiny habits to create momentum, and also do the Value Exercise I talked about last week to give yourself some additional energy.

Now, the more fun one — assets

So your constraints are all the things you have to work around.

Your assets are — you guessed it — all the things you have to work with.

The categories are pretty much the same as they are for constraints. You might have a bit of a budget to apply to your project right now. You might have a few evenings free.

You might have a skill you can capitalize on — you have a good speaking voice, or you write reasonably well, or you have good design skills.

You may have a person you can get help from. This might be a person you pay, a person you barter with, a person you partner with, or a person you ask for a favor.

In terms of creativity — creative professionals will nearly all tell you that creative energy tends to come in waves. Some weeks are kind of dry and some are really productive and flowing. So if you’re in a good creative time, get some creative stuff done. If you’re in a dry spell, that’s the time to go back to fundamentals, to focus on getting better at the basics, and even to work on some “boring” things — if you call them “meditative” you may find them easier to take.

When you’re not feeling ultra creative, use that as an asset to work on the not-so-glamourous things. Those are important, too.

If you’ve built any kind of habit at all — even a habit of, say, posting a long post on Facebook every day, think about whether you could use that as an asset. A long Facebook post is almost a short article. Could you take that habitual time and deploy it in a way that’s serving your needs better?

Then, you put it all together

You’re at Point A. You want to go to Point B. Take a few minutes to just write that down — electronically or physically, just do what works for you.

Then scribble out the assets and constraints that are in play.

So to launch a new ebook, maybe your constraints are that you don’t have a budget for this one, your time is limited to weekends and two evenings a week, and you’re a slow writer. Your assets are that you know your topic really well, you have a blog and an email list, and you know there’s interest in the topic if you can get it done.

One thing you might do is look at the assets and see if any answers to the constraints might be on there.

So — you have an audience, and expertise, but you’re a slow writer. Could you send a post to your list and your blog asking for a writing partner? You don’t have budget, but you could barter consulting time in your topic of expertise for their writing ability and speed. You get together, record some phone calls, do some consulting hours, and you could have a solid ebook draft quite quickly.

Remember, how you put your own individual puzzle together depends on the pieces you have. It’s like Lego, remember?

Now, this assets and constraints business isn’t stunningly innovative. There’s a whole Theory of Constraints from lean production, that people who write business books have written about.

It’s kind of common sense. Funny thing, it’s those common sense, tried-and-ptrue solutions that tend to actually work.

When in doubt, the answer is usually people

Sometimes there’s kind of a gray spot on your map — something where you don’t know what you don’t know, or you just can’t see a solution.

In that case, the answer is usually to reach out to someone, or to a group of someones.

You can ask me a question on twitter, you can email your list, you can ask in a LinkedIn or Facebook group, you can form a little accountability group, or you could even do all of those things.

Before your ask, spend a moment to make a micro-commitment to yourself that you will act on some of the advice you get, even if it’s only a small action like researching or further investigating an option.

Just a reminder that the show will be on hiatus in August. That means this is the last show before my break! We’re returning in September with a new iTunes feed and hosted on a new site. BUT, the PinkHairedMarketer.FM url will continue to send you wehere you need to go. smile.png" alt=":)" class="wp-smiley">

Before I start — one of the things I’d like to do when I return is to do a mini-course that’s just for the subscribers. This will help me to restore the visibility on iTunes, and plus I just think it will be fun.

If you have something you’d particularly like me to cover, just let me know in the show comments or on Twitter!

Thanks so much for your time and attention and I’ll catch you next month. smile.png" alt=":)" class="wp-smiley">

The Transcript

Sonia Simone: Greetings, superfriends! My name is Sonia Simone and these are the Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer. For those who don’t know me, I’m a co-founder and the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital.

I’m also a champion of running your business and your life according to your own rules. As long as you don’t lie and you don’t hurt people, this podcast is your official pink permission slip to run your business or your career exactly the way you think you should.

Note: Links to extra resources are in the Show Notes!

Just a reminder that the show will be on hiatus in August, and then return in September with a new iTunes feed and hosted on a new site. BUT, the PinkHairedMarketer.FM url will continue to send you wehere you need to go. smile.png" alt=":)" class="wp-smiley">

Before I start — one of the things I’d like to do when I return is to do a mini-course that’s just for the subscribers. This will help me to restore the visibility on iTunes, and plus I just think it will be fun.

What I’m looking for are ideas for the course! I have lots of them in my Evernote and my stack of index cards, but I’d be interested in what you might want to see.

I’m thinking about creating this short free course around the topic I covered at our live event in Denver last year — how to improve your conversion. In other words, getting more people to take the action you want them to take, including getting them to buy things. I got excellent feedback on that talk last year, which is why it comes to mind. Let me know if that sounds like you would dig it, or if you would prefer something else!

Launching your first (or next) digital product

Since we did mindset last week, this week I’m going to get very practical. I did a call with my friend and business coach, Gary Barnes, on this subject the other day, and I think it’s probably something that would be useful for a lot of folks.

So today I’m going to talk about how to get started with a digital product — that’s a product that exists purely in the digital world.

Just a quick pitch — we have an entire live event devoted to this coming up in Denver, Colorado in October — where we’ll really walk you though all of this and more in depth. It’s going to be a very action-oriented session — a bit of a cross between a class and a conference, which is always how Brian Clark likes to set our events up.

I’m also going to deliver an optional additional workshop with Chris Brogan, so I’ll give you a few more details on that in a few minutes.

Step 1: Who (and how) do you serve?

I think we’ve said this about a million times on Copyblogger —

Everything good comes from the audience.

You have to know who you’re helping, and you have to know how you help them.

One of the most important things we do with content is to attract those folks, and then give them some meaningful help for their journey as a way to get to know one another.

So this is our blog posts, our podcasts, our YouTube videos — all of that great publicly-findable content on the web.

Most folks working on this aren’t getting specific enough.

I see a huge amount of “I help people make meaningful change in their lives.” OK, awesome. What kind of people?

The answer might be demographic — women between 20 and 50 who live in large cities — or it might be psychographic — people who identify as spiritual and not religious who are interested in social justice causes.

Or it could be both demographic and psychographic, if you’re into that. To some degree, you learn this by putting a message out and seeing who shows up. The audience that appears may or may not look like the one you intended to attract. As long as you still like them, go with the flow.

And if you don’t like them, try a little strongly-worded values conversation — get very real about what matters most to you. That will chase them away if you aren’t on the same page there.

Then … what kind of meaningful change? Health? Relationships? Finances? Time management?

And finally … how do you do that? Specifically? Could you come up with a memorable, simple label for your process or methodology?

Step 2: Pulling the audience together

If you haven’t started some kind of content hub to build your audience, do that now. You really do want something you control, and you also want a way to keep talking with them. Normally that means an email list.

I’m noticing — not for everyone, but for many — that some folks who have put together large and loyal groups on Facebook have a terrible time when they try to sell those folks something. Because people spend a lot of time in Facebook groups when they’re looking for free advice.

Not a thing wrong with that, except that these people don’t buy, therefore they’re not your customer.

In general, I’d much rather have an email list of 500 people who buy than a Facebook group of 5,000 who don’t.

When you’re really starting out and you have no one, you want to think about partnering and finding those audiences that have already gathered around someone you might partner with. You can also absolutely do something like Facebook advertising, if you have some extra cash and a lot of time to get good at that. It really depends on what resources and constraints you’re working with.

Step 3: What’s the smallest meaningful change? (MVP)

Once you know who you serve and you’ve started to pull them together so you can talk to them, your first step is to listen.

What’s bugging them about your topic? What are they struggling with? What’s frustrating or annoying?

You’re looking for opportunities to solve an annoying problem with your digital product. Maybe you’ll help people finally get consistent about an exercise habit, or learn how to catch Pokemons in Pokemon Go, or get a promotion at work.

Most business — and nearly all digital products — solve a problem.

The trick at first is — look for small problems to solve first. Initial steps on the larger path.

If you try to launch a massive membership community that’s going to create complete transformation, unless you have an incredibly strong relationship with your audience, it’s too much, too soon. You’re moving too fast. Solve minor annoyances, then bigger headaches, and work your way up.

As far as what you actually offer? Literally, if you can re-create it in a digital form and take money for it, you’ve got a product.

Some examples are:

Cheat sheets, mind maps, process maps, workbooks, ebooks, checklists, video tutorials (these go well with workbooks), audio tutorials.

As you start working your way up to bigger audience problems — and bigger solutions — you start getting into the e-courses, membership communities, virtual coaching groups, that kind of thing.

My friend JB Glossinger has a premium podcast called Morning Coach — Monday is free, Tuesday through Friday are a paid subscription. That’s an unusual model but it works well for him and his audience.

Make it small. I like checklists and cheat sheets for the very beginning of the process, then simple tutorials (audio or video) with a PDF workbook. When I say “workbook,” realize that can be 3 pages.

Think small.

Step 4: Options for tools

Actually delivering the digital product to the customer and getting paid for it has, frankly, been a giant pain.

When I created my first educational community, the technology side of it was a bear — and it was not cheap. Numerous products had to be stitched together, then styled by a designer to look good and work well. Then there were those couple of weeks we had Russian hackers putting porn images into our library, that was awesome.

Now, if you have any revenue at all, I really recommend our Rainmaker platform. You get the public side, so the podcast and blog we were talking about, and then a membership side that manages all of the login information for you, manages multiple products when you’re ready for that, lets you provide “free products” as well as various levels of paid things, and all of it is hosted, turnkey, and secure. It’s just a very good solution for this.

If you’re talking a checklist for .99, Rainmaker is a paid service and it’s not a rock-bottom price, so it may be that you won’t feel ready right now. That’s fine. My advice in that case is, go as simple as you possibly can.

You may want to go with a service like Clickbank or E-junkie to make things simple. They’re fine when you’re starting out, but at some point you’ll probably find it makes sense to upgrade.

Step 4: LORE: Launch, observe, rework, evolve

I think we’re addicted to creating acronyms — this one sort of popped up as I was planning out this session: LORE.

Launch, observe, rework, and evolve.

In other words, get something out there — it might not be too fantastic, but there could be something to it. It reflects an idea you’ve seen in the audience that you think might resonate. It helps solve a problem you think people might care about.

Then you see what happens. You talk to buyers. If no one buys, try to talk with some non-buyers — you can just get onto your list and ask for a few folks to chat with about why the product wasn’t a good fit.

You rework it so it’s better, based on the feedback, and then you evolve the product to a better version.

You don’t have to have the world’s most stunning idea. You just have to start with a spark that will catch — and that’s why we start with those micro-products. That’s how you find the spark that can catch. Then you fan that flame and make it bigger.

So: If you think you’d like to start a digital business — and most of these start as small projects “on the side” that can be grown into something bigger over time — just a reminder that our live event this year is going to be focused on that.

It’s called the Digital Commerce Summit, it’s in October this year in Denver, Colorado, and it’s designed to actually walk you through this process in much more detail. Understanding who you serve and then finding those folks and building your audience. Developing your product idea. Producing the product, then launching, and of course going on to evolve and grow over time.

You can find that at DigitalCommerce.com, you can click the summit section or if you’re very good at listening to URLs, just jump to digitalcommerce.com/summit.

This year, we’re trying something new — Chris Brogan and I are going to do an optional supplemental workshop on putting together an online course.

Both Chris and I have done quite a lot of this — an online course was really what got me out of the stress of chasing freelance clients and on to a much more sustainable and (for me) enjoyable business model. We’re doing a hands-on workshop for the folks who attend Summit — attendance is limited and there’s an additional fee, but actually that fee is really reasonable right now. This is a roll-up-your-sleeves and do it thing, with Chris and I there to guide and help you as you put your business plan together.

It’s going to be fun and I’m really looking forward to it. I’ll get you a registration link in the show notes if you’re interested — we’re pinning down venues, but the spaces for this are going to be limited so we can really focus on you as an individual. It should be a blast.

So, as I understand it the workshop is only open to folks who are attending Summit, so the place to do that is digitalcommerce.com, slash, summit. Then we’ll let you know how to get signed up for the workshop with me and Chris if you’re into it.

Thanks so much for your time and attention and I’ll catch you next week. smile.png" alt=":)" class="wp-smiley">

The Transcript

Sonia Simone: Greetings, superfriends! My name is Sonia Simone and these are the Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer. For those who don’t know me, I’m a co-founder and the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital.

I’m also a champion of running your business and your life according to your own rules. As long as you don’t lie and you don’t hurt people, this podcast is your official pink permission slip to run your business or your career exactly the way you think you should.

Note: Links to extra resources are in the Show Notes!

Thanks to everyone on Twitter who asked a question for this episode!

Sharon Liu @SZL14

@soniasimone What are some fun ways to write sponsored content that sounds less ad-y?

— Sharon Liu (@sharonzix) June 22, 2016

@soniasimone What are some fun ways to write sponsored content that sounds less ad-y?

This is a super fun question — sponsored content, or “native advertising,” or as we called it when I did a lot of them, “advertorials” have been around for a long time. So as is so often the case, the “hot new thing” is something that’s been around for a long time.

A little research tells me they are not the same thing — technically sponsored content is pure content that’s designed to build brand authority. Mediapress studios defines sponsored content this way:

This is strictly editorial. Sponsored content is not brand-biased and focuses on informing rather than convincing their target audience. The strategy behind this is to become a thought leader in the industry, and increase the value of the brand. If the audience goes to that company for advice, maybe they’ll buy their products as well.

Copyblogger would be an example of this, and we call this an “authority content” model. Basically, show up and be super smart and useful on your topic.

Mediapress studios: http://www.mediapressstudios.com/blog/native-advertising-vs-sponsored-content

Native advertising is more that traditional advertorial — it’s an ad, but the tone, voice, and layout are designed to blend into the publication so you can’t tell it’s an ad.

The key to making both of them work is actually the same — you start with the call to action that you want to work toward, and you keep that in mind, but then you sort of squish that part of your brain down and think more like a creative writer or a journalist.

What are the legitimate reasons for going with this particular company, product, or service? What do they, in fact, actually do well? What kinds of buyers are an excellent fit? Who would genuinely benefit from taking the desired call to action?

The only way I know how to do these is if you as a writer truly do believe 100% in the product. So you want to choose your clients — or your employer — accordingly, and only work for companies you think are doing something extraordinarily well.

For an advertorial, the key really is to blend — so if it’s a research-heavy publication, then you need some solid, credible numbers and data. If it’s a more lifestyle publication, then look at the way they use language — what do the verbs look like, how many adjectives are we talking about. Match the voice and the approach.

Hope this is helpful! This was a fun question. smile.png" alt=":)" class="wp-smiley">

Shikhashikz @Shikhashikz

@soniasimone in today's world,do you think only content matters n Concept of b2b n b2c has vanished away?its all about b2p ( people)

— Shikhashikz (@Shikhashikz) June 21, 2016

@soniasimone in today’s world,do you think only content matters n Concept of b2b n b2c has vanished away?its all about b2p ( people)

This is a question I’m always very happy when people ask. The fact is, it’s always been B2P. When you’re creating B2B — business-to-business — content, versus business-to-consumer, you have to figure out who the stakeholders are — which is just corporate-speak for who’s involved in making the decision you’re trying to get to.

We have a bit of a mythology that when people are at work, they’re somehow more rational and aren’t influenced by emotion. But of course that’s not true at all — and in fact, some of the new brain research is showing us that the kinds of thinking we label as “emotions” are crucial to all human decision-making.

If you think of your own work experience, work is a very emotional place. The emotions are different at work — frankly, fear and status are very highly represented there in most companies. Fear of losing your spot in the hierarchy, and desire to gain a higher one.

But it still comes down to understanding what moves your audience — getting into their heads, empathizing with their complex emotional states, and then understanding their complete customer experience so you can use content to make the path easier to walk.

We have some posts on Empathy Maps and Experience Maps that I think may be useful, I’ll include them in the show notes.

Ifeanyi C. Okolo @pass4lifeltd

@soniasimone how does a B2B company write intermediate content for clients?

— Ifeanyi C. Okolo (@pass4lifeltd) June 21, 2016

@soniasimone how does a B2B company write intermediate content for clients?

This obviously leads right into the earlier question — and again, it’s one that I think is excellent when people ask.

This gets to something that not enough B2B organizations do — they forget who it is who fuels the fire. Somewhere, no matter how esoteric your B2B, there’s a customer who pays for something. A consumer, or a citizen or community resident or taxpayer if you’re talking B2G.

The whole chain needs to know what that person needs. The whole chain needs to make that person successful, so that the entire chain of organizations can be successful.

So if you write point-of-sale software for retail stores, you need to understand the experience of the customer who buys from that store, not just the store owner or even the store employees. If your software makes it hard for the eventual customer to buy, then your product is stealing fuel from the fire.

That insight is how you start to make decisions about what content, if any, you create for those folks, and what it will look like. It’s really the Empathy and Experience Maps all over again, but you just have kind of a chain of maps depending on the specifics of your organization and their relationship to that core customer.

Glen @ViperChill

@soniasimone What's the best way someone who hasn't connected with you before could get the attention of you and Brian smile.png" alt=":)" class="wp-smiley">

— Glen (@ViperChill) June 29, 2016

@soniasimone What’s the best way someone who hasn’t connected with you before could get the attention of you and Brian smile.png" alt=":)" class="wp-smiley">

Glen Allsop is a very cool guy, relatively young and has lots of energy and is a great implementer.

In my experience, there are two super strong strategies. The first is, if you can swing it, to meet people in person, ideally at small events. So SXSW can be a ton of fun, but it gets hard to really connect there.

Nobody goes there any more, it’s too crowded. -Yogi Berra

The parties are massive and loud, the event is so spread out.

Small events, on the other hand, let you spend more quality time with a few people, and that’s what you want. So, you know, cough, we have one coming up in October. And obviously I am biased, but it’s awesome. Truly.

But you probably encounter other small events as well. I’ve certainly had some fantastic conversations at Chris Guillebeau’s World Domination Summit, although that’s grown a lot. I’m sure it’s still terrific, though. Liz Strauss and Terry Starbucker’s event SOBCon was legendary for this, and in fact it’s where I met Brian Clark and Chris Garrett face to face for the first time, and other fantastic folks as well.

Look for events that are structured to allow for quality interactions between the attendees — and ideally with the speakers as well.

The other super strong strategy is to do something epic. So I will never forget meeting Andy Crestodina, who I met face to face at a larger event, because when I met him he put his Periodic Table of Content Marketing into my hand, and it was incredibly beautifully produced, very smart, a clever concept executed beautifully.

The easiest way to do “something epic” is to have a killer content platform, so have an outstanding blog or a wonderful podcast or a great video series.

Strategy #3 isn’t quite as powerful as the first two, but it makes an impression, and that’s just show up and be nice, and if you can, be useful.

Drive someone to the airport. Leave thoughtful and interesting comments that go beyond “Nice post.” Engage meaningfully and thoughtfully in social media. This is like vitamins for your networking strategy. It just makes it work a lot, lot better.

If you get known for being nice, everything else you do gets a halo from that. And I will tell you straight up, if you’re not nice — or, this is really fatal, if you’re nice to me but you’re rude or mean to my team — then you pretty much have to cure cancer and bring about world peace before I want to talk to you.

I have an ebook on content promotion that goes into some of this in a little more detail, it’s free with the My Copyblogger library.

The final thought on that is — people with big audiences have a lot of people who want to connect with us, and it’s always interesting to me how many folks with big audiences are introverts. So it will probably take some time and you want to try to be patient. Also, observe where folks are easy to find. I tend to be very easy to connect with on Twitter and blog comments, and very hard to connect with via cold emailing or LinkedIn.

Patience and a sense of humor are wonderful. People aren’t trying to give you the cold shoulder and they don’t think they’re better than you are — they just have a lot of communication flying in at them and if they’re introverts, that can get really overwhelming and exhausting in a hurry.

I totally get taking it personally when someone doesn’t respond, and I’ll tell you right now, I go in and out, and sometimes I get slammed and I don’t respond to people I really, really wanted to reply to. They get to the bottom of the inbox screen and my distraction ruins all my good intentions. As much as you can, try to assume that they’re just overloaded, they don’t really think they’re “superior.”

Thanks for the smart question, Glen. smile.png" alt=":)" class="wp-smiley">

The Transcript

Sonia Simone: Greetings, superfriends! My name is Sonia Simone and these are the Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer. For those who don’t know me, I’m a co-founder and the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital.

I’m also a champion of running your business and your life according to your own rules. As long as you don’t lie and you don’t hurt people, this podcast is your official pink permission slip to run your business or your career exactly the way you think you should.

Note: Links to extra resources are in the Show Notes!

I had a Q&A episode planned for today, but since there are a couple of days left to see The Abundance Code film for free, I thought I’d address a great question that came up in the comments over on Copyblogger.

By the way, did you know we turned comments back on over there? We love to see yours. smile.png" alt=":)" class="wp-smiley">

On to the question:

Is The Abundance Code the same as “The Secret”?

Christine Wareing:

Having watched the film, there is not a lot of difference between this and The Secret, which very much impacted me, although neither have really convinced me that you can really have it all if you manifest hard enough.

I believe that every bodies life is mapped out for them from birth, and whoever you are born to this is your package deal, hopefully you are given the opportunity to have a good life, some are lucky, some are not.

I will now refer you to a hilarious episode of The IT Crowd, which is a brilliant show if you’re comfortable with a bit of salty humor, about “Spacestar Ordering.”

Here’s how the character described how this system worked for him:

Well, I visualised the thing I wanted. In my case, it was a helicopter. I drew a picture of the helicopter on a piece of paper, then I stood with my back to space, threw the paper over my shoulder and wished really hard.

Couple of days later, bought myself a helicopter. Explain that one, if you can!

OK, so that’s a pretty broad parody — but I don’t think it’s an unfair one.

Here’s what I think:

Fatalism is dangerous

If you believe that your destiny is fixed, and you’re either destined to be lucky or you’re destined to be unlucky, you’ll take action that accords with that mindset.

As I talked about in my podcast on “Getting Lucky,” people who self-identify as unlucky don’t look for the lucky break — and because they don’t look for it, they don’t see it.

This doesn’t mean that no one gets a raw deal. Resources are not equally allocated. Someone born into a community where the standard of living is under a dollar a day don’t have the same resources that you have and I have. You and I have access to technology, not to mention all that cool stuff like food and clean water.

The role of mindset

Here was my response to Christine:

For me there is a massive difference [between abundance mindset and “The Secret”], which is that you cannot, and should not, expect to get anything simply by manifesting (wishing). You have to take action, and you have to keep your eyes open and continue to take informed action.

The role that abundance thinking plays for me is that it sets up a mindset in which you ll actually take the actions you know would be beneficial. It s creating a space of optimism in order to fuel behavior change.

…. mindset is crucial, but it s just one element. An abundant mindset without action is just daydreaming.

So, for example, studies have shown that people who have a positive view of ageing tend to do better after a significant health event like a serious illness or accident.

Those with a positive view of growing older do better not because of any kind of cosmic energy, but because they are much more likely to engage in health-promoting behavior. They take that extra walk around the block. They do their physical therapy. They eat their vegetables.

My grandmother lived to be 102, and right up until about 101, she was painting, she was socializing, she was taking walks, she was appreciating the things she loved, especially nature and her family.

And I will tell you that if anyone said, “You know, eating broccoli is good for you,” or whatever it was, she’d eat some broccoli. She wanted to keep going. She had no interest in fading away.

She wasn’t running marathons or competing in bodybuilding competitions — she was doing normal things that people do when they take care of themselves. Moderate exercise, reasonable food, staying social, and doing things she enjoyed.

Now she had some very good genes helping her out, but we can’t help our genes. The thing we can help, and the lesson I take from her, is that she lived her life right to the end. She didn’t say, “Oh, that’s not for people my age.”

I remember into her 90s she used to pull all-nighters making quilts to raise money for “the old people.” She’d drink about five pots of seriously bad coffee and get it done. She did this for the benefit of people who were a lot younger than she was.

What else do we need besides mindset?

Here’s what I would suggest.

First, I think it would make sense to try an experiment at least, of taking, say, the next six months and deciding to believe you’re a lucky person.

If you don’t like it, go back. Just the exercise of trying on different beliefs and mindsets is good for you.

Now I don’t suggest adopting the belief that gravity doesn’t exist, or that there is no such thing as disease. Beliefs and mindset are about what lies outside the realm of things we can see and touch.

Then, within the context of that thought experiment, if you’re into it, I’d suggest these activities for your six-month project.

1. Start that side project you’ve been thinking of

Most people have a bit of a daydream about a “side hustle” — a little side business to make a small amount of extra revenue.

We’re not talking about making enough money to live on at this point. This is, say, $100 a month.

Important: Don’t spend $1000 a month to get $100 a month. Avoid the get-rich-quick schemes, the huge promises, all of that stuff. Focus on resources you can get for free, or — this one is a great resource for many people, me included — focus on resources you have already paid for.

Every day this week, spend about 10 minutes planning out your next steps. This “plan” can be pretty rough. Just back-of-the-envelope.

Example:

I’m going to write a $7 ebook and then write a bunch of guest posts to try to get some traffic to it.

I’m not saying that’s an ideal model. But it’s a model that might be workable.

Or another possibility:

I’m going to launch a part-time freelance business doing something I know how to do really well.

Write, design, teach art, write grant proposals, tutor English, cook, make clothes.

Don’t look for a “paint by numbers” system. Look for something you know how to do really well, that someone else wants and will pay for.

Try not to think about “this is my future.” Instead, think about projects and experiments. Just interesting things to try.

I’ve noticed something about a lot of very successful people I write about or interview — their story is usually really windy and full of odd little side paths. It’s how you get to be an interesting person, in my opinion. Real success, satisfying success, very, very rarely happens in a straight line.

2. Leverage the free stuff

A lot of us who give any thought to this have bought some things over the years. Business advice, marketing advice, that kind of stuff.

Go find all of those. Print them out if that helps you. Schedule the time to work through them.

We also have a big old free library for you on Copyblogger.com — look on the Products tab for Free! My Copyblogger.

This weekend, do something. Make something. A website or a page or something. It can be small and imperfect, that’s fine.

Remember, you’re a lucky person. So your little project is going to benefit from some sparks of luck along the way.

That’s what this “abundance mindset” means to me. It means looking for resources you already have access to. It means asking yourself all the time, “What’s right in front of me that I haven’t seen yet?” It means cultivating the courage to move a little out of your comfort zone to try and find some great things.

And, very important, it means cultivating a community of support so that you’re not trying to do this all by yourself. I’ve said this before, but don’t put all of this onto your spouse or partner. That’s not really their job, and they’ll have their own fears and worries that can make this harder. Find like-minded friends instead, who want to experiment and have fun and see what kind of luck you can all make together.

I’m not going to tell you that this is going to make you an internet millionaire. But I will tell you that there’s no reason it wouldn’t.

I am, on paper — and trust me, it’s only on paper. Not the kind of paper I can spend. But I have a lot of freedom. I can structure my days to spend the time I want to spend with my son and my husband. I can structure my time so I can take good care of myself. And I can still meet my obligations and do the kind of work I’m best at.

For example, travel is something I’ve loved since I was a teenager. Now, I work when I travel, I don’t take “vacations” in a traditional sense. But that gives me the freedom to see things and have experiences that I value greatly.

So give up this idea that you can fill in an order form, stand with your back to outer space, and wish really hard. You and I both know it won’t work.

Take consistent action, and stay curious. Look for possibilities. Look for support. The world has plenty of bad stuff and it has plenty of good stuff. You can find the good stuff — and you’ll have your share of the tough stuff as well, because that’s reality. It’s fine. It’s being human.

And I hope I can play a role in that community of support for you. Leave me a comment or hit me up on Twitter with your questions, or if you feel stuck and can’t figure out what to do next.

Encouraging and helping each other is the way we can all build a better future. I believe in that. And I believe in you. Go get ’em. smile.png" alt=":)" class="wp-smiley">

You may find the film helpful — and it’s free until the 30th. Go grab it, and watch it with an eye to what you can extract that will help you on your path. It could be that you don’t agree with 100% of it, and that is totally ok. You get to cherry-pick the stuff that will help you.

The Transcript

Sonia Simone: Greetings, superfriends! My name is Sonia Simone and these are the Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer. For those who don’t know me, I’m a co-founder and the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital.

I’m also a champion of running your business and your life according to your own rules. As long as you don’t lie and you don’t hurt people, this podcast is your official pink permission slip to run your business or your career exactly the way you think you should.

Note: Links to extra resources are in the Show Notes!

It’s time again for Things I Love / Things I Hate!

As I’ve been doing, I’m going to share lots of details on the “Love” part, and then some general principles and practices for the “Hate” part. This week in particular, I like the business that’s on my “Hate” list, but I feel they’re shooting themselves in the foot by clinging to a business practice that does not seem to be serving them.

Let’s start with Love!

Rand Fishkin and radical transparency

I wrote last week on Copyblogger about Rand Fishkin, who founded Moz, which is an SEO software service — at least, that’s the current incarnation of his company.

Every time I run across Rand he sort of startles me. There’s a lot of talk, especially for web-based products and services, about transparency. It’s a buzzword, for one reason:

If you lie on the internet, you will get caught.

This is as close to being a natural law as it gets on the web, because of the nature of it.

The word “web” of course points to the fact that everything is connected to something else. It’s what makes the internet work — it was designed way back in the day when Al Gore, yes, signed off on the creation of DARPANet, to be interconnected so that you couldn’t take it down through an act of sabotage.

Virtually everything on the web is connected to other points on the web through multiple points.

So if you say one thing on your super tiny private blog that has 8 readers, but you’re doing something different, you might get away with it for awhile. But as soon as you start to be better known, as soon as you do anything at all remarkable, good or bad, it will get shared.

This is how people get fired or sued for posting their bad behavior on their private Facebook account, or on a Twitter account that has a dozen followers.

Privacy online is very, very difficult to maintain, because it’s only as strong as the promises of every single person who can see your stuff.

So you have two options.

One, you can be extremely consistent. For example, you may choose not to share current photos or other personal information about your family online. If you make that choice — don’t do it at all. This is a legit choice — “privacy” is not the same thing as “keeping secrets.”

I also happen to be a fan of being private about your personal stuff. I don’t particularly get into my personal details online, whether or not it’s in a quasi-private setting like Facebook or a more public space like Twitter. I’m sure someone could find things, and that’s fine, but I don’t go out of my way to share.

So we all draw some kind of line, hopefully. Oversharing is a thing. I don’t need to see your sandwich every day. We’re good.

Vulnerability vs. privacy

One thing many folks are private about is vulnerabilities.

Insecurity, depression, grief, uncertainty, mistakes.

And my opinion is: It’s ok to be private about that. It’s completely your choice. But sometimes you can claim a tremendous amount of power by revealing your vulnerability.

Brene Brown is the champion of this, I think she’s very smart about it.

Choosing to be open about certain kinds of vulnerability — emotional vulnerability, insecurity, that kind of thing — tends to have the effect of unleashing a ton of energy that you were using trying to pretend you were more badass than you actually are.

So let’s talk about Rand. He’s very open about times when he was CEO of Moz where he made poor decisions. We all have blind spots, we all have times when we don’t follow our own advice. Rand just talks about them, where most people don’t.

In that, he does a couple of things. First, he defuses the situation so that no one can throw that stuff at him. It’s all open, so it can’t be weaponized.

Second, he opens up the opportunity to be of service and value to other people who have made the same missteps, or who are on the verge of that. That’s one of the reasons — that, and the fact that Rand is a really smart business owner who knows a lot of stuff and teaches it well — that Brian Clark invited him to keynote our event in October. Rand will give you the whole thing, not just the Instagram-ready pretty highlights.

Trade secrets

The other thing about Rand is that he’s been in the SEO game so long that when he started, it was all about trade secrets.

SEO professionals figured out how Google was working. Google itself, and the other search engines, were insanely cagey about how they ranked pages. So there was a lot of reverse-engineering and making educated guesses based on patent applications, that kind of thing.

This still happens in SEO, both on the SEO professional side and the search engine side, but Rand’s phrase for it is, “a pane of glass versus two tons of steel.”

One of the insights that Rand had, joined by folks like Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Journal, was to go ahead and publish any trade secrets that they found.

If they figured out something significant about how the search algorithms seemed to working, they told everyone. Matt Cutts came on the scene at Google with a more transparent approach, even though they certainly don’t reveal everything.

Over time, instead of SEO being about a lot of tricks, it started to become about just publishing quality content instead of searching out 10,000 different ways to produce spam. Which, coming around to 2016, turns out to actually be less trouble, honestly.

“Don’t take shortcuts, they take too long.”-Sonia Simone

So Rand, and others like him, took this idea of “trade secrets” and turned it on its head. They revealed all of them — and it turns out that, no matter how many good SEO blogs you read, there’s still work involved, and people will pay good money to others to either do that work or to produce high-quality tools that will help make the work easier.

The idea is to uncouple your business model from keeping trade secrets — because, remember, secrets are really hard to keep online. They leak from one point to another until they find open water, and then you’re done.

Now, maybe you’re not as brave as Rand. I don’t think I am. One thing I will recommend: When we’re talking about airing your own screw-ups in public, I like to wait until I’m on the other side of the crisis. Crowd-sourcing solutions to problems that you’re still wrestling with has not, in my experience, been very helpful. Coming clean about lessons learned after the fact, though, is helpful, I’ve found.

If you are going through a tough patch, talking about it definitely helps, and getting some other perspectives helps — but get the perspectives of people you trust who love and respect you, not the peanut gallery. In my opinion.

Now the Hate part

So switching gears, I want to talk about a little online business that’s trying very hard to maintain its secrets, and from my vantage point, it doesn’t look to me like it’s serving them.

This is a company that’s come up with a particular kind of drawing. Come see me in Denver this October and I’ll show some to you — it’s neat.

So these artists invented a kind of proprietary structure and teaching for making a certain kind of drawing — and their business model is to teach the method to teachers, and then those teachers teach it to people like me who want to learn.

I found out about it by buying a little kit of materials — the right pens, the right paper, and then the box was decorated with these drawings, making the kit totally irresistible. I saw it at my local art store and it kind of jumped into my basket. That happens to me a lot at the art store.

So I think there are going to be instructions, right? No instructions in the box.

No problem, I go to the website. No instructions on the website — it says, “Find a local teacher.”

Just for grins, I look up a local teacher. But the two teachers in my area aren’t currently teaching — and here’s where the business lesson comes in.

This company has an idea about a business model: Train the trainer.

They forgot the most important part of that business model — all the revenue comes from people like me, the eventual students, and you have to understand that person’s path to purchase. Looking around at teachers trained in this method, only a few are taking students. It looks to me like a lot of the rest have given up — and I think it’s because they’re not doing enough to facilitate the customer journey that gets someone interested in the ideas to come on in to a class.

I use the term customer journey, we’ve written about it quite a bit, and we get in-depth on it inside our Certified Content Marketer training, because if you don’t get it right, there’s no fuel for your business.

In a nutshell, you have to know what the paths are that bring people from not knowing anything about you to making a purchase, and then past that through a wonderful experience so that they talk you up, they refer you, they do business with you again, all of that good stuff.

Keeping trade secrets — this little drawing company has certain types of drawings that they ask their teachers to only teach in a face to face class — by its nature puts up barriers to customers.

If these barriers can be smoothly and reasonably navigated, that can be ok. I’m not saying trade secrets are always bad. But you have to understand that you’re creating friction.

Now, you can’t keep secrets on the internet. So the instructions and how-to videos and all kinds of things are all over YouTube, Pinterest, Flickr, etc. So you haven’t actually kept your trade secrets at all.

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”-John Gilmore,, technology pioneer and one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

All you’ve done is created friction on your customer journey.

What you can do instead is to create lots of paths that move the customer pleasingly to the destination you have in mind. And you can also create revenue models that the customer wants to participate in, think of them as little lemonade stands along the side of the path. It might not be the eventual purchase, it might not be The Big Thing you sell, maybe it’s some micro purchases along the way.

For example, a lot of potential customers for this company don’t have thriving teachers near them — at least in part because the customer journey isn’t bringing in enough new students for the teachers. So maybe it would be wise to facilitate some great ways to let teachers teach online. Maybe this little drawing company could become a virtual workshop space, with teachers using their site to teach both micro classes and more comprehensive ones.

They could have a quick workshop on values, which are the lights and darks in a drawing — standard stuff. One on composition. Whatever it is that you see people are having problems with, you can create workshop on that. Which is one of the super nifty things about education as an online business, you can often put these together very quickly if you have the right tools. Cough, Rainmaker.

Instead of pushing every student into a half-day workshop at around $50, which some people want and some do not, look for what the students are looking for, and how they’re looking to get it.

If you have a student who takes, let’s say 3 or 4 $10 mini-workshops online, that person is super primed to go to a half or full day session face to face. And they’ll really get something out of it.

This lemonade stand model is what successful businesses do — they create products, which at first might be quite small, around what their customers are in the mood to buy. That’s what Rand Fishkin did at Moz. It’s what we do at Copyblogger — and we’re always adding to our model, creating new options, meeting our customers at new points.

It’s much more fun and less frustrating, because it actually works.

So, those are some thoughts on trade secrets, business models, and transparency. See you next week!

The Transcript

Sonia Simone: Greetings, superfriends! My name is Sonia Simone and these are the Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer. For those who don’t know me, I’m a co-founder and the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital.

I’m also a champion of running your business and your life according to your own rules. As long as you don’t lie and you don’t hurt people, this podcast is your official pink permission slip to run your business or your career exactly the way you think you should.

Note: Links to extra resources are in the Show Notes!

So one of those questions that comes up a lot, along with “how long should blog posts be” and “how often should I publish,” is:

Is it OK if I swear on my blog?

I don’t swear on this podcast, because I have been informed that iTunes doesn’t like it when we swear on our podcasts, and I want this to reach a wide audience.

Once again one of those rules of thumb of digital sharecropping — if I’m going to take advantage of iTunes to reach a wider audience, then I have to follow their rules.

Every once in awhile this comes up on Copyblogger, harkening back to well-known copywriter and teacher of copywriting, Bob Bly, who was very unhappy with us for running a post by Joanna Wiebe, in which she used the term “mofo” in her bio.

The post was superb, by the way, from Joanna Wiebe: 6 Proven Ways to Boost the Conversion Rates of Your Call-to-Action Buttons. Lots of deep analysis and specific examples, which she’s so good at.

The quote isn’t in the post any more, because author bios get updated as the writer’s professional situation evolves, but at the time it was this:

Where startups & marketers learn to convert like mofos.

This wasn’t something we in Copyblogger editorial found particularly controversial, then or now, just to give some context.

So Bob is very smart, and he has a lot of experience, and he felt very strongly that this cheapened the content. One of the comments he left was,

If it might offend even one in a hundred, why risk it, when you can say the same idea without the profanity?

In his (strong) opinion, there are standards of public discourse, and not swearing is one of those standards.

He wrote an entire post about it, quoted here:

I contend that in articles published online and offline on business topics, it is completely unnecessary, and people do it primarily to look cool and hip to their counterparts.

But by doing so, they turn off a large segment of their readership, me included mostly the 50 and over crowd.

If you are a marketer, I would warn you not to alienate oldsters, as we control most of the money in the United States.

A survey reported on the Joshua Kennon web site found that households where the head was age 35 and younger had a median net worth of only $65,000.

By comparison, households where the head was 55 to 64 years old had a median net worth of $880,000 nearly 14X richer.-Bob Bly

So Bob’s case is (partly) economic — is it bad business to swear in our content?

Turning people away

In terms of this question about turning your audience away, I’m reworking my Remarkable Communication site to run on Rainmaker finally after putting it off, and I feel like a complete moron about it. The only part of the process that was tricky was finding all of my old login information. The migration took something like seriously maybe 20 minutes. So I’m sprucing up the sidebars and and reworking things like the About page, but I am so excited to be able to share it with you soon. I’m really happy, it looks so amazing. My goal is to use Rainmaker strictly out of the box without getting help to set it up.

Anyway.

I ran across a post I wrote about a soap company called Nancy Boy.

Now, Nancy boy breaks all of the email marketing rules for content.

I gave an example of their email messaging (link in the show notes), and I had this to say about it:

You may be thinking, wow, that s wordy. And kind of insane. And it uses the word prevarication, they re gonna get some unsubscribes with that one.

It s a little like horehound candy, or stinky goat cheese. A lot of people don t like it. Maybe most people don t like it. But the people who do absolutely crave it.

In 2009 I wrote about their content being “an attitude that is euphemistically called Very San Francisco.

In 2016 we speak a little more plainly — The content for Nancy Boy is … gay. It’s not just slightly gay. It’s very, very gay. Their tagline is “tested on boyfriends, not animals.” Um, the name of their business is Nancy Boy. There is no closet available here to hide in.

Now, being gay — especially in a way that’s this out — is for many folks in our culture in the U.S. a lot more controversial than swearing. “MoFo” doesn’t have much on gay.

They’re absolutely alienating many people. Many, many people. Look on Twitter or Facebook if you think everyone is super comfortable with gay people today.

And yet, to restate the point I made in 2009, they’re selling soap in one of the highest real-estate cities in the country. Soap. They still have their retail store, in the really extremely expensive and adorable Hayes Valley neighborhood.

And they have a thriving mail order business still, and they still send crazy emails. Their latest one in my in-box has a picture of a dog licking plates in the dishwasher, to highlight that they sell a nice-smelling dish detergent.

Their tribe is strong enough to support them, and their tribe loves them because they’re not for everyone. Because they’re brave enough to be a tall, proud, out Nancy Boy. I can get great-smelling soap at Whole Foods, but I still mail-order soap and some other nice-smelling things from Nancy Boy because I love them, because I feel connected to them.

What Joanna wrote about it

Joanna also wrote about this on her blog, Copyhackers, which is a good read and I’ll give you a link in the show notes.

Swearing, Euphemisms and Writing Something That Actually Sounds Like You

Here’s a quote:

I always recommend that you write for the 20 to 35% of your visitors that are most likely to a) convert and b) be happier for it. I recommend that because I ve tested it and it works. It s not just an assumption I randomly pulled out of the air and tried once; it s not like I applied a go-narrow principle to my business and my business alone and found that it prettymuch worked, so now I think everyone should do the same for similar results.

So this points to the same thing I see at Nancy Boy. They’re writing for their customers, not the entire universe of possible customers. In Nancy Boy’s case, their customers start in their local neighborhood, and now many years on, are made up of like-minded people from all over the place.

Another quote from Joanna:

But, without question, you are taking a risk when you use that kind of language…. With regard to risk, you re also taking a risk when you absolutely avoid euphemisms and impolite words in your copy.

So is it ok to swear on your blog or not?

The message isn’t, “Yes, go swear on your blog.”

The message isn’t, to be crystal clear, that I think Bob was wrong on this. In fact, I really did not appreciate folks being disrespectful in the comments to him about it. They were trying to stand up for us and for Joanna, but that wasn’t necessary in this case.

The message is,

You don’t get to decide what’s relevant or appropriate. Your audience does.

The Copyblogger readership is, for the most part, 1000% comfortable with the term “MoFo.”

Is Bob wrong because he’s not comfortable with it? Not at all. We respect Bob a ton. His point of view is very valid.

We actually swear very, very little on Copyblogger, precisely because we have a large audience that’s extremely diverse. We know that there are some folks who really don’t appreciate it — that’s part of who our audience is.

But once in awhile, certain words feel like they’re important to state a point clearly. I’m not a big fan of euphemism, as anyone who’s ever heard me give a talk can attest to. So I don’t like “friggen” or “flippin.” Actually for me, my issue with MoFo is precisely that it’s a euphemism. I was taught early on as a writer to avoid them, and I try to.

So here’s my advice:

Overall I recommend that you not swear for the sake of swearing. It’s kind of lazy and not necessarily very interesting. That kind of language has a lot of power, but the power comes from holding it back to make an impact when you really want to make a point very strongly.

If your audience swears a lot and that’s what feels right for connecting to them, then make your decisions accordingly.

If your audience doesn’t appreciate it, then don’t swear ever. They decide, not you.

But if it matters, if it’s the truest statement of what you need to communicate, and that’s how your audience will read it? Then I think you’re the one who is best qualified to make that call for your audience and your situation.

I know I won’t convince Bob Bly with this argument, and I’m ok with that. Because as much as I respect him, the ones who are my true compass are my readers, my listeners, my audience.

The Transcript

Sonia Simone: Greetings, superfriends! My name is Sonia Simone and these are the Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer. For those who don’t know me, I’m a co-founder and the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital.

I’m also a champion of running your business and your life according to your own rules. As long as you don’t lie and you don’t hurt people, this podcast is your official pink permission slip to run your business or your career exactly the way you think you should.

Note: Links to extra resources are in the Show Notes!

So my beautiful and ultra smart friend Julie Ann Cairns has been working on a project lately that involves me, and this is the month we’re launching. It’s not a course or a product, it’s a film, called The Abundance Code, and it’s a documentary capturing some thoughts and insights from a diverse group of successful folks about, more or less, how to cultivate more luck and opportunity within your circumstances.

I love Julie, she’s more “woo woo” than I am, and I know right now some of you are wondering if that’s even possible. But she’s also super analytical.

She has a finance background, she had a prestigious scholarship in Japan, and while she was in school there she actually founded and ran an English school. She’s worked in banking and for many years she ran an educational site for the financial markets. So she has a lot of numbers in her background, and a lot of analysis.

She has a skill that I always find fascinating when I see it, which is that she understands money. She understands the flow of it, whether it’s the stock market or business or our relationship with money.

And yet she also has a very intuitive side and a side that’s very open to, let’s just say, “non-linear” traditions. She’s a very open-hearted and open-minded person.

So that combination of intuition and kind of “fuzziness” with the very clear-headed analytical side I find fascinating, plus she’s just a good person. I’m very grateful for her friendship.

The reason I’m talking Julie up to you is that I’ve been interviewed for the film, and apparently — I haven’t actually seen an edit yet — there are quite a few segments of ‘that pink-haired lady’ in there. And launch date is this month!

So I know what I said, and with these kinds of projects, I think the film guy was here for maybe six hours, so I said a lot of stuff, but then it all comes together in the editing process as something larger. So I know what I said, but I’m curious to see how it works within the greater context.

I have a few other dear friends in the film as well: Bill O’Hanlon, who’s appeared on this podcast, Ruth Buczynsky, JB Glossinger who’s also appeared here, Victoria LaBalme, Jeff Walker.

So I thought in honor of the film I’d talk about how I see this concept of “abundance,” or luck, or opportunity.

They’re doing a worldwide free premiere of the movie, by the way, which you can sign up for at TheAbundanceCode.com. I know that there will be some kind of additional offer to go further with something paid at the end, I think it’s going to be something that’s not ultra expensive, but also it’s not going to be a weird hard sell. Just a chance to go deeper with it if that feels appropriate for you at this point.

The main thing Julie wants to “sell” with this is really the set of ideas about working and taking care of ourselves in a healthier, more productive, more positive way.

So, let’s shift gears for just a quick minute and think about this Abundance thing.

It’s not The Secret

I think the first thing that may come up for a lot of people when we start to toss these ideas around is the notion from some of the popular self-help material that was really pushed by the movie “The Secret,” which is this idea that, “If you visualize it, it will come.” The word often used is manifest.

So if you wish hard enough and ask nicely, the universe is like your all-powerful mommy and will give you millions of dollars and perfect health and beautiful relationships and no problems.

And everyone above the age of four knows this is a lie, or ought to know.

I’m actually profoundly offended by this idea. Because of course, we’ve got 7 or 8 billion people on the planet right now, many of whom are suffering quite profoundly, many of whom are very genuinely stuck in very bad situations, and they’re not there because their mindset is off.

Bad things don’t happen in life because somehow we invited that with our bad mindset. That’s just a toxic viewpoint, and also, you know, incorrect.

So the way that I think about this whole luck and good fortune thing is not that somehow we are entitled to something special from the universe, or that some cosmic justice owes us good things. That’s childish and silly.

But there’s an element of this Abundance business that I think is often overlooked, and is much more pragmatic.

For most of us, there are more opportunities than you’re seeing

So if you’re listening to this podcast, you have internet, you have some kind of device that can play podcasts, you have enough free time to listen to something for 20 minutes or so. You have some assets.

I read about a fascinating study, I think it might have been in Martin Seligman’s book Learned Optimism, which is very solid.

I’ll paraphrase and quite possibly get the details a little fuzzed, but:

A group of students is recruited. Before they get started, they’re sorted into groups — some describe themselves as “being lucky” and some as “being unlucky.” They’re all given a newspaper and told that when they find a short specific kind of code in it, they’ll get $20.

The code is in tiny text and let’s say it’s on page 17. But on page 2, there’s a large ad — like one of the big quarter-page display ads that used to appear in that ancient technology, that says, “You don’t have to keep looking — here’s the code.”

So the unlucky people and the lucky people all find the code and get the $20. But the self-described lucky people overwhelmingly see that ad — and remember, it’s much bigger than the “real” code is — and get to the $20 in less than a minute, while the self-described unlucky overwhelmingly pore through the whole paper before they find the good stuff.

People who believed they were lucky were looking for some luck. They said to themselves, “Hm, I wonder if my usual good luck will hold out here, let me take a quick check.”

And the unlucky people didn’t look for that — so they didn’t see it, even though it was quite a bit more prominent.

And that study, in a nutsell, explains how I think about good fortune and abundance.

Choosing your beliefs wisely

I just finished Raj Raghunathan’s book If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Happy? (see show notes for a link) which is based on his super popular Coursera course on happiness. It’s a good book with a lot of exercises and a very pragmatic approach.

Here’s what he said about our beliefs of whether or not life, (or The Universe or whatever label you would use) is in its nature benign, indifferent, or hostile:

… the belief that life can be trusted and the associated belief that everything happens for the best isn t any less scientifically valid than are the competing beliefs, that life is indifferent or that life is malign and can t be trusted.

In other words, you could look at the mass of the evidence and argue for any of those. It’s not fundamentally a very scientific question and it can’t really be answered with the scientific method.

But here’s the bit I find useful:

… what can be proven is that from a utilitarian perspective — that is, from the perspective of maximizing happiness — it is better to believe that life is benign than it is to believe otherwise.

And that’s because of this mechanism that we tend to see what we’re looking for. There’s so much of our environment, and there always has been, that’s irrelevant. So just like ancient hunters, we’re looking for the signs that will lead us to what we want — a successful hunt, a site with fresh water or some nice berries to eat. Or in our case here in the 21st century, for more success, bigger audiences, better career or a better business, more satisfying relationships with the people in our lives — all the good stuff.

Stop believing it’s magic

So for me, the belief that The Universe is Abundant and will Magically Take Care of Us doesn’t work, because a) it’s not consistent with my observations, and b) when something not-so-good happens, I think it comes with a toxic sub-message that we somehow thought something Bad and made the bad thing happen to us.

But the belief that There’s More Out There than I’m Seeing Right Now, and If I Start to Look for It, I’ll Find Something Cool is one I can get behind — because it is consistent with my observations, and because the sub-message is, If I haven’t seen it yet, I’m going to keep looking, because there are a lot of possibilities out there that I haven’t run into or maybe just haven’t noticed yet.

And you know, it all comes with hard work and with paying attention and doing our best and taking consistent action, even if that action is fairly small.

We’re not sitting there waiting for some external force to “manifest.” We’re finding a path, exploring options, taking action, observing carefully, and keeping a good outlook without being delusional about it.

To me, that’s been empowering and useful. It doesn’t just break when things are difficult, or cast me into some kind of funk of self-doubt. It empowers hope. And I hope perhaps it will do those things for you as well.

You can sign up to see the film for free at TheAbundanceCode.com, I’m really excited about it, the launch week starts on June 21st.

The Transcript

Greetings, superfriends! My name is Sonia Simone and these are the Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer. For those who don’t know me, I’m a co-founder and the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital.

I’m also a champion of running your business and your life according to your own rules. As long as you don’t lie and you don’t hurt people, this podcast is your official pink permission slip to run your business or your career exactly the way you think you should.

Note: Links to extra resources are in the Show Notes!

I’ve been doing lots of mindset and what some might call “woo,” so today I’m going shift gears and get into a key strategic underpinning that makes content marketing work. I wrote about this for Copyblogger 8 years ago, in a post called The Harpoon or the Net: What’s the Right Copy Approach for Your Prospects?

It recently came to mind because Jerod Morris and I were talking about marketing funnels and paid advertising, such as Facebook advertising, over on CopybloggerFM, the sister podcast to this one. And it occurred to me that the thing that makes paid advertising work in 2016 is the same thing that made content work way back in 2008. So let’s unpack it.

How we used to think about paid traffic

Long, long ago — in other words, a few years ago — there were, for lack of better terms, “content people” — and Copyblogger was one of the very first to write about this approach, and then there were “paid traffic people,” which encompassed most of what then fell under the title Internet Marketing.

Content people wrote interesting things and built an audience. Paid traffic people bought traffic, which was cheaper to do 8 years ago, and piped that traffic into a sales page with the intention of making a sale.

Like all absolutes, there were exceptions. There were a few people who advocated doing both, but the content people often shied away from learning about how to pay for traffic and not get murdered financially, and the paid traffic people looked at the work involved in creating genuinely useful content and weren’t that excited by the prospect.

In the words of S.E. Hinton, That was Then, This is Now.

The Third Tribe became the Primary Tribe

Believe it or not, I actually generated some controversy when I wrote a post called Is Your Tribe Holding You Down, talking, more or less, about these two groups of folks — the audience-focused types, who at that time were mainly bloggers, and the traffic-focused types. I feel bad today because some of the folks on the traffic-focused side apparently got their feelings quite hurt, when really I was poking a bit of fun at both sides.

If you build a relationship but have no marketing strategy, you’ll be popular and broke. If you have killer marketing strategy but spend no time on relationships, you’ll tend to have big revenue spikes puncutated by very long periods of also being broke, because no one trusts you.

So it’s not wise to be one one side or other of the spectrum, you want to learn from both. I speculated that maybe a new “tribe” could be formed that learned from both worlds, and folks started calling that The Third Tribe. We actually used to have a community with that name, which over time evolved into today’s Authority community.

Hopefully my brothers — at that time, almost all of them were guys — on the Internet Marketing side can appreciate that. I have some very dear friends from that community and tradition, so I’m not slamming them, although I might poke a bit of fun at times.

Back in the day, this notion of combining relationship-building content with smart selling strategy was actually a weird idea. Today it’s just how smart marketers do things, and the labels aren’t quite as limiting as they used to be.

OK, enough history, let’s take a look at how it looks in the real world today.

The Harpoon and the Net

Unpacking this analogy, if you buy traffic and send it directly to a sales page, it’s what I call a harpoon.

A well-written traditional sales page acts like a harpoon. When a likely prospect swims along, if the writer s aim is good and she gets enough power behind that harpoon, she can make the sale.

The main issue with that traditional sales page — if y0u’ve been online awhile, you might remember when they all had fake yellow highlighter and red headlines, it was not a high point in web design history. But the main issue is that this kind of page is crazy hard to write.

Now it can be learned, and of course we can hire folks to write them for us. But the folks who are genuinely good at it are also genuinely expensive.

In a world without infinite resources to learn something hard or pay for something expensive, we needed another model.

Enter the Net

Instead of hurling your single-pointed communication as forcefully as you can, consider encouraging your prospect to wrap himself in a friendly, supportive net.

In other words, rather than trying to harpoon customers with single-shot sales letters, snare them in a net of useful, relevant content.

Strong content will keep luring your prospect back for regular bites. Each bite builds a little more trust. Each bite builds your reputation as a friendly authority.

This is what today we call “strategic content marketing.” We build an audience with our content, and that content builds trust over time. It also educates that potential customer on what they would need to know before making a purchase.

This is wide territory — it might be a pragmatic thing that they need to believe. For example, folks may be reluctant to buy a WordPress theme if they don’t realize the dangers of putting all of their content on something like Facebook or Medium. To speak to that, I wrote a post on The Most Dangerous Threat to Your Online Business, about the danger of building all of your business content on a platform that someone else controls.

It might be a process that they need to understand. When folks learn more about content marketing strategy from podcasts on our RainmakerFM network, or posts on Copyblogger or DigitalCommerce.com, they can see how they would use the Rainmaker platform to deliver that. People who don’t have at least some grasp of content strategy wouldn’t see the need for a platform that’s structured the way ours is.

It might even be a more personal value or belief. Brian Clark wrote a great post about The Snowboard, the Subdural Hematoma, and the Secret of Life, about how a brain injury gave him clarity about what was important in his life — and the values that event revealed were values that either resonated or didn’t. I wrote one of my own (internally we sometimes call these “hematoma posts”) about struggling in the corporate world for being “naive” because I was an idealistic person and I thought that was a better way to do business.

And you may have noticed that this podcast is really about me expressing my values as a human being who’s in business, hopefully to empower others to trust their own instincts and build on their strengths instead of getting discouraged.

The strategy part is important

A final word about this “Content Net” idea — it sounds very nicey-nice and “if you build it they will come,” but it isn’t.

Seriously interesting and useful content has to be paired with business strategy if you want it to work. Otherwise you just stay adrift in that “popular but broke” thing, which is maybe not where you want to be.

Again, I’m not claiming I invented this or Copyblogger invented it, but I do believe that we have become known for this very ethical, principled approach, and we love to offer our platform to others who are teaching this approach.

Content strategy isn’t “rocket surgery,” but it has a fair number of pieces and it’s important to know how they work together.

There are a few resouces we can offer you to figure this out. The first one is 100% free, which is our content marketing library. Brian Clark and I, joined by a few other folks, have put together a comprehensive library of ebooks to give you that understanding.

If you’re the kind of person who’s self motivated, this can definitely be 100% of what you need. Grab it at the Copyblogger Blog (>products >Free! MyCopyblogger)

If you need a little more hand-holding and motivational fire, my best recommendation for 2016 is to join us at the Digital Commerce Summit. It’s happening in Denver in October.

Right now, but this will expire soon, you can actually get the Summit ticket and a full year of our Digital Commerce Academy, which is a more advanced series of courses about how to do digital business. Pricing on that is going up on May 27, 2016, so boogie on over to DigitalCommerce.com if you think you want to join us there.

I’m going to be doing a keynote on how to actually use the information that you learn at that conference, or any conference. The rest of the event is really a curriculum, so you learn how the different pieces go together — not only for your marketing but also for your actual product or service. We’re structuring it so that you start to take action to get to the next level from where you are now — before you even leave the event. It’s all oriented to action you can take right now, paired with the understanding of the larger strategy so you see how everything fits together.

The conference is perfect for people who want to make something happen with a digital business — either a side project or something that could grow into quite a large business — but they’re having issues with overwhelm. They have some of it figured out but there are pieces that you’re finding intimidating or too confusing.

One of my super favorite things about our live events is meeting people, because we attract an audience that I find quite cool — very principled and interesting and individualistic. I always carve out a lot of time — especially look for me on day two, when my talk is done and I’m not so nervous — to hang out with the folks I meet there. Day Two for me is basically going to be sitting in on the sessions and schmoozing with you guys. smile.png" alt=":)" class="wp-smiley">

Join me this coming Thursday on CopybloggerFM for an episode on how to put together opt-in bonuses to start the conversation with your audience.

The Transcript

Sonia Simone: Greetings, superfriends! My name is Sonia Simone and these are the Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer. For those who don’t know me, I’m a co-founder and the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital.

I’m also a champion of running your business and your life according to your own rules. As long as you don’t lie and you don’t hurt people, this podcast is your official pink permission slip to run your business or your career exactly the way you think you should.

Note: Links to extra resources are in the Show Notes!

If you caught last week’s podcast, I talked about the ideas I’m noodling with for the book I’m writing. The book is really about constructing your “Escape Pod” — the structures and patterns that will get you out of whatever’s not serving you today, and on to your next chapter.

One of the biggest deterrents for any of us is a lack of free time. Very few people have free time in any kind of significant quantity. And when we do, we do dopey things with it like play Nintendo or watch TV we don’t even really like or have fights on Facebook.

Don’t multitask

I’ve talked before about the irony of me talking about productivity, since I am not one of Nature’s Organized People. But that’s maybe part of why I can help you out — if it works for me, it’s very likely to work for you.

When your time is a significant constraint, when you’re at a point in your life when you don’t have a lot of free time — for most of this, this is most of the time — the worst thing you can do is to multitask, because it makes everything take longer.

This is backed up by approximately a trillion studies. We all think we can multitask, but we don’t realize how poor a job we’re doing on everything that’s being done that way. Incidentally, this very much applies to doing anything with your cell phone while you are driving your car. Short of listening to some music or your nav, please don’t do stuff with your phone while you’re driving. It’s dangerous, and even if it feels like you have good control, studies show that you do not.

While obviously you can multitask, since most of us do most of the time, it actually takes you longer to get all of your stuff done, and you don’t do a good job of it.

Find the scraps of time

If you’re not going to multitask and you want to try something different, the first thing to do is find your scraps of time.

In the U.S. by law you have to get breaks every X number of hours you’re working. In some jobs, this is hilariously not a thing. For example if you’re a medical resident, you’re cracking up right now. But for most of us, we get some defined breaks during the day.

Then there’s before we go to work, after we get home from work, etc.

One key marker to look for is: Do you spend any time watching TV, socializing on Facebook or another platform, or playing digital games? If so, think about whether you’re willing to take 30 minutes, or even 10-15 minutes, from those activities for another purpose.

A lot of times we are very unwilling to give up on those because they’re our relaxation time, our unwinding time. If your job is stressful and everything else is stressful, you want that time to relax.

What I would just suggest as a thing you could let ping around in your thinking is: Spending regular time every day working toward something larger, a goal that you care about a lot, is genuinely restorative in a way that TV, Facebook, and gaming are not.

This isn’t about being one of those people who fills every moment with something “worthy.” I’m not that person and I think you’re not either, otherwise I would annoy you and you’d be spending your time with other people who are good at being perfect.

It’s just about cultivating a small habit of working on something meaningful.

This is easier, by the way, if you use my values hack — one that I’ve talked about, certainly not one that I invented — to charge your battery. I’ll give you a link to that in the show notes.

Identify microtasks ahead of time

The other thing to know is that if you wait until your “little habit time” to figure out what you’re going to do with it, the time will evaporate. Deciding what to work on is work.

So let’s say you’re going to skip 15 minutes of TV every day and work on your thing instead. The first set of tasks you do in your 15 minutes is: Figure out what tasks you’re going to do in your 15 minutes.

Make a nice list you can find easily. Could be pen and a paper notebook, could be an Evernote item, could be a Google doc or just the to-do app on your phone. Just have a list of things to spend 15 minutes on.

Some possibilities are:

• Writing blog posts
• Figuring out how to get your site active
• Outlining and recording podcasts — these will be separate days
• Figuring out something complex like getting a payment method set up
• Outreach to people you’d like to know better in your topic

9 times out of 10 for most of us, it’s either planning content or creating content. One of my favorite resources for this was a post Pamela Wilson wrote for Copyblogger that set out a content plan to produce one excellent piece of content per week.

Link

Cultivate itty bitty habits

The reason we start with these itsy bitsy habit processes is that once you have even a small amount of movement, you’ve opened up the possibility of momentum.

If you work on, let’s say it’s a side business, 15 minutes a day, it will take a long time to get traction. But you’ll get traction faster than working on it zero hours a day, and you’ll also make much more progress than you would working on it an hour a week.

But one thing that happens is that it’s fun to make progress. It feels good, it’s empowering, it’s energizing. So those 15 minutes start to turn into 30. And then you realize there’s some other chunk of time you spend on a “relaxation” that you would rather put to your project.

Changing behavior is fundamentally psychologically scary. It shakes up our attachment to who we think we are. These little habits are a way to sneak up on the change, make progress, even if it’s very slow at first, and start to open up space for new possibilities.

Compartmentalizing your time

So half of my statement is “don’t multitask,” the other side of the same coin is that you compartmentalize your time and your focus.

That means, when you’re at your day job, you’re really there. You’re looking for ways to bring meaning to it, you’re looking for ways to do it as excellently as you can, or you’re looking for another job where you can do those things.

You’re fully present.

And you’re fully present when you come home, whether you have other people there or not. You’re fully present for your project. You’re fully present with your family, if you have family.

Each moment is like a compartment, and you try to focus fully on that compartment while you’re in it.

This is really not easy at all to do, but if you remind yourself all day every day to strive toward it, you get better at it.

This all by itself is very energizing, even if it’s imperfect. Because thinking about work when you’re with your family, and family when you’re at work, and your side project all of the time, is exhausting. It’s draining.

Link in the show notes — Power of Full Engagement

You really can do this

Finally, I want to let you know that you can actually do this.

Even if you’ve tried some of these before and petered out with it. That’s so normal. We’re talking about behavioral change, and that almost always takes a few tries.

But it rewards multiple tries. If you try some of these out, do well for two weeks, then drift off for a couple of weeks, that’s completely fine. Just come back to your little habits and start fresh. You can always start fresh.

This isn’t about being perfect and it’s not about superheroic levels of will power or energy. It’s about building and growing and taking small steps toward the things you want to create in your life.

Let me know about your journey! And thank you all!