how to motivate, instruct and market

March 28, 2007 by  

IMO, Seth Godin’s You should write an ebook post (partial below) is a gold-standard example of how to move clients from ideas to action while increasing the potential for additional business.

These are my 7 reasons:

  1. He creates trust, making the audience (client) believe that it’s smart, and it can do what he can do.
  2. He overcomes resistance upfront, assuring the audience (client), that it’s technically easy.
  3. He 100% backs up that claim, providing the few, necessary, step-by-step bulleted how-to’s.
  4. He’s upfront about the obvious challenge: “Write something worth reading!” but doesn’t preach, or arrogantly belabor the point to the audience (client).
  5. He sets expectations by telling his own (brief) success story, for the sole purpose of sharing learning and metrics (not promising anything) with the audience (client).
  6. He anticipates and reframes the “how much $ will I make?” question into an “it costs nothing” win-win, no-brainer.
  7. He “markets without marketing” to the audience (client) by making recommended applications, (Squidoo and Changethis), integral components of “how he helps them out”.

From a big picture perspective, its an example of what I call a no boundary model (influenced and inspired by CPU): what’s good for you, is good for your business, and is good for your clients.

ripple.jpg

You should write an ebook: “

I’m serious. Smart people with good ideas worth sharing can get a lot out of this exercise.

To help you out, I wrote a lens about the simple details of how to do it.

It’s technically easy and when it works, your idea will spread far and wide. Even better, the act of writing your idea in a cogent, organized way will make the idea better. You can write an ebook about your travel destination, your consulting philosophy or an amazing job you’d like to fill.

A Google search finds more than 200,000 matches for the word ‘ideavirus’, which I made up. Some will ask, ‘how much money did you make?’ And I think a better question is, ‘how much did it cost you?’ How much did it cost you to write the most popular ebook ever and to reach those millions of people and to do a promotion that drove an expensive hardcover to #5 on Amazon and #4 in Japan and led to translation deals in dozens of countries and plenty of speaking gigs?

It cost nothing.

Changethis, which I dreamed up in a moment of weakness a few years ago, is still going strong under better management now. It’s the epicenter of ebook distribution, but there are plenty of places just dying to host your content. And your blog is the best place to launch your idea. The biggest challenge is that there are no barriers. If you want to do it, go do it. Ideas worth spreading, spread.

(Via Seth’s Blog.)

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