Note from the editor: The following is a guest post by Ryan Holiday. Ryan (FB/IG/TW: @RyanHoliday) is the bestselling author of six books, including The Obstacle Is the Way, Ego Is the Enemy and The Daily Stoic. His books are used by many NFL teams, including the Seahawks and Patriots, and was read by members of the Warriors on their way to NBA championship in 2017. His work has been translated into twenty-eight languages and has appeared everywhere from the Columbia Journalism Review to Fast Company. His company, Brass Check, has advised companies such as Google, TASER, and Complex, as well as multiplatinum musicians and some of the biggest authors in the world.

His latest book, Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts is a meditation on the ingredients required to create classic books, businesses, and art that does more than just disappear.  

Nobody sits down to make something they hope will be immediately or quickly forgotten. Elon Musk compares starting a business to “eating glass and staring into the abyss of death,” and no one would willingly do all that if they thought their efforts were going to disappear with the wind.

The vast majority of creative work, sadly, is not only forgotten, it never had a chance to be anything but forgettable. In the United States alone some 300,000 books are published on average per year. Roughly 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Since it launched in 1985, some 6,000 films have appeared at Sundance. How many of these products endured for years or decades? Not many.

But some people do figure it out. The publishing industry, the music industry, the movie industry, despite what you read in the newspapers, are successful not because of the hits that come out each week, but because of their library of content—what insiders call “perennial sellers.”

Perennial sellers are movies like the Shawshank Redemption, artists like Iron Maiden, startups like Craigslist, books like the 48 Laws of Power, (and The 4-Hour Workweek, which is 10 years old and still sells more than 100,000 copies per year in the U.S. alone). Look at Craigslist, now 20 years old, which makes annual profits of over half a billion by monetizing just 2-3 categories of listings. These are the kind of products that customers return to more than once, and recommend to others, even if they’re no longer trendy or brand new. In this way, they are often timeless and unsung moneymakers, paying like annuities to their owners. Like gold or land, they increase in value over time because they are always of value to someone, somewhere.

All my life (and career) I have been studying these kinds of perennial sellers. Not just because it’s what I do for a living as an advisor to writers, musicians and entrepreneurs, but to incorporate them in my own writing. What follows in this post are some of the lessons we can learn from the creators who have made things that last—not for months but for years. I’ve split them into two distinct buckets, how to make something that lasts and the kind of marketing required to develop a loyal audience that lasts.

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The Work Is What Matters

It was the great Cyril Connolly who would tell writers that, “the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.” This is true of anyone setting out to produce a perennial seller in any space in any era. Phil Libin, the founder of Evernote, has a quote I like to share: “People [who are] thinking about things other than making the best product never make the best product.” The legendary investor and Y Combinator founder Paul Graham explains why, “The best way to increase a startup’s growth rate is to make the product so good people recommend it to their friends.”

The point is: The first and most essential step of a perennial seller is creating something truly great. As my mentor Robert Greene put it, “It starts by wanting to create a classic.” If you’re sitting down to make something and thinking about how famous it’s going to make you, how rich you’re going to get, how fun it’s going to be, or all the people you’re going to prove wrong, you are thinking about the wrong thing.

Frank Darabont, the director and writer of The Shawshank Redemption, was offered $2.5 million to sell the rights so that Harrison Ford and Tom Cruise could be cast as the stars. He turned it down because he felt this was his “chance to do something really great” with his screenplay and the actors of his choosing. Turning down that kind of money couldn’t have been easy, but that’s the difference between what might have been a forgettable mid-level blockbuster to one of the most enduring and popular movies of all time.

Think Long Term, Don’t Chase Trends — What Doesn’t Change?

Darabont’s decision probably seemed crazy at the time. Hollywood says “We want to give you a bunch of money to put these two movie stars in your film,” and he rejects it? Why? He didn’t want to make a movie dependent on big names. He wanted to make a movie that captured the essences of Stephen King’s book, a movie that wasn’t about flash and marketing but rooted in something deeper.

Consider Amazon, now arguably the most valuable company in the world. Jeff Bezos’ dictum to his employees is not to focus on what will make the most money right now, he’s not rushing to capture every fad or opportunity. Instead, he has this surprising command: “Focus on the things that don’t change.”  

Bezos isn’t rushed, and he is thinking long term. He knows that customers will, always prefer cheap prices, fast shipping and reliable service. That’s what he is optimizing for, not what’s trendy right now. The great writer Stefan Zweig once recounted a youthful conversation with an older and wiser friend. The friend was encouraging him to travel, believing that the experience would broaden and deepen Zweig’s writing. Zweig believed he had to write right now and he needed to finish his book as quickly as possible. “Literature is a wonderful profession,” the friend explained patiently, “because haste is no part of it. Whether a really good book is finished a year earlier or a year later makes no difference.”

It doesn’t make a difference because really good stuff is timeless. It doesn’t need to be rushed.  

Who was rushed? All the people who started “businesses” right before the first dot-com bust, or apps for Myspace pages. Or Groupon clones. Or QR codes. Or gourmet cupcakes. Or published adult coloring books. Or people selling fidget spinners.

Take the Star Wars franchise. In one sense, the films were undoubtedly futuristic and took advantage of then cutting-edge special effects. But George Lucas borrowed far and wide…and new and old. He acknowledged that his initial conception of the movie was for a modern take on the Flash Gordon franchise, going as far as trying to buy the rights in order to do so. He also borrowed heavily from the 1958 Japanese movie The Hidden Fortress for the bickering relationship between R2‑D2 and C‑3PO. Yet for all these contemporary influences, Lucas’s most profound source material was the work of a then relatively obscure mythologist named Joseph Campbell and his concept of a “hero’s journey.” Despite the special effects, the story of Luke Skywalker is rooted in the same epic principles of Gilgamesh, of Homer, even the story of Jesus Christ. Lucas has referred to Campbell as “my Yoda” for the way he helped him tell “an old myth in a new way.” When you think about it, it’s those epic themes of humanity that are left when the newness of the special effects fall away. Why else would ten-year-olds—who weren’t even born when the second set of three movies were made, let alone the original trilogy—still be captivated by these films?

As Rick Rubin said on Tim’s podcast, he urges his bands not to listen to the radio while producing an album. He doesn’t want them thinking about what’s popular right now. “If you listen to the greatest music ever made, that would be a better way,” he says, “to find your own voice to matter today than listening to what’s on the radio and thinking: ‘I want to compete with this.’ It’s stepping back and looking at a bigger picture than what’s going on at the moment.” He also urges them not to constrain themselves simply to their medium for inspiration—you might be better off drawing inspiration from the world’s greatest museums than, say, finding it in the current Billboard charts.

As you are deciding what to make, it’s essential that you root it in what is timeless. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter how great it is in the moment—it won’t last.

Seek Out A Blue Ocean

Creators gravitate towards competition because it seems safe. If pop punk is popular, they re-tool their band because they think that’s what labels and fans are looking for. If venture capitalists are funding VR or drones, that’s the company they start. Unfortunately, this makes it harder to break through the noise.

As famed investor Peter Thiel has said, “competition is for losers.”

An essential part of making perennial, lasting work is making sure that you’re pursuing the best of your ideas and that they are ideas that only you can have (otherwise, you’re dealing with a commodity and not a classic). Not only will this process be more creatively satisfying, it will be better for business. In 2005, business professors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne described a new concept that they called Blue Ocean Strategy. Instead of battling numerous competitors in a contested “red ocean,” their studies revealed that it was far better to seek fresh, uncontested “blue” water. Can you redefine or create a category, rather than compete in one?

To tell another Rick Rubin story: In 1986, he was signed on to produce the first major label album for Slayer, then a notoriously heavy but obscure metal band. The natural impulse for many would be to help the band make something more mainstream, more accessible. But Rubin knew that would be a bad choice both artistically and commercially. Instead, he helped them create their heaviest album ever—maybe one of the heaviest albums of all time: Reign in Blood.

As he recounted later, “I didn’t want to water down. The idea of watering things down for a mainstream audience, I don’t think it applies. People want things that are really passionate. Often the best version is not for everybody. The best art divides the audience. If you put out a record and half the people who hear it absolutely love it and half the people who hear it absolutely hate it, you’ve done well. Because it is pushing that boundary.”

In the short term, this choice almost certainly cost them some radio play. But when Rubin says that the best art divides the audience, he means that it divides the audience between people who don’t like it and people who really like it. Ultimately, it was the polarizing approach that turned Reign in Blood into a metal classic—an underground album that spent eighteen weeks on the charts and has sold well over two million copies to date.

When I decided to write a modern book that relied heavily on Stoic philosophy, I knew I didn’t want it to be like other books on the subject. First off, the originals like Seneca and Marcus Aurelius are so good that they are essentially impossible to beat. It would have been suicide to compete with them. Many of the subsequent books about stoicism seemed to be content to retread what these great thinkers had said and thus only reached a small niche of hardcore philosophy fans. I decided to take a different route entirely—I would illustrate Stoic principles through historical and business stories. This has angered many fundamentalists in the academic Stoic community—but that’s OK. They weren’t who I was trying to reach anyway. By creating something fresh and new I was able to find an audience that had never considered philosophy.

In the last three years, The Obstacle is the Way has sold more than 300,000 copies and is translated in more than a dozen languages. It sold more copies in 2017 than it did in 2016, and more in 2016 than it did in 2015 and 2014. That’s what can happen when you sidestep competition and create something new—while still basing it on timeless principles and ideas.

Know Your Audience

It’s important to “scratch your own itch” as the saying does, but are you actually sure people share your itch? I know you’re not going to be satisfied selling just one copy. Whatever you’re making is not for “everyone” either—not even the Bible is for everyone.

Paul Graham of startup incubator Y Combinator, which has funded over a thousand startups including Dropbox, Airbnb, and Reddit, says that “having no specific user in mind” is one of the eighteen major mistakes that kills startups: “A surprising number of founders seem willing to assume that someone—they’re not sure exactly who—will want what they’re building. Do the founders want it? No, they’re not the target market. Who is? Teenagers. People interested in local events (that one is a perennial tar pit). Or ‘business’ users. What business users? Gas stations? Movie studios? Defense contractors?”

It pays to be specific.

Think of Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines, who has an incredibly clear mission statement illustrated via one question: Will this help us be the lowest-cost airline? As he put it, “I can teach you the secret to running this airline in thirty seconds. This is it: We are THE low-cost airline. Once you understand that fact, you can make any decision about this company`s future as well as I can.” Because of this, his employees knew who their customers were and what those customers needed.

What to Expect When You’re Expecting is for soon-to-be parents. The person who sat down to write the song Happy Birthday was creating something for people at birthday parties (and created an incredibly valuable copyright in the process). When Susan Cain published her book about introversion, she had a very specific audience in mind: introverts. (Which has since sold over a million copies and launched a massive TED talk.) The Left Behind series is obviously for Christians. Its films, novels, graphic novels, video games, and albums are preaching with a very specific choir in mind.

The famous music promoter and later movie producer Jerry Weintraub (The Karate Kid and the Ocean’s series) has a good story in his memoir When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead. He once proposed renting out Yankee Stadium for a celebrity softball game with Elvis. On a day the stadium wasn’t in use, the owner of the Yankees took Weintraub out onto the field and forced him to look at all the empty seats—each one symbolizing someone who would have to be marketed to, sold, and serviced. It was a formative lesson, he said. “Whenever I am considering an idea, I picture the seats rising from second base at Yankee Stadium. Can I sell that many tickets? Half that many? Twice that many?”

What if you can identify a perennial problem and solve it? If you can create something for an audience that renews itself each year (like college grads or people turning 50)? Then you’ll have something that can last and sell by word of mouth.

The more important and perennial a problem (or, in the case of art, the more clearly it expresses some essential part of the human experience), the better chance the products that address it will be important and perennial. As Albert Brooks put it, “The subject of dying and getting old never gets old.” The filmmaker Jon Favreau, who created Swingers and Elf and directed Iron Man, has said that he aims to touch upon timeless problems and myths for specific groups of people in his work, and that all great filmmakers do as well. “The ones who get the closest to it,” he said, “last the longest.”

If You Don’t Care Enough To Market Your Work, Why Should An Audience Buy It?

Let’s stipulate that you have made something amazing. In some ways, now you have an even harder job ahead of you—because now you have to make people care. Art is a kind of a marathon where, when you cross the finish line, instead of a getting a medal placed around your neck, the volunteers roughly grab you by the shoulders and walk you over to the starting line of another marathon: marketing.

In a recent interview, the novelist Ian McEwan complained lightheartedly about what it was like to go out and market a book after spending all that time creating it: “I feel like the wretched employee of my former self. My former self, being the happily engaged novelist who now sends me, a kind of brush salesman or double glazing salesman, out on the road to hawk this book. He got all the fun writing it. I’m the poor bastard who has to go sell it.”

Fortunately, this is a learnable skill, and there is a process that greatly increases your likelihood of success. I’ve used this process with dozens of New York Times bestsellers, musicians whose work has been downloaded millions of times, and products and brands that have grossed hundreds of millions in sales.

Now, the bad news: no one “trick” will do the job. Marketing isn’t about hacks.

As renowned venture capitalist Ben Horowitz says: “There is no silver bullet. We’re going to have to use a whole lot of lead ones.”

What Do We Have To Work With?

The first thing you should do at the launch of any product is to sit down and look at your assets, and ask: What are we working with here? The first thing anyone planning a launch has to do is sit down and take inventory of everything they have at their disposal that might be used to get this product in people’s hands.

This asset assessment can also be used to make great products, and the process is similar, so let’s begin with an example. This was director Robert Rodriguez’s approach—now famous as the “Rodriguez List” approach—to making his award-winning movie El Mariachi. As he told Tim on their podcast together, “I just took stock of what I had. My friend Carlos, he’s got a ranch in Mexico. Okay, that’ll be where the bad guy is. His cousin owns a bar. The bar is where there’s going to be the first, initial shootout. It’s where all the bad guys hang out. His other cousin owns a bus line. Okay, there will be an action scene with the bus at some point, just a big action scene in the middle of the movie with a bus. He’s got a pitbull. Okay, he’s in the movie. His other friend had a turtle he found. Okay, the turtle’s in the movie because people will think we had an animal wrangler, and that will suddenly raise production value. I wrote everything around what we had, so you never had to go search, and you never had to spend anything on the movie. The movie cost, really, nothing.”

The point is: Not every launch is the same and every launch should be tailored around your specific needs. For instance, when we launched The 4-Hour Chef, Tim was looking at a tough retail situation because the book was published with Amazon. We put our heads together and thought about who we knew who could help. Matt Mason, then the CMO of Bittorrent was an old friend of mine. I connected him with Tim and bam—the first Bittorrent author bundle was born and was downloaded more than 2 million times. (Also see the “free” section below for more on this kind of approach.)

Without that brainstorming, one of the single best marketing strategies of that campaign never would have come together. So kick things off by doing a deep dive into:

• Relationships (personal, professional, familial, or otherwise)
• Media contacts
• Research or information from past launches of similar products (what worked, what didn’t, what to do, what not to do.) (Ramit Sethi’s Growth Lab had an excellent post recommending that you pick a competitive product to yours and track all the places they got press, all the things they did to move units and use that to form the basis of your campaign. No need to learn by trial and error if someone has already done some of it for you.)
• Favors you’re owed (if nobody owes you favors then you should pause your launch and go help other people. Build up debt you can call in to help promote your stuff. Adam Grant’s book Give and Take describes this well.)
• Potential advertising budget
• Resources or allies (“This blogger is really passionate about [insert some theme or connection related to what you’re launching].” And if you don’t know who the influencers and gatekeepers in your space are? That’s a bad sign! Don’t leap into a pool you haven’t familiarized yourself with first. Study the terrain.)

It is essential to take the time to sit down and make a list of everything you have and are willing to bring to bear on the marketing of a project.

Aside from racking your own brain, one of my favorite strategies to kick off this process is simply: ask your world. I call this the “Call to Arms”—a summons to your fans and friends to prepare for action (see Platform, later in this post). I create a quick online form and I post it on my blog as well as on my personal Facebook page and other social media accounts. In a previous era, different tools would have been used (a physical Rolodex?), just as there will doubtlessly be newer, different tools in the future. Regardless of the tools used, though, what you’re saying is the same:

“Hey, as many of you know I have been working on ______ for a long time. It’s a ______ that does ______ for ______. I could really use your help. If you’re in the media or have an audience or you have any ideas or connections or assets that might be valuable when I launch this thing, I would be eternally grateful. Just tell me who you are, what you’re willing to offer, what it might be good for, and how to be in touch.”

Eric Barker, author of Barking Up The Wrong Tree, sent a similar note to his 300,000 person email list prior to his launch. He replied to each offer to help—but there was so many he actually got temporarily blocked from his his own gmail account! Yet this process unearthed a number of podcasts, book clubs, speaking opportunities and interviews that helped the book debut on the national bestseller list. Depending on the size of your platform, the number of messages you get might range from a few dozen to a few thousand, but there will almost always be something of use in there.

Free Is One Of The Best Ways To Get Fans

How much does the thing you’re selling cost? Twenty dollars? Fifty dollars? A thousand dollars? Whatever the price, that is not the full price. In addition to the actual dollar cost, there’s also the cost of buyers’ time to consume the product—there are all the things they’re missing out on by choosing to consume your product (what economists call opportunity costs). I can’t ever get two hours of my life back if the movie isn’t good. Life is short, and we can read only so many books—by choosing one, I’m choosing explicitly to not read another. That weighs heavy on consumers.

There’s another cost that creators tend to miss too: How much does it cost for people to find your work? To read the reviews or read an article about it? How much time does it cost to download, wait for it to arrive, or set up? These costs—discovery and transaction costs—exist even when your work is free! Think of the free concerts you haven’t attended, the samples you didn’t bother to walk over and try, the products you didn’t buy even though they were 100 percent risk-free, love it or get your money back, no money down. When you think about it this way, it’s really amazing that people buy or try anything at all!

Tim has posed an interesting related question: “If TED charged for their videos from the beginning, where would they be now?” The answer is probably closer to “obscurity” than ubiquity—they’ve racked up billions and billions of views since the first videos went up. Why should our work be any different?

When we say, “Hey, check this out,” we’re really asking for a lot from people (time, attention, opportunity costs,etc.). Especially when we are first-time creators. Hugh Howey, author of the wildly popular Wool series and one of the first big creators in the self-publishing era, has said that it’s essential for debut authors to give away at least some of their material, even if only temporarily. “They’ve gotta do something to get an audience,” he’s said. “Free and cheap helps.” So does making the entire process as easy and seamless as possible. The more you reduce the cost of consumption, the more people will be likely to try your product. Which means price, distribution, and other variables are essential marketing decisions.

Why do you think Steven Pressfield gave away nearly 20,000 copies of a special edition of his book The Warrior Ethos to soldiers? Because he knew they were his target audience and he knew that if a small percentage of the millions of vets and soldiers in the US Army read his book, it would spread by word of mouth from there (first month it sold 37 copies, five months in it was selling 500 copies per month and now it sells 1,000-1,500 copies per month five years post launch.)

Sure, free is an easier strategy for some products than others. The indie musician Derek Vincent Smith aka Pretty Lights did this so often and so prolifically, it not only built him a huge audience for live shows, but also earned him a Grammy nomination. Starting with his first album in 2006, Pretty Lights has given all eight of his albums and EPs away for free on his website. “I knew I’d probably have to support myself and my music through live performance, so I wanted to get it through as many speakers as possible,” he told Fast Company.

Starting in 2008, his music was available for paid download on iTunes and Amazon, while still being free for anyone to download from his website. This gave his fans a choice of supporting him financially while still growing his audience through free downloads. By 2014, Smith was averaging, per month, 3,000 paid album downloads, 21,500 single downloads, and three million paid streams on platforms like Spotify. His album A Color Map of the Sun was nominated for a Grammy in 2014, after being downloaded free more than a hundred thousand times in its first week of release.

Of course, you don’t have to do “free” to succeed, but it’s worth considering how you would if you had to.

Find Your Champions

When the New York Times profiled me and my book The Daily Stoic, it took the book to about #1,500 on Amazon. When Tim posted a picture of the first page of The Daily Stoic on January 1st on his Instagram, it took the book to #44. Below is a chart of The Daily Stoic’s weekly book sales:

When he shared a photo of the “memento mori” coin that DailyStoic.com produced, we were seeing orders come in practically every minute for most of the day. When a real person, a real human being that many others trust says, “This is good,” it has an effect that no brand, no ad, no faceless institution can match.

Marc Ecko built his clothing brand Ecko Unltd into a billion-dollar company and a staple of streetwear and music by perfecting what he called the “swag bomb”—a perfectly tailored and targeted package to the person he was trying to impress. His first influencer was a popular New York City DJ named Kool DJ Red Alert. Marc was addicted to his weekly show, which often featured the latest and coolest trends in hip-hop. To get attention for his company, Marc would camp out in Kinko’s and fax in special drawings he made to Red Alert’s station fax machine. Then he started sending airbrushed hats and jackets and T‑shirts. He never asked for anything—he just made great work and sent it to select influencers he knew might appreciate it. Eventually, he got his first shout-out on the air, and the brand was officially born.

Marc wasn’t just sending out random stuff to random people—he knew who mattered and he knew what they liked. When Spike Lee directed the movie Malcolm X, Marc “sent him a sweatshirt with a meticulously painted portrait of Malcolm X on it.” The sweatshirt took two days of work to make—even though there was no guarantee Spike would even see it. It turned out that Spike loved the gift and sent Marc back a signed letter. Two decades later, Spike Lee and Marc Ecko are still working together.

The story of John Fante, one of my favorite writers, is a heartbreaking one. A great novelist’s career was partly ruined by Hitler—and the world was deprived of many great books. Yet there is another wrinkle in that story that gives it a somewhat happy ending. After fifty years of languishing in obscurity, Ask the Dust was discovered in the Los Angeles Public Library by the writer Charles Bukowski. Bukowski was blown away and began to rave about Fante to everyone he knew—including his editor. What ensued was a resurgence of Fante’s work. He spent his dying days finishing one last novel, and today there is a public square in downtown Los Angeles named after him—a man who was nearly forgotten by history.

I heard about Fante from another one of his champions, the writer Neil Strauss, who had called Ask the Dust his favorite novel in an interview. I picked it up because of that recommendation. In turn, I have become a champion of Fante and helped sell thousands of copies of his work to my own fans. I tell this story to illustrate the power of champions—it can bring art back from the dead.

Some networking strategies from I’ve learned from Tim that I think help with influencer relationships:

Never dismiss anyone — You never know who might help you one day with your work. Tim’s rule was to treat everyone like they could put you on the front page of The New York Times . . . because someday you might meet that person.

Play the long game — It’s not about finding someone who can help you right this second. It’s about establishing a relationship that can one day benefit both of you.

Focus on “pre-VIPs” — The people who aren’t well known but should be and will be. It’s not about who has the biggest megaphone. A great example for me was meeting Tim in early 2007 before The 4-Hour Workweek was published. He hadn’t sold millions of books then and didn’t have a huge platform. Now he does and I am writing this post.

In my experience, one of the most effective use of influencer attention is not simply in driving people to check you out, but instead as a display of social proof. A blurb on the back of a book isn’t bringing new fans to the book; it’s there to convince an interested reader, “Hey, this thing is legit.” Katz’s Deli has photos of the owner with all the celebrities who’ve eaten there—but they’re hanging inside the restaurant. It’s to reaffirm to the customers: You’re in a special place. Special people eat here. In the middle of the restaurant there’s also a sign hanging from the ceiling that reads, Where Harry Met Sally . . . Hope You Have What She Had!

Social proof sells. The perennial seller acquires it by being legit, and then comes up with interesting ways to use it to their advantage.

Fun Ways To Get Media Attention

One of my previous guest posts on Tim’s site dealt with the process of getting media so I won’t repeat it all here, but I do want to give some some high level thoughts on the subject:

• Media is a seller’s market — It might not seem that way, but trust me, no reporter has ever complained that there are too many good stories out there. They want to write about you…if you’re interesting and cool and nice.
• One size does not fit all — If you’re sending press releases or standardized pitches, you’ve already lost. You’re just contributing to the noise. Really study the work of the people you want to write about you. Don’t pitch people who don’t cover what you do. Build a relationship (before you ask for anything). Be a human being.
• Focus on what’s unique and special — Remember, competition is for losers. Whatever is most special about you, lean into it with your pitch.
• Don’t be afraid of controversy — As Elizabeth Wurtzel put it, “Either you’re controversial, or nothing at all is happening.” Not all press is good press, but most of it is.
• Take advantage of the cycle — Almost every day Google gets press for its Google Doodles—because they celebrate a theme, or a historical event, a famous person’s birthday. If there is a big story about cybersecurity in the news and that’s what your product does, jump into the fray. My third biggest week ever for my first book Trust Me I’m Lying came 4+ years after release because I wrote an article about the violent protests in Berkeley (see: David Meerman Scott’s newsjacking.)
• Start small — In 2015, I appeared on a small podcast to discuss The Obstacle is the Way’s impact in professional sports. That led to this piece on PatriotsGab.com which led to a Sports Illustrated piece headlined: “How a book on stoicism became wildly popular at every level of the NFL.” It sold so many books the publisher ran out of stock—but that wouldn’t have happened had I pitched SI. The story had to be traded up the chain.

Now, I’ll now touch on two other things: paid media (advertising) and publicity stunts.

The most important thing to remember if you have a budget for your work: Advertising can add fuel to a fire, but rarely is it sufficient to start one. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s editor Maxwell Perkins once wrote to one of his authors the following, comparing advertising a product to a man attempting to move a car,

“If he can get it to move, the more he pushes the faster it will move and the more easily. But if he cannot get it to move, he can push till he drops dead and it will stand still.”

That’s how you should think about advertising. It’s not how you launch your product—it’s how you keep it going once it has already broken through. Ian Fleming, the commercially minded creator of the James Bond franchise, advised his publisher to advertise for his books after they’d begun to sell well, not only offering to share the costs (£60 for every £140 the publisher put in), but even submitting some of his own ad copy:

Ian Fleming has written 4 books in 4 years. They have sold over one million copies in the English language. They have been translated into a dozen languages, including Chinese and URDU. No. 5 is called FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE.

As for getting media attention, my strategy is this: If you want to be in the news, make news. Reporters sit around all day hoping to find good stuff, anxious to beat their (many) competitors in getting to it. In this way, the modern media is really a seller’s market. Reporters want stuff, but you have to catch their attention.

A fun example: I was working with a band called Zeds Dead and I saw an article about a woman who had worn a Fitbit while having sex. The article blew up online. So we had Zeds Dead put heart rate monitors on their fans during a show. The subsequent piece from BoingBoing, the biggest blog in the world, did great. One of the things we did when James Altucher launched Choose Yourself! was to announce that James was accepting Bitcoin payments for the book. He was one of the first authors to do it, and even though James only had about ten readers actually take him up on offer, the stunt got him on CNBC to talk about that and the book itself. This certainly moved a lot more units. But again, neither of these stunts would have mattered without a great product to back them up.

There are lots of cool stunts you can do with advertising even. Look at Tim’s decisions to buy actual billboards featuring answers to his famous podcast question: “What would you put on a billboard?” It resulted in a video that did close to 80,000 views and all sorts of social media impact. Neil Strauss bought a billboard on the Sunset Strip for his book The Truth that said, “ON BEHALF OF ALL MEN, I APOLOGIZE.” American Apparel’s controversial advertising got it all sorts of publicity, and that publicity, in turn, introduced lots of people to the brand.

If you’re interesting and provocative enough, the pitch is easy: just email reporters and tell them what you’re doing.

Keep Your Platform in Mind

After the comedian Kevin Hart experienced several disappointing career failures in a row, he was at a crossroads. The movies he’d expected to make him a star hadn’t hit; his television deal hadn’t panned out. So he did what comedians do best—he hit the road. But unlike many successful comedians, he didn’t just go to the cities where he could sell the most seats. Instead, he went everywhere—often deliberately performing in small clubs in cities where he did not have a large fan base. At each and every show, an assistant would put a business card on each seat at every table that said, “Kevin Hart needs to know who you are,” and asked for their e‑mail address. After the show, his team would collect the cards and enter the names into a spreadsheet organized by location. For four years he toured the country this way, building an enormous database of loyal fans and drawing more and more people to every subsequent show.

As his name grew, Hart began to take television gigs that he thought would allow him to grow his platform. In 2011, he hosted the MTV Music Awards and snagged, by his count, more than 250,000 Twitter followers in one swoop. Across social media and e‑mail, Hart’s fan-by-fan ground game—in his words, “years of me building and building and building and reaching out to my fans on the personal level”—built up a platform of more than fifty million people, people he can launch each of his products too.

The problem is people want to have a platform, they don’t want to build one. How many bestselling books came out in 2007? Many, but few took the time to build a blog around their book, featuring other writers no less, but it was Tim’s decision to do that that was instrumental in the book continuing to sell over time.

You’re probably familiar with Kevin Kelly’s theory of 1,000 True Fans: “A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author—in other words, anyone producing works of art—needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.”

Look at a band like Iron Maiden—they haven’t been on the radio in decades, but they built a platform of loyal fans. As Bruce Dickinson, their lead singer, would say, “we have our field and we’ve got to plough it and that’s it. What’s going on in the next field is of no interest to us; we can only plough one field at a time. We are unashamedly a niche band. Admittedly our niche is quite big.”

With one thousand true fans—people “who will purchase anything and everything you produce”—you’re more or less guaranteed a livable income provided that you continue to produce consistently great work. It’s a small empire and one that must be kept up, but an empire nonetheless.

And if I could give a prospective creative only one piece of advice, it would be this: Build a list.

Specifically, an e-mail list. It’s the most durable of platforms and it’s the most direct. Sure, that could change, but I think email (over four decades old) is a safer bet than Facebook or Twitter (just one decade old). With my book The Daily Stoic, we built a 40,000 person email list by sending out one additional free meditation every single morning. This is an incredible amount of work—basically, one additional book written per year—and I do it totally free. BUT—it helped the book spend 5 weeks on the Wall Street Journal list and without really any other marketing, the book now sells 1,000-1,200 copies per week.

Launches Matter But Keep Going Past Them

History shows that good work eventually finds its audience, but, as John Maynard Keynes so accurately expressed it, the market “can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” If an artist starves to death before the world comes around to appreciating her genius, it doesn’t help the artist much. Launches are about getting attention sooner rather than later. Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power took a decade to start to hit bestseller lists, but with some slight shifts in his approach, we were able to get Mastery to debut at #1 on New York Times (and 4 years later it is regularly ranked sub-1000 on Amazon.)

Record labels know that the more times you hear a song, the more likely it is to be a hit. That’s why they hold tracks back until they get a threshold number of stations committed to playing it. It’s the same thing with the marketing of any product. You’re doing the work in advance so that to the public it feels like you’re suddenly everywhere.

At the same time, it’s worth remembering that Star Wars was beaten at the box office by Smokey and the Bandit. A launch is important, but we must bear in mind what Kafka’s publisher wrote to his author after poor sales: “You and we know that it is generally just the best and most valuable things that do not find their echo immediately.” In other words, it is far better to measure your campaign over a period of years, not months. If you don’t have the patience for that, at least months over weeks or days. I’ve seen this play out with my own launches. Looking at my 5 previous books, all have sold more than 90% of their total sales in the weeks AFTER launch week. For my most successful book, The Obstacle Is The Way, over 98% of sales have happened since launch week.

I remember early on I asked my agent Stephen Hanselman what separated his bestselling clients from his smaller ones. He said, “Ryan, success almost always requires an unstoppable author.” Throughout my career, I’ve seen this played out not just in books but in all products.

As I see it, not everyone who publishes a book is an author. They’re just someone who has published a book. The best way to become an author is to write more books, just as a true entrepreneur starts more than one business. The best way to become a true comedian, filmmaker, designer, or entrepreneur is to never stop, to keep going. They hustle, they keep creating. Very few of us can afford to abandoning our gift after our first attempt, convinced that our legacy is secured. Nor should we. We should prove to the world and to ourselves that we do it again…and again.

I’ll leave you with one last thought related to that and it’s from Craig Newmark. I asked him what it felt like to know that he had created something used by millions of people, something that’s still going strong after twenty years, his answer was the perfect note to end this post on: “It feels nice for a moment, then surreal, then back to work.”

The post How to Create a Perennial Bestseller appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

This is my first public exploration of the business and art of podcasting. I still have much to improve, but I’m ready to share a few lessons learned. It’s my hope that they’ll save you a ton of time.

I’m still flabbergasted by how this experiment took on a life of its own.  It started with too much booze with Kevin Rose, and I expected it to die a quiet death after six episodes.

That said, here are a few quick stats on The Tim Ferriss Show after 150 episodes of mucking about, screwing up, and refining (as of this writing):

• Nearly 70,000,000 downloads as of April 2016 [Update: As of January 2023, more than 900M]
• More than 2,500 reviews on Apple Podcasts, 2,100+ 5-star reviews
• Selected for “Best of iTunes” in 2014 and 2015
• Out of 300,000+ podcasts on iTunes, it’s generally the #1 business podcast and an overall top-25 podcast
• Won “Podcast of the Year” in 2015 for the Jamie Foxx episode (via Product Hunt)

I’ve certainly stumbled a lot, but that’s how you figure things out.

I’ll share the first batch of big lessons in this post. If you like it, there’s a whole lot more to divulge (e.g. exactly how I get guests, etc.). If the response is a collective “meh,” I’ll play with my dog instead.

I’ve formatted this little ditty as a Q&A, based on the most common questions from readers, podcasters, and journalists.

Hope you find it useful!

The overarching principles explored apply to a whole lot more than podcasting…

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QUESTION: Why did you start the podcast? How has it evolved over 150 episodes?

The podcast was never intended to be a business.

I was burned out after The 4-Hour Chef, which was nearly 700 pages, and I wanted a casual but creative break from big projects. Since I enjoyed being interviewed by Joe Rogan, Marc Maron, Nerdist, and other podcasting heavies who really move the needle, I decided to try long-form audio for six episodes. If I didn’t enjoy it, I would throw in the towel and walk.

My rationale: Worst-case scenario, the experience would help me improve my interviewing, which would help later book projects. This is a great example of what Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, would call “systems” (win even if you lose) thinking. He discusses this at length with me here.

Flash forward to the current day, the podcast has found a nest in my “business,” but there is a clear hierarchy. Here are the pieces, in descending order of importance:

1) E-mail newsletter and 5-Bullet Friday — Unlike, say, Facebook or Twitter, I own this communication directly and it’s less subject to the whims of algorithm changes (e.g. “Oops! Now you only reach 10% of your audience.”). Some people insist that e-mail is dead for younger generations, and they’re right… until those young people get jobs. E-mail will stick around for a while, despite attempts to kill it.

It’s still the most reliable delivery mechanism, although mobile push notifications are increasingly interesting to me. Though I use Slack for internal team communication, email is still #1 for external.

2) Blog and website — Based on WordPress VIP, ditto for the above. Even if Automattic goes out of business (disclosure: I’m an advisor, so I think this unlikely), WordPress is open source and I’ll survive. Video and audio are fantastic, but few things travel as well as text. Unlike video and audio, I feel there is a greater appreciation of page value with solid long-form, evergreen text content. The vast majority of my most popular posts are years old (e.g. Hacking Kickstarter: How to Raise $100,000 in 10 Days, Scientific Speed Reading). The best SEO is good, non-newsy content that remains relevant for years.

3) Podcast — This is the fastest growing piece of the puzzle, and I’m heavily investing here. Unlike the above two, audio can be a secondary activity. In other words, people can listen to my podcast when they commute, cook, walk the dog, work, etc. There’s also no degradation of experience when moving from laptop to mobile. Last but not least, I’m currently having the most fun with audio.

All that said, I put “business” in quotation marks in this answer because I don’t rely on my writing, etc. for money.

The majority of my finances come from early-stage startup investing, which I started in 2007 (portfolio) and stopped about six months ago. For this reason, I don’t feel pressured to monetize, per se. I put out what I want to put out, when I want to put it out, and that’s it.

Paradoxically, this seemingly lax approach appears to generate more revenue than if I focused on pushing product. My fan dedication (and occasional conversion) is high precisely because I don’t constantly bombard them with sales pitches and calls to action. Sure, I could make $5-10M additional per year for 1-3 years until I burned my audience out, but these people (you!) are worth far more to me than that. They’re a high-calibre bunch, people I want to be friends with rather than irritate.

Your network is your net-worth, and there are many ways to build it. Content is definitely one tool.

QUESTION: Does the podcast make any money directly, though?

Yes. If I wanted to fully monetize the show at my current rates, I could make between $2-4M per year, depending on how many episodes (“eps”) and spots I offer.

So why “if I wanted to fully monetize?” Because “fully monetizing”–bleeding the stone for all it’s worth–is nearly always a mistake, in my opinion.

I want to convert casual listeners into die-hard, fervent listeners, and I want to convert casual sponsors into die-hard, fervent sponsors. This requires two things: 1) Playing the long game, and 2) Strategically leaving some chips on the table. As a mentor once told me, “You can shear a sheep many times, but you can skin him only once.”

So, don’t skin your fuckin’ sheep, kids. In practical terms…

The podcast over-delivers for sponsors (here’s one example), partially because I deliberately undersell downloads. If I hypothetically get 1M downloads per episode, I might only guarantee (and charge for) 750K downloads.  This has attracted and kept sponsors ranging from Audible and Wealthfront to MeUndies and 99Designs.

I don’t have any sophisticated “funnel” or loss-leader campaign. I charge each sponsor per thousand downloads/listens that I guarantee. This cost per thousand (e.g. downloads, impressions, delivered email, etc.) is abbreviated as “CPM,” and the amount you charge per M (“thousand” in Roman numerals) is your “CPM rate.”

I’m not going to give my exact rates in this post, but I’ll give you something better: the bigger picture.

Premium podcasts tend to charge between $25-100 CPM. By “premium,” I mean high-converting, (often) single-host (due to Oprah-like sales impact), iTunes top-50 podcasts.

Let’s look at some numbers. If you can hypothetically guarantee 100,000 downloads per episode, as measured at six weeks post-publication (which seems standard for some odd reason), here is how the math shakes out at different CPM rates:

$50 CPM x 100,000 = 50 x 100 = $5,000 per sponsor per episode

$75 CPM x 100,000 = $7,500 per sponsor per episode

$100 CPM x 100,000 = $10,000 per sponsor per episode

Now, if a podcaster can guarantee 500,000 or 1M downloads/listens, you can see how the numbers add up.

To put these rates in context with other advertising, consider banner ads and email newsletters targeting high HHI (household income) demographics.

On the cheaper end, display/banner ads often cost less than $10 CPM, but a high-converting email newsletter can sell ads/sponsorship at $200-250+ CPM (with no guarantee of opening, only delivery). Premium podcasts currently fall in the middle.

Some podcasts charge $100 CPM or more and are worth it, but… I like setting numbers I can easily beat.

Any marginal short-term loss is made up for by repeat sponsors and larger, long-term purchase orders.  I also rig the game to tilt ROI for sponsors by including blog posts (~2.5M uniques/month), e-mail newsletter (500K-1,000,000+ with sharing), and social (2M+) in the podcast sponsorship versus charging separately a la carte. That might change, but it currently guarantees that 90%+ of my sponsorships clobber competitors, as the cumulative CPM is probably 50% below market.

(Related: If you spend at least $100K per year in marketing and are interested in test sponsoring the podcast, click here for more. Minimum test spend is, at least, $50K-$100K. Seriously inquiries only, please, and pricing is non-negotiable.)

Note to everyone asking “How do I get sponsors?”:  It’s critical to realize that I didn’t accept advertisers for the podcast until I had 100,000+ downloads per episode, as measured six weeks after publication.

Novice podcasters (which I was) and bloggers get too distracted in nascent stages with monetization. In the first 3-9 months, you should be honing your craft and putting out increasingly better work. Option A: you can waste 30-50% of your time to persuade a few small sponsors to commit early and stall at 30,000 downloads per episode because you’re neglecting creative. Option B: you can play the long game, wait 6-12 months until you have a critical mass, then you get to 300,000 downloads per ep and make 10x+ per ep with much larger brands. If you can afford it, don’t be in a rush. Haste makes waste; in this case, it can make the difference between $50,000 per year and $1,000,000+ per year. To reiterate a phrase more often used for blogging: “Good content is the best SEO.” Read The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing to be different, not just incrementally better.

But…all this advertising talk is important to consider in the context of higher-level strategies. In podcasting, it’s easy to get stuck in the CPM and what-preamp-do-I-need? weeds. Decide on your larger framework and philosophy first.

Example — In general and across the board, I split my content in a very binary fashion: free or ultra-premium.

“Free” means that 99% of what I do is free to the world (e.g. podcast, blog) or nearly free (books). I write on topics A) that I enjoy and want to learn more about, and B) that I think will attract intelligent, driven, and/or accomplished people. This is what allows “ultra-premium.”

“Ultra-premium” means:

• Once in a blue moon, I offer a high-priced and very limited product or opportunity, such as an event with 200 seats at $7,500-$10,000 per seat. I can sell out a scarce, ultra-premium opp within 48 hours with a single blog post.
• I use the network and contacts I’ve built through “free” to find excellent non-content opportunities. I already mentioned one example: my early-stage tech investing. This came from the first book, blog, and social. I found Shopify, for instance, via my fans on Twitter while updating The 4-Hour Workweek. I started advising Shopify when they had ~10 employees. Now they have 1,000+ and are a publicly traded company (SHOP).

An openness to indirect paths means I don’t obsess over selling my content, and I never have. If the podcast sponsorship stuff turns into a headache, I’ll just drop it. Not to beat a dead horse, but let’s restate the most important takeaway — my network, built through writing, is my net worth. That travels with me. If you’d like more practice thinking laterally, try the work of Edward de Bono as an introduction.

Back to the money…

Whenever possible, I avoid what I consider the “blood-bath zone” — products or services priced from $20-100. This is where your customers will be at least 1/3 high-maintenance and cost-sensitive. For my minimalist preferences and operation, that’s too much customer service headache for the ROI, unless it’s automated like my book club with Audible.

[Afterword: I asked my Managing Editor to proofread this post, and he gave me the below comment. I’ve decided to simply copy and paste it.]

*** Tim: I think you should dig in more on just how much money you actually pass up. Including:

1) You don’t do more than 2 sponsors per ep (you could).

2) You vet [and use] all products and turn down >80% of advertisers.

3) You turn down sponsors that want you to do ridiculous reads. I’ve seen it multiple times where advertisers are like, “We need this to be longer” and you tell them to fuck off. This is important. You value your listener waaaaaaay more than they ever realize, and do it to the tune of legitimately millions “lost.” It’s not lost, but is worth mentioning and understanding.

4) You want the ads–like the content–to add value. You’re hoping when you hear it for the first time that you think it’s cool, new, different, or interesting. Otherwise, you wouldn’t share. When you hear it the 4th time, are you tired of it? Maybe. But your fourth time might be someone else’s first. It’s like complaining about shared content on social media. Just because you’ve experienced something before, that doesn’t mean everyone has, and your job is to best serve the audience. You do pre/post roll [instead of mid-roll] to make avoiding this easy: if you don’t like it, they can simply fast forward.

QUESTION: What’s your long-term revenue strategy with the podcast?

There is no long-term revenue strategy. I focus solely on making it as fun as possible for me to do. But — perhaps this itself is a solid strategy, not a lack of one. Simple can be effective. At least 50% of the venture capitalists I’ve met over the years laughed at my simplistic “scratch my own itch” investing approach. Net-net, I’ve now beaten most of their IRR. (Don’t get me wrong; many investors perennially kick my ass.)

For me, the moral of the story is this: Revenue opportunities often present themselves if you focus on creating something you’d pay for yourself.  If you can easily sell it to 10 friends and do some basic market research on top of that, the odds improve.

Of course, “scratching your own itch” doesn’t always work, but I think of it as necessary but not sufficient. If you have enough at-bats, and if you know how to limit losses (knowing when to fold ’em and walk away, like my six-episode commitment), you’ll eventually hit the ball.

The recipe is straightforward — Study the craft like it’s your job (e.g. Find people like master interviewer Cal Fussman), make yourself smile, don’t rush, don’t whore yourself, test a lot of wacky ideas, and think laterally. If you want to increase your income 10x instead of 10%, the best opportunities are often seemingly out of left field (e.g. books → startups).

Just remember that, even in a golden age, podcasting is a squirrely opportunity and not a panacea on a silver platter. Even if you work smart, you still have to do the work and take your lumps.

Amelia Boone, the world’s top female obstacle racer, said on my podcast that she’d put the following on a billboard: “No one owes you anything.” I think that’s a good mantra for life.

Try your best, take notes, and do better the next time.

QUESTION: What gear do you use for the podcast?

The recording gear is better and cheaper every year. It’s extremely easy for me to travel with a small recording studio in my backpack. If you’re on a budget, even an iPhone will do, but–bang for the buck–the ATR-2100 is hard to beat.

My mantra for gear is borrowed from my podcast with Morgan Spurlock: “Once you get fancy, fancy gets broken.”  Keep it simple.

For post-production and editing, I used Garageband for the first 30-40 episodes, but I now outsource to people who use primarily Ableton and Hindenburg. The simplicity of the latter is very appealing to me, but as a pure editor, it doesn’t include sound effects, transitions, etc. as a Garageband does.

Pat Flynn, a seasoned podcaster who’s helped me a ton, made a great and free podcast-editing tutorial for you all. This covers nearly everything you need to know for basic post-production.

For free options, Audacity is also popular. My suggestion: use the simplest editing software you can, or pay someone to do it for you. If Garageband appears too amateur for your first 1-3 episodes, I’d bet money you quit before episode 5. Keep it simple.

Regarding consumption and promotion — I love Marco Arment’s Overcast, both as a listener (smart speed) and podcaster (can link to specific time stamps). My wish and ask for them: to embed a small player on my blog instead of having to link out.

QUESTION: Is it too late to start a podcast? Don’t you feel pressured by all the competition? it seems like thousands launch every week.

Competition makes you better.

Everyone should try podcasting for at least 3-6 episodes, even if just to get better at asking questions and eliminating verbal tics. Those gains transfer everywhere.

If someone ends up better than me (or ranking better than me), they deserve to beat me. I’ll be the first person to buy them a beer. Remember that podcasting isn’t a zero-sum game, and a rising tide raises all ships (Check out the “Serial effect”). There’s plenty of room for more good shows, and the pie is expanding. Bring your A game and the cream will rise to the top.

Of course, you don’t need to be perfect (and you won’t be), but you need to try your best.  As Michael Gerber, author of The E-Myth Revisited, told me over coffee before I wrote The 4-Hour Workweek: “If you’re going to write a book, write a fucking book.”

If you start out bad but are incrementally improving towards awesome, that’s totally fine. If you’re half-assing it and coasting, find something else you can whole-ass.

QUESTION: How much time do you put into the podcast? Aren’t you The 4-Hour Workweek guy?

The 4-Hour Workweek is, first and foremost, about 10x’ing your per-hour output. I have no problem with hard work, as long as it’s applied to the right things, and I never have.

This is partially why The 4-Hour Workweek and the podcast have attracted some of the world’s most successful hedge fund managers and start-up founders. They might work 80+ hours per week, but they value efficient and elegant solutions.

The objective is to control your time — a non-renewable resource — and apply it where you have the highest leverage or enjoyment. For me right now, the Archimedes lever is clearly the podcast. I get to interview the most fascinating people I can find, including Rick Rubin, Jamie Foxx, Maria Popova, General McChrystal, Tony Robbins, and dozens of others. I would pay a small fortune to do this. Instead, I somehow get paid. For the time invested, especially when batching (e.g. I try and record eps on Mondays and Fridays, two weeks a month), it has the most disproportionate hours-to-ROI imaginable.

I don’t want my readers to be idle. Mini-retirements are wonderful (here’s a month-long example), but I’m not going to spend my entire life on the sidelines. This is all covered in the “Filling the Void” chapter of 4HWW, but it bears repeating.

For those curious, here’s what one of my days looks like. No two are quite alike.

QUESTION: But–for God’s sake–I don’t have bestselling books or a big blog! You had an unfair advantage. What can I do?

Get started.

Remember Amelia Boone, the most successful female obstacle racer in history? No one owes you anything. So… gird your loins and fucking get amongst it. Prepare to bloody your knees and learn a lot.

Yes, I came into podcasting with a text-loving audience, but guess what?

#1) Like everyone else, at one point, I had zero readers and zero listeners. We all start out naked and afraid. Then your mom starts checking out your stuff, or perhaps a few friends give a mercy-listen, and the fragile snowball grows from there. Here are a few ugly first versions of popular blogs. Mine was incredibly unpopular and hideous.

#2) Coming to the party with a pre-existing audience isn’t enough. Celebrities, YouTube icons, and bestselling authors start podcasts every week that get abandoned three weeks later.

Fortunately, the most common pitfalls are easy to avoid.

Here are a few things I found helpful that might help you:

1) Upload at least 2-3 pre-recorded episodes when you launch your podcast (real-world example). This appears to help with iTunes ranking, which — like bestseller lists — can be self-propagating. The higher you rank, the more people see you, the higher you continue to rank, etc.

2) Keep the format simple. Most would-be blockbuster podcasters quit because they get overwhelmed with gear and editing. Much like Joe Rogan, I decided to record and publish entire conversations (minimizing post-production), not solely highlights. I also use a tremendously simple gear setup and favored Skype interviews for the first 20 or so interviews, as the process is easier to handle when you can look at questions and prep notes in Evernote or a notebook.

As Tony Robbins would say: complexity is the enemy of execution. You do NOT need concert hall-quality audio; most people will be listening in the subway or car anyway, and they’ll forgive you if recordings are rough around the edges. Audio engineers will never be fully satisfied with your audio, but 99.9% of listeners will be happy if you’re intelligible and loud enough.

3) Don’t pursue or even think about sponsors until you have a critical mass. I discussed this earlier. It’s a distraction. Play the long game.

4) Get transcripts and send highlights with pitch ideas to print/text journalists. I have done this with several outlets, and it’s resulted in some outstanding original pieces like this one from Business Insider, who came up with the story angle on their own. I suspect this type of coverage also helped the Jamie Foxx episode win “Podcast Episode of the Year” on Product Hunt.

5) If you use blog posts, utilize graphics to increase podcast downloads/listens for your target platform. This is a tip I got from podcasting veteran John Lee Dumas. Here is one example of mine, where the iTunes button is exceptionally clear.

6) Experiment constantly. I have tested conversations in a sauna (Rick Rubin), solo Q&As based on reddit submissions (e.g. Maria Popova, Round Two), drunk dialing fans via Skype, audiobook excerpts (e.g. Tim Kreider), and more. It’s easy to assume that labor-intensive, polished episodes get the most downloads. Luckily, sometimes the opposite is true—the easy, low-labor stuff kills. This experimentation also keeps things fun for me. Podcasting isn’t radio, and there aren’t any hard-and-fast rules. Go nuts and let the world tell you what works.

A Few Closing Thoughts

There is no reason to bore your listeners (or yourself) because you’re slavishly following someone else’s playbook.

This post explains a few things I’ve found useful, but they’re guidelines at best, not rules.

Borrow, be ridiculous on occasion, and be yourself. This is one medium where it can pay 100-fold to simply be you: warts, weirdness, and all.

How about throwing chimpanzee screeches in the middle of an episode? Fuck it, sure. Making weird Mogwai noises during the intros with no explanation whatsoever? If I’ve had enough wine, definitely.  Recording last-minute guest bios in an airplane bathroom? Done it.

If you make yourself laugh every once in a while, at least you will have fun.

And that is perhaps the best strategy of all.

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Last but certainly not least, I want to thank a few smart people who generously spent many hours educating me on the details, tech, and craft of podcasting. In alphabetical order by first name (and if I forgot anyone, please let me know!):

Jason DeFillippo of Grumpy Old Geeks

John Lee Dumas of Entrepreneur on Fire

Jordan Harbinger of The Jordan Harbinger Show

Lewis Howes of The School of Greatness

Matt Lieber and Alex Blumberg of Gimlet Media

Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income

Rob Walch of Libsyn

You can find the most popular episodes from 2021 here, from 2020 here, from 2019 here, and some earlier popular episodes here.

If you enjoyed this and would like more on podcasting, please let me know in the comments, and I’ll write more. Specifically, what would you most like to know?

The post How I Built a #1-Ranked Podcast With 60M+ Downloads appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Specifically, it will explain how they gathered nearly 100,000 email addresses in one week (!).  This post includes all the email templates, open-source code, and insider tricks that you can use to replicate their success.  It’s similar in depth to my previous how-to post, Hacking Kickstarter: How to Raise $100,000 in 10 Days.

This post is of great personal interest to me, as I’ll be doing a ton of fun stuff with email soon.  For a sneak peek, click here.  Now, on to Harry’s…

Harry’s started small and grew quickly.  They now have 40 domestic employees, an online store, a barbershop in New York, and a thriving online magazine called Five O’Clock. Harry’s also recently raised 100+ million dollars to buy the 94-year-old German factory that makes it blades.  By doing so, they added 427 people to their team. Today, you can find Harry’s products on harrys.com, in select J Crew stores, and at more than 65 men’s boutiques and hotels across the country.

This is piece was written by Jeff Raider, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Harry’s, with input from key members of the Harry’s team.

Prior to Harry’s, Jeff co-founded Warby Parker, a brand offering designer-like eyewear at lower prices, which also helped pioneer the “buy one, give one” model.

Enjoy!…

Enter Jeff

We can’t launch to crickets

We opened the digital doors of our shaving brand, Harry’s, in March of 2013.  In the weeks leading up to the launch, there was one persistent worry: Were we going to launch to crickets? Would anyone notice?

My co-founder, Andy, and I had spent the better part of two years researching the global men’s shaving market.  We’d found the nearly century-old German manufacturer who would make our razor blades, we’d worked with talented industrial designers to create an ergonomic handle inspired by fine pens and knives, and we’d laid the groundwork for the direct-to-consumer online brand that would become Harry’s.  We were excited to offer our customers a quality shaving experience at an affordable price.

Fortunately, Andy and I had a team of 10 who believed in our not-yet-existent brand as much as we did. We needed people to find out about us and come to our website to find our products. After all, a direct-to-consumer brand isn’t anything without the consumer. We couldn’t launch to crickets. We had to figure out a way to make sure that didn’t happen.

That also meant a lot of pressure.

Click for full size

Thanks to what you’ll learn in this post, our first week at Harry’s was a huge success. We were inundated by tweets, emails, and—our favorite—customer phone calls. It was an incredibly exciting time.

Much of the success of week one was due to what we did beforehand. One week before our e-commerce site went live, we had gathered emails from nearly 100,000 people who were eager to learn more about Harry’s.

We had collected those email addresses thanks to a one-week long prelaunch campaign, the focus of this post.

Since launching the campaign, we’ve shared it with friends and other entrepreneurs. Now, together with Tim, we’re excited share the details of the campaign —the thinking, the code, our strategy, and the results—with all of you. One of our company values is transparency. We believe in open source, not only for code but also for ideas.  And we hope this might help you or your business reach and engage with more people in a fun and constructive way.

Just one large disclaimer: we can only share what we did. We’re sure we made lots of mistakes (we make them a lot) and have no doubt you’ll be able to improve on our template.

Now, without further ado, here we go…

The Most Credible Source

The idea for our campaign was built around our belief that the most powerful and effective way to be introduced to our new company was through a credible referral.  Thus, we focused on building a campaign that helped people to spread the word to their friends.

Ahead of our launch, Andy and I spent a couple of months meeting friends, entrepreneurs and virtually anyone else who would listen to us talk about Harry’s. Whether or not they were interested in razors, we tried to interest them in our story.  That list of people was probably a couple hundred long by our launch, and we created the campaign to help that group of people publicly share in the excitement of our launch.

We also took inspiration from other startups that we looked up to. Michael Preysman at Everlane is a friend and has built an amazing company. Early on they’d had success with referral mechanics. We also admired Fab’s launch and the manner in which they had success in promoting sharing.

So, inspired by those closest to us and some other amazing startups, we created a referral campaign.

The General Campaign Design

The user interface of the campaign was relatively simple—a two-page microsite.

First, users entered their email addresses on a splash page. This first step was essential since we wanted to capture emails both for our list and so that we could use it as an identifier for tracking referrals.

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The second page was where the referral mechanisms lived. It contained a shareable link to the splash page coded specifically to the user. Below the link were buttons to share the link through email, Facebook and Twitter with the click of a mouse. By sharing the link with friends, users had the opportunity to earn free product. The more friends who signed up using your unique referral link, the bigger the prize you earned.

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Here is all the code for the campaign.  If you have trouble with that link, you can also download the files here.

[Note from Tim: Modifying and deploying this app requires some technical knowledge, BUT if you’re non-technical (like me), you can find people to help you. If you aren’t familiar with editing HTML and CSS code, or have never deployed a Ruby on Rails app, I recommend finding a partner with design and Ruby skills in either the Heroku Partners Directory (if you want a team), or ODesk (if a single freelancer will do). ODesk will have more options.]

The mechanics are simple. It automatically generates a unique code for every unique email address entered, and it appends that code onto the given URL. In our case, the link looked something like this:

https://prelaunch.harrys.com/uniquereferralcode

When a referral—say, a friend of that first user—comes to the site using a unique link, we save it as a cookie we can use to find the email address responsible for the referral. For the engineers out there, you can see our engineering team’s explanation of the code here. As for the code itself, check it out here.

The code is, of course, important to creating a campaign.  In addition to sharing the code, we wanted to provide a few insights into how we thought about using it to drive growth.

Step 1: Make Special People Feel Special.

We saw prelaunch as a way to make people feel special.

And the first people in the world to find out about our brand were really special to us. We wanted our first customers to feel like they were getting insider access.

Splash Page Messaging

The copy on the splash page said, “Respecting the face, and wallet since like right now.” These words were intended to be playful and introduce people to the purpose of our brand but also leave an air mystery as to what we were all about. We paired the line with photo of one of our razors, but we included no more information about our company or product.

For the call to action on the button, we chose the words STEP INSIDE. Above the field was a small drawing of a key. We wanted to reinforce for our early customers that they were getting insider access.

Referral Page Messaging

Our referral page had more enigmatic design and copy. A picture of a wooly mammoth was coupled with the words: “Shaving is evolving. Don’t leave your friends behind.” Again, we wanted people to feel that something big was happening to which they had front row seat and the opportunity to invite friends to join them. Our first customers were insiders and we wanted to make them feel like insiders.

Step 2: Choose Tangible Rewards And Make Them Achievable.

The fundamental mechanic of our campaign was a game: complete the challenge of referring friends and earn prizes. It seems pretty straightforward—and it is—but we think that what those prizes are, and how they are doled out, is critical to getting people excited play. Not all reward structures are created equal. Here are a few things what worked for us.

First, we tried to make our rewards tangible: free Harry’s product. On the page, we very clearly emphasized, “Invite Friends and Earn Product.” It was the one message on the page where we did away with mystery and left nothing up to interpretation. We didn’t want there to be any doubt about what people might receive.

Second, we paced out the rewards so that they were attainable, appropriate for actions taken, and increasingly exciting. The first award was easily attainable and each subsequent tier wasn’t discouragingly difficult to achieve. To earn the first tier prize—a free shave cream—you had to make only five successful referrals. The next tier was only five further referrals. If you signed up ten friends, you earned a free razor. The jump between tier two and tier three was more significant but still not overwhelming: 25 referrals and you’d receive a shave set with our more premium handle, The Winston. Finally, even the grand prize was within reach: a year of free shaving for those who referred 50 friends.  Indeed, over 200 people achieved our highest referral tier. At one point we had considered offering a lifetime of free product for 1,000 referrals. We ultimately decided to scrap that tier, worrying that it would discourage people from participating at all, and — though we can’t prove that that decision bolstered the strength of the reward structure — I strongly believe it did.

Click for full size

Step 3: Make Sharing As Fun As Humanly Possible.

We wanted the entire experience to feel like a fun game. To amplify the experience, the campaign page included a tracker, pictured above, where users could see how many friends they had referred and what prize they had achieved—or not yet achieved. This dynamic progress tracker served the dual purpose of (1) giving users faith throughout the one-week campaign that we were good for our word and (2) keeping track of their referrals while also incentivizing users who were close to the subsequent tier to keep sharing.

It also amplified the fun people might have with the interface and campaign as they compared their progress to their friends and strived to reach the next tier. We heard from some friends that they took the referral campaign like a personal challenge.

Step 4: Make Sharing As Easy As Humanly Possible.

Through the campaign, we wanted to encourage friends to tell friends, and those friends to tell their friends, and so on and so forth.  Any barrier to sharing would hinder the campaign, so we did a few things.

First, we included social sharing buttons. You can’t rely on the user cut and paste the link (though do make it available for the user who prefers that method).

Right below the custom link field on the page, we included icons for Twitter and Facebook. We had learned that using the standard Twitter and Facebook icons for sharing yields higher engagement than if you design your own.  People are used to them and recognize them immediately.

Clicking the icons pulled up a dialogue box with a pre-populated message.

This seemingly small measure was really important. It removed a barrier-to-sharing for the user and allowed you to push forward a message.

Click for full size

Ours was really, really simple: “Excited for @harrys to launch. I’m going to be #shaving for free” with a shortlink back the campaign site.

Here are a few quick ideas that were helpful to us:

• Include an @ mention of your company or initiative
• Include a link to your prelaunch site
• Resist the urge to be salesy. We tried to let the mystery of the message drive traffic through the link.

Step 5: Start by Telling Your Friends–Use E-mail, Social, Etc.

This post isn’t one where you learn brilliant tactics for generating and closing media leads (for that, check out “Hacking Kickstarter: How to Raise $100,000 in 10 Days”).

In fact, by our count, there was one article about the campaign while it was live. We didn’t have anything to do with the piece, and, while it wasn’t fully accurate, we liked it because it added to the fun around our launch and helped to amplify the social sharing that was already underway.

While we love the press (and they have been generous to us at Harry’s), for this campaign we deliberately decided that we would focus on our friends and let the groundswell build organically. We thought that having the referral come from a publication would be counter to the campaign’s ethos.

We started there, with our own friends. We had our team of 12 employees seed the campaign to their friends. Here’s a breakdown of how we suggest approaching those two mediums.

Email

A few days before the campaign, we walked the whole team through the process of creating groups of contacts in Gmail. Everyone on the team added all of their contacts to two groups—a group that was familiar with Harry’s vs. a group that hadn’t heard of Harry’s. We wrote a sample email (see template below), though we really emphasized making the messages personalized. We wanted people on our team to share the news of our company and brand in the most comfortable way possible for them. We did all of this a day or two in advance because we wanted to be able to simply hit send on the day prelaunch went live.

Here are some tips for these emails:

• Make it personal. These people are closest to you and, thus, to your product or company. They’re friends—so write to them like they are!
• This is for friends, not press. If you send your prelaunch campaign to friends who are part of the press, make sure they know it’s not the time to “break news” about your company. If you can’t trust them not to do so, don’t keep them on the list. You want press when your company is actually live.
• Encourage your recipients to spread the word. Make that ask explicitly—don’t be shy!
• As a rule of thumb, assume the email will be forwarded, and craft your message accordingly (i.e., don’t disparage the competition etc., etc.,).
• Set up email signatures—with links back to the prelaunch site and social channels—before emailing the world.
• Consider appending a visual asset. We included a simple product shot of our razor with the phrase “Harry’s is coming,” hoping to pique interest.

Title: “Harry’s is Coming!”

Friends and Family,

After months of closely examining the weight of razor handles, natural ingredient mixtures in shaving cream and angles of razor blades, we are really excited to only be days away from launching Harry’s. 

You’re important to me and I wanted you to be the first to know about our plans for launch. We have just put up our pre-launch site, you can check it out at www.harrys.com. 

Our full site will be up in about a week and I’ll be sure let you know when it’s live!

In the meantime, I’d love your help in spreading the word! Here’s how: 

1) Go to our website www.harrys.com 

2) On the first page of the site, enter your email to join our mailing list 

3) On the second page, refer friends using your own custom link back to Harry’s – and as a bonus you can earn free Harry’s products!

Thank you so much for all of your help and support. I can’t tell you how much we appreciate it. Look forward to continuing to shareHarry’s with you and appreciate you telling the world! 

All the best,

[Your name]

We also reached out to a number of people individually.

We wanted to tell them ourselves in a personal way. For example, some of our friends could reach entire companies. We’d ask people individually share Harry’s with their teams. For an example of what this email could look like, see below for an actual email (in looking back maybe I got a little carried away in the excitement of the moment).

Hey [CEO],

Hope you’re great and everything is going really well at [Company]. 

I wanted to drop you a quick note and let you know that we just put up prelaunch site for Harry’s – check it out and sign up at www.harrys.com. We plan to launch in about a week. Super excited. Would love for you to pass the prelaunch site on to the [company] team and anyone else who you think might appreciate it. 

Thanks for your help. You’re the best. Hope to see you soon.

Jeff

Social Channels

We launched our Facebook page and Twitter handle the day that prelaunch went live in an effort to capture social followers from the prelaunch buzz. As part of our seeding, our small team made a concerted effort to interact with our new social pages and handles. Our whole team did the following:

• Like your company’s page on Facebook
• Follow your company’s Twitter handle
• Tweet about the campaign with an @mention of your company
• Update your Twitter and Facebook profiles to say you work at your company
• Track @mentions of your company and respond with a thank you—from your personal handle—if you see anyone you know tweeting about the campaign
• Post a personal Facebook post about the campaign. We encouraged people to frame the launch of the campaign as a personal life event, i.e. I just started working at Harry’s and after a lot of hard work our pre-launch site is finally up! Check it out: www.harrys.com”

Step 6: Protecting Yourself Against Fraud

When you’re giving away free stuff, you’re opening yourself up to the risk of being scammed and the liability of people gaming your system. We took a few simple precautions to protect ourselves against fraud.

First and foremost, we set up IP blocking. This means our code looked at the IP address of every sign-up, and if a single IP address had signed up two email addresses to the campaign, we blocked the ability to create any more sign-ups from that IP address.

Second of all, we used SendGrid to send a simple transactional email to every email address entered.  If that transactional email bounced back—a data point that SendGrid provides—the email address was interpreted as illegitimate. Unsurprisingly, we saw the most fraudulent activity in the highest tier.

Step 7: Cross Your Fingers. You Never Know What’ll Happen.

Before the prelaunch, our small team set wagers on how many emails we would collect.

We wrote the figures on a whiteboard: Three thousand. Five. Seventy-five hundred. One bold person thought we could get 15k. (I think that might have been me!) We broke that high bar in the first day. When all was said and done, we had collected by our estimation over 85K valid email addresses (and over 100K emails in total) in the span of seven days.

Click for full image

The referral mechanics were amazing. As the first graph above shows, 77% of the emails were collected via referral, meaning about 20K people referred about 65K friends. This means referrers, on average, referred more than 3 friends.

Yet there were a lot of people who referred well above that average: More than 200 participants referred more than 50 of their friends, achieving the highest tier reward. These were largely people who were close to us with large followings or access to companies that sent out blasts on our behalf. Even in the lower tiers it was pretty amazing how many people participated. In total we gave away product to about 3,000 people and believe that those folks are still some of our most ardent supporters.

Two More Things…

The heavy lifting really started after our prelaunch: we had to get product to customers.

We sent out coupon codes to customers for the rewards they won. In this way, we redirected our customers to our full, live site where they could read the backstory of the mystery company whose prelaunch they had just participated in and browse our full suite of products.

We handled reward fulfillment through the distribution partner we continue to work with today.  We selected a distribution partner based on these four key principles:

• Scalability – Can they grow with us?
• Flexibility – Are they willing and able to play around with process to work toward our vision?
• Price – Are they in-line with the market across all their services (not just pick/pack but also receiving, inventory, etc.)
• Partnership – Do they require minimums and do they mark-up any pass through costs like outbound carrier costs?

In addition to a reliable distribution partner, a second critical element to our prelaunch campaign was customer support. We used—and continue to use—a platform called Zendesk to manage tickets from customers. We had fully a functioning customer support operation where customers could contact us via e-mail, phone, Twitter, Facebook, and even text message. On our first day in business, we had literally everyone on our small team manning Zendesk and replying to inbound tickets.

Thanks Where Thanks Is Due

It was truly amazing to see the impact that our friends and their friends (and their friends) could have on our brand.

We’ve thanked them numerous times, but if you’re reading this, and you participated in our campaign, then thank you again. It was instrumental to us building Harry’s.

While it’s very difficult to attribute its success to one specific variable — the code, the tactics, the idea — we thought we’d share our story in the hopes it might help you with your future endeavors. We have no doubt that you can tweak and improve this early experiment, and we look forward to learning from your future successes.

Most sincerely,

Jeff, Andy, and The Harry’s Team

###

Afterword from Tim:  For an advance look at what I’ll be doing with e-mail, click here.  I am also creating my own micro-site (a la Harry’s) and will be sharing all of my tweaks and findings with you.

Look forward to your thoughts and questions in the comments!

The post How to Gather 100,000 Emails in One Week (Includes Successful Templates, Code, Everything You Need) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

If you want to write a bestselling book, don’t reinvent the wheel.

I get at least a dozen email a week from friends who want to write books.

After three #1 bestsellers from 2007 to 2012, and publishing in 35+ countries, I’ve tried a lot. Having experimented with everything from “traditional” (Random House) to Amazon Publishing, from BitTorrent Bundles to self-publishing audiobooks, I’ve developed strong opinions about…

• What works and what doesn’t.
• What sucks and what doesn’t.
• What makes the most money and what doesn’t.

This post is intended to answer all of the most common questions I get, including:

– “Should I publish traditionally or self-publish?”

– “How does a first-time author get a 7-figure book advance?”

– “How do I get a good agent or publisher? Do I even need an agent?”

– “What does the ‘bestseller list’ really mean? How do you get on one?”

– “What are your top marketing tips if I have little or no budget?”

– “What are the biggest wastes of time? The things to avoid?”

– And so on…

My answers are grouped into sections, all of which include resource links. Here are the four sections of this post:

MARKETING

PR AND MEDIA

TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING VERSUS SELF-PUBLISHING

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

As a prelude, here are two books I found useful when selling The 4-Hour Workweek, both as a proposal to publishers and as a finished book to the world:

Write the Perfect Book Proposal: 10 That Sold and Why

Author 101: Bestselling Book Publicity

For the first meaty section, we’ll cover marketing, as it’s where I get the most questions.

MARKETING

A few quick points to get us started:

• Wrangling book blurbs or cover testimonials is one of the biggest wastes of time for new authors. Take the same number of hours and invest them in making a better product and planning your marketing launch. I think one quote per book is more than enough, and a passionate quote from a credible but lesser-known person is FAR better than faint “meh” praise from a famous person.

• If you only have time to read one article on marketing, make it 1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired Magazine.

• In my experience, more than 50% of the CEOs who have bestselling books buy their way onto the lists. I know at least a dozen of them. See The Deception of Bestseller Lists for more detail. I’ve never done this, as I aim to have books that are bestsellers for years not two weeks. That said, if you’re busy and simply want “bestselling author” on your resume, it can be had for a price.

• If your book is mediocre, you can still market/promote a book onto the bestseller lists…but only for a week or two, unless you’re mega-rich. Long term, book quality and pass-along value is what keeps a tome on the charts. I value the Amazon Most-Highlighted page [Ed note: The page no longer exists. The link will take you to a snapshot of the original page in the internet archives. Please allow longer-than-normal load times.] more than my NYT bestseller stats. The weekly bestseller lists are highly subject to gaming. I’d love to see a shift to monthly bestseller lists.

Now, the meat of this MARKETING section:

12 Lessons Learned While Marketing “The 4-Hour Body”

How to Build a High-Traffic Blog Without Killing Yourself

How Tucker Max Got Rejected by Publishing and Still Hit #1 New York Times

How Does a Bestseller Happen? A Case Study in Hitting #1 on the New York Times (Skip down to “What were the 1-3 biggest wastes of time and money?”)

Behind-the-scenes mechanics:

How the Various Bestseller Lists Work — New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Etc.

Behind the Scenes: How to Make a Movie Trailer for Your Product (or Book)

How to Create a Viral Book Trailer (or Get 1,000,000 Views for Almost Anything)

PR AND MEDIA

What does one week of a real launch look like for me?

Here’s the first week of The 4-Hour Chef launch. It features a complete list of media, in chronological order and broken down by format.

Now, here’s how I get that done:

From First TV to Dr. Oz – How to Get Local Media… Then National Media

How to Create a Global Phenomenon for Less Than $10,000

Public Speaking — How I Prepare Every Time

The success of The 4-Hour Workweek is often attributed to an early wave of tech “influencers” who spread the word. Pursuing such influencers requires thoughtfulness, and you can’t be overeager. Sadly, most people oversell and make an asshole of themselves, pissing off busy people and getting rightly shunned. Here’s how to avoid pitfalls and do it right:

Marc Ecko’s 10 Rules for Getting “Influencer” Attention (Be sure to read his interactions in the comments)

TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING VS. SELF-PUBLISHING

Let’s showcase four success stories, all using different approaches:

• How a First-Time Author Got a 7-Figure Book Deal (traditional-ish)
• How to (Really) Make $1,000,000 Selling E-Books – Real-World Case Studies (self-published e-book “product”)
• How to Self-Publish a Bestseller: Publishing 3.0 (a hybrid)
• How to Crowdfund a Book (John Biggs, who describes the experience more in “The Crowdfunder’s Dilemma”)

If you’re going to use a crowd-funding platform like Kickstarter or Indiegogo to fund your book (and get pre-paid orders, as well as a reader database), the following scripts and tools could save you hundreds of hours:

Hacking Kickstarter: How to Raise $100,000 in 10 Days (Includes Successful Templates, E-mails, etc.)

Now, let’s look at the nitty-gritty economics of publishing, as well as how to weigh the pros and cons of self-publishing:

How Authors Really Make Money: The Rebirth of Seth Godin and Death of Traditional Publishing

Tim Ferriss and Ramit Sethi on Self-Publishing vs. Big Publishers (Hint: there are some benefits to big publishers)

For those of you considering selling a book chapter by chapter, here are some relevant thoughts:

A Few Thoughts on Content Creation, Monetization, and Strategy

If you opt to self-publish, you might also need the below.  Remember: you’ll be your own marketing/PR/advertising department, and you need to know what you’re getting into. Never bought advertising? You might have to learn. Not sure on margins? Get sure:

Jedi Mind Tricks: How to Get $250,000 of Advertising for $10,000

The Margin Manifesto: 11 Tenets for Reaching (or Doubling) Profitability in 3 Months

ON NEGOTIATING CONTRACTS, FINDING AGENTS, ETC.

If you’re going the traditional route (Read “How Authors Really Make Money” above), you will have to negotiate.

Many books have been written on the subject — I quite like Getting Past No — but here are the two most important things to remember:

• He or she who cares least wins. Have walk-away power and figure out your BATNA.
• Options are power. If you can avoid it, never negotiate with one party. Get competing offers on the table.

If you’ve decided on traditional publishers, I also suggest getting an agent.

I pay a 15% commission on my royalties because I want an experienced, diplomatic bulldog to fight my publishing battles for me. Selling a book to a publisher is easy — if you pitch the right editors, you only need an entertainment attorney to review contracts. But getting a book distributed properly nationwide? Getting the cover you want?  Pushing important editorial decisions in your direction? Getting commitments for end-cap displays or seasonal in-store promotion?

All this stuff is massively time-consuming.  Epic pain-in-the-ass stuff.

I view my “agent” more like the COO of my publishing business, not as a simple commissioned salesperson. This is one reason I opted to go with a smaller agency instead of a large entertainment agency. The latter tends to be (but is not always) exclusively focused on selling your book rights to the highest bidder. Once that one-night stand is over, they move on to fresh commissionable meat/deals, leaving you to fight the publisher on your own.  And trust me: the road from contract to bestseller list is a LOT harder than anything that comes before it.

You can find good agents by looking for contact info under “Major Deals” on Publishers Marketplace/Lunch. I also suggest reading the “Acknowledgments” section in books that you like; the agent will often be thanked. Here’s an old story about how I found my agent.

Another reason to have an agent — you’ll have your hands busy writing the damn book! That’s where your creative process will make or break you.  Take it seriously.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

If you want a “bestselling book” that’s worthy of that label, you need a good book.

In my opinion, a mediocre book is more of a liability than no book at all. As the author of The E-Myth Revisited, Michael Gerber, once said to me, “If you’re going to write a book, write a fucking book.”  Good advice.  Follow it.

My stuff isn’t Tolstoy quality, but I do take pride in the work I do.

My general recommendation is this: If you can’t dedicate at least a year of full-time attention to a book (which might be 70/30 split between writing and PR/promotion), don’t bother writing it. There are exceptions of course. Some cocaine-fueled novelists I know can knock out a rough draft of a book in 1-2 weeks (!). I’ve seen memoirs completed in 1-2 months. But, alas, I’m not fast. I’m slow, what Kurt Vonnegut might call a “basher” or a “plodder,” and I write how-to content that requires a shit-ton of research and first-hand experimentation.

To do that reasonably well, I budget 1-3 years per book project.

It’s worth noting here, even though I write my own books, you don’t have to. “Ghost writers” exist solely to write books that are credited to other people. Here’s a good example of such services. If a current CEO publishes a book, it’s fair to assume that they had a professional ghostwriter interview them and pen “their” book.  If you’re not sure, you can check the acknowledgments or simply compare the writing to their speaking style in interviews.  Don’t match?  Grammar a little too good?  Use of “whom” a little conspicuous?  That’s a ghost at work.

Now, moving onward.

Here are some techniques, tricks, and resources that I’ve found helpful for nearly any type of writing…

The Good:

Tim Ferriss Interviews Neil Strauss, 7x New York Times Bestselling Author, on the Creative Process

Neil Gaiman – The Best Commencement Speech You May Ever Hear (20 Minutes)

The Odd (And Effective) Routines of Famous Minds like Beethoven, Maya Angelou, and Francis Bacon

Paulo Coelho: How I Write

The Bad (But Critically Useful):

“Productivity” Tricks for the Neurotic, Manic-Depressive, and Crazy (Like Me)

So…You Want to Be a Writer? Read This First.

The Ugly (But Necessary):

The Ugly New York Times Bestseller — The Creative Process in Action

Tim Ferriss: On The Creative Process And Getting Your Work Noticed

AFTERWORD

And that’s it!

Did you enjoy this post?  Any favorite parts, or things missing?  Do you have your own tips about publishing and writing?

Please let me know in the comments!  I’ll be reading them all.

The post How to Write a Bestselling Book This Year — The Definitive Resource List and How-To Guide appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Lance Kalish and Ido Leffler of Yes To Carrots

Intro by Tim

How do you build a multi-million dollar global business?

Well, you might start by visiting Israel and negotiating the rights to an unknown brand (Yes To Carrots)…found in 16 stores. Then, you might use cold calling artistry and Jedi mind tricks to get carried by Walgreen’s in its 7,000+ stores. Next, you might get your product into 25,000+ stories internationally and smile when you see Rosario Dawson using your goods publicly. Now, as the happy ending (of sorts), every 6 seconds in the US, someone buys a Yes To product!

But that’s leaving out the details, isn’t it? I hate business articles and books that do that.

I’ve known Ido Leffler, Yes To’s co-founder, for ages. I met him at a Summit Series event in Miami. His trademark hug was the first thing that caught my attention: inexplicably slow-motion and super gentle, as if he were cradling a baby panda. Of course, there’s his subtle Australian accent and persuasive (and deliberately less subtle) Israeli chutzpah. Who the hell was this guy? I’ve come to love him, but perhaps more important to you, I’ve come to love his methods. He deconstructs problems like Sherlock Holmes with a twist of Richard Branson…

His partner Lance is even more methodical. In many respects, he is to Ido what Steve Wozniak was to Steve Jobs. That’s part of the reason their partnership works. To paraphrase one of Yes To’s investors: “He [Lance] is the numbers guy, and he [Ido] is the pictures guy.”

This post by Ido and Lance explains their methodical approach to tradeshows. But why should you care about tradeshows, if you don’t already? I used tradeshows (e.g. SXSW, lounges at CES) to successfully launch The 4-Hour Workweek to the bestseller lists. You can use tradeshows to network with people who would otherwise never return your email or phone call.

Tradeshows can be — even for a solo entrepreneur — the best single use of time in a given year, and Ido and Lance know how to make it count.

For the full Yes To story, you’ll need to grab their new book, for which I wrote the Foreword. The book explains, step-by-step, how they went from selling out of a suitcase to building the second largest and fastest growing natural beauty brand in the US, with almost 100 unique products (or “SKUs,” pronounced “skews”).

It’s tempting to write that the Yes To story is a beautiful example of the American Dream. But that’s not quite right.

It’s the Australian Dream.

It’s the British Dream.

It’s the Indian Dream.

It’s the [fill in the blank] Dream.

Ido and Lance’s story is the dream of doers everywhere–the dream of making something happen, of creating something meaningful from nothing.

Have you ever had a job and thought “I could do a better job than this guy” while watching your boss? Have you ever thought of an invention for solving a common problem and asked “Why hasn’t someone DONE this yet?!?” If so, you’ve found the right teachers.

Before I hand the mic over to the Australians, I could say “May the wind always be at your back,” but that’s not how this game works.

Instead, I’ll recommend that you gird up your loins (figuratively), grab a cup of coffee, and prepare for an adventure.

Enjoy the ride…

Enter Lance and Ido

This post everything we know about how to extract the most value from a trade show.

Keep in mind that we threw together our first U.S. trade show booth with nothing but hope, good vibes, a modest budget, and a fortuitous Google search that led us to an amazing design firm in Israel and a builder in Hungary who were able to build our booth for pennies on the dollar.

Trade shows are absurdly expensive; save money on everything but don’t skimp on your visual presentation. Sleep underneath the registration table. Eat nothing but stale pretzels. Shave in the McDonald’s bathroom. But make sure that your booth looks fun, deluxe, well designed, and tells a compelling story. You need it to catch buyers’ eyes as they run past you to the established businesses in the primo spots on the convention floor. Trade shows are an incredibly useful weapon to get introductions to massive retailers, and no matter how much you think you know about international retail, there are always going to be retailers out there that you’ve never heard of and whose stores you need to be in. So give it your all. Presentation is everything.

Ido: When we first started Yes To we would attend the National Association of Chain Drug Stores convention in San Diego every year. It’s a huge deal; literally everyone who is anyone in health and beauty is there. We always had the same spot, year after year; and so did the guy a few booths down from us. Now, I admired our neighbor’s products. They were well formulated and effective. But I struggled to understand his approach to selling these products. Every year he had the same collapsible table, covered in the same tablecloth, with a dropdown backdrop showcasing his products. He wore a slightly scruffy suit and stood morosely at his table, rarely engaging with anyone he didn’t already know. In other words, he had a great product and a terrible presentation; his table looked cheap, he seemed uninterested, and no one was going to fall in love with cheap and uninterested. You don’t need ridiculous amounts of money to make an impact, but if you’re working with a minimal budget, you need to brings tons of imagination and effort and add something unique to your presentation. Don’t go with a little table and a pull-down sign at the back. You don’t need to spend a lot of money — just be different.

The Taj Mahal booth

Ido: What do we mean by different? We mean be bloody different. A few months after we shook hands with Walgreens on our online exclusive, I went to an industry conference in Hong Kong called the Cosmoprof convention. I’d squeezed Lance for about 200 percent more money than he thought we could afford; it was still a minuscule budget by the standards of a big trade show. We’d found an architect in Israel who designed a fantastic, modern, über-hip booth for us and the aforementioned builders in Hungary who were willing to build it for a fourth of the cost of Israeli contractors. Nobody knew anything about us except that we were the brand new company with the over-the-top, bright orange, sexy booth. The booth had a carrot structure that rose like an orange Taj Mahal over the rest of the exhibitors. The green fronds brushed the ceiling and could be seen from any point on the floor. We filled it with energetic young people, glowing with good health, who handed moisturizer samples and carrot juice to everyone who walked by. Basically, we were the party booth, and we were packed from morning to night. Turns out that our structure was ten feet too high and broke every rule of the convention center, but we managed to stall the demolition team till the last day. By the time the convention wrapped, we’d drunk our own weight in carrot juice many times over, but we’d also made hundreds of new friends and new contacts. Success. Now when we attend conferences we do it with an even more fantastic booth than we had at the last event. Other companies recycle their booths for decades. What’s fun about that! Sometimes the booth will have a Frank Lloyd Wright look to it, other times it will be futuristic, but it is always big, orange, and fun. No matter what, our booth changes every year and is always the one that people are talking about on the opening day of the convention. A first impression is always going to be the most lasting impression. There is a certain expectation that your booth and your presentation will reflect the reality of your business’s size and market share.

This is an expectation that we chose to ignore. Our booth reflected the company we planned to be in a few years, not the company we were at that moment. So you don’t need the biggest booth or the biggest budget. But at the same time, you can’t simply follow the norm of having a plasma screen playing a generic video or hosting a random giveaway or competition.

By the end of a trade show, people want two things:

• They want to be entertained.

• They want free stuff.

If you can make them laugh and send them home with a bag of goodies, then you have a reasonable chance of getting them to remember you. Think of a trade show as speed dating on a massive level. Every account in that convention hall has the opportunity to sit down with every buyer for three minutes. In those 180 seconds you need to find some way to click with them, make them laugh, give them an insight into your brand’s philosophy, put some samples in their hands, offer them a carrot juice and a key ring, and hope and pray that they felt the same little spark that you did. It always shocks us when we see brands not putting a 150 percent effort into a trade show. I feel personally offended when I see attendees sitting down and reading the paper or sneaking out early. What’s the point? Attending a trade show is a massive investment, especially if you’re a small company with a modest budget. Don’t slack off even when you see your competitors half-assing it. In fact, look at their half-assing as an opportunity for you to wow the retailers they are underwhelming.

The Master’s Degree of Trade Shows: Working the Show

Lance: In our early days with Yes To we made a huge effort to attend the Cosmoprof convention in Italy. This was a biggie, and we put down a huge amount of cash to fly our team out, assemble gift bags, and make our booth look fantastic. By the end of day two, though, our booth was quiet; all the good-looking carrots, handing out juice, and the team couldn’t get people interested. For whatever reason our magic wasn’t clicking. “What the hell are we going to do?” I wondered. “This is a disaster.” “Why?” Ido asked.

“Because our booth is empty, and it’s been empty all day!” Ido laughed.“Mate, we built this booth to meet one person, from one account. I’ve met him, he loves us, and nothing else matters.”

Have goals. Be strategic. Know whom you need to meet and what kind of business you need to do with them. Identify your “whales,” the most important people you want to meet at a trade show. It’s critical that your team knows the names (and ideally the faces) of the whales on your hit list. Make sure they understand that if Mr. or Ms. Whale shows up, then they need to get your attention immediately. Trade shows are full of perfectly charming people who are lots of fun but essentially irrelevant to your business. If you are talking to one of these people, and you miss your chance to talk to the whale, then you are in trouble.

Ido: I’ve shamelessly run after a whale that got away; Captain Ahab would be proud of me! After all, this might be the only day your particular Moby Dick attends the trade show. Do not miss your opportunity to talk with them. Manifesto Rule Numero Uno: Turn the convention hall into a walking billboard about you and your brand. Conventioneers love tote bags. Why? Because there are tons and tons of free stuff to be had, and after about two hours they are going to need something to carry the swag in. We always order thousands of great tote bags. No cheap paper or thin cotton for us. Our bags are big, bright, and unique, and by day two we try to make sure that every single person in the hall is carrying one. Be shameless and be fun. Slap your logo on the bag, add some bright colors, and make sure that people instinctively smile when they see it. Have tons of product to give away at the booth, and give it away freely. Don’t be one of those guys withholding the good stuff for the “big guys.” Instead, be the guy with the product that everyone is using and talking about. Freely distributing swag (even if it costs you) is in your best interests; you want those walking adverts wandering the convention.

Try to stay in the hotel where the important people are staying, because you want to be able to interact with them in the elevator, in the bar, or at breakfast. A two-minute conversation in the breakfast buffet line can be invaluable if it creates a tiny bond or shared experience between you and an important buyer. Give yourself the chance to have that moment. These hotels are expensive, but it is so, so worth the extra cost if you are able to use it to your advantage. Always make sure you and your team have a uniform — and not a suit. Order some logo shirts, but make sure they are funny, not droney. Do something goofy and unexpected. Order everyone in the team those East Coast preppie trousers that are covered with embroidered whales. Have fun with it, but whatever you come up with, make sure it makes you stand out. You want to be a little bit different and also be comfortable, so don’t wear a corporate, uninviting suit. One caveat: It’s useful to have someone who looks more conventional in your booth. Some of your meetings will be with a person who needs the reassurance of seeing someone who looks a little square. Lance: At every damn trade show Ido sees me putting on my jeans and polo shirt and says, “I’m dressing cool, you dress like the accountant.”

Ido: That’s just because of your terrible taste in jeans. No, we need one guy who looks serious and traditional, and seriousness comes more naturally to Lance. Note: The more conventional, reserved-looking guy should not be the boss or, in our case, both of the bosses. Make sure that at least one of the founders or the CEO is wearing the more casual look, like everyone else. You want your CEO or founder to be fun and superapproachable. You don’t want him or her wearing a suit and sitting in one spot and looking like a monarch on a throne. Keep the boss approachable, and don’t create the impression that you have an impenetrable hierarchy. Buyers buy from people they know, like, and trust. Give them a chance to build that relationship with the head guy, even if it is the one and only time they will ever have anything to do with him. Always have a pen and paper, or an iPad, or a voice recorder handy. As soon as you finish a meeting, scribble down all the pertinent information: name, contact info, and any details you can recall. Small talk is everything, and six months later you may be glad you remembered that their youngest is playing ball at State, or that they grew up in an area you know well. Send a follow-up note to everyone you contacted over the course of the day, and every evening debrief with your team so you figure out who to delegate your new contact to. Keep the initial note brief; no one has the time or energy to read a detailed letter while the show is still running.

Once you are back home, give them a couple of days to settle back and then hit them again with an action-based e-mail. Always remind them who you are, and refer back to your notes. If you have a personal comment that feels appropriate, such as, “I hope John’s first day of school went well,” make it. Know how to cut your losses; if someone says, “I am coming back,” without scheduling an actual time to return and talk, it means they are never coming back, ever. Let it go. The minute the trade show closes for the day is the minute the real work begins.

Practice the fine art of thinking while drinking

Lots of the important business at a trade show is done after the convention closes for the day. In order to get in on these opportunities, you need to be organized, aggressive, and targeted. Plan ahead. You want at least one after-hours social interaction with all your potential partners, retailers, distributors, press, and even your competitors. You need to start planning these social interactions months before the convention, so start calling and e-mailing and Facebooking well in advance of the show. Don’t be afraid to approach people whom you’ve never met or who feel “out of your league.” Everyone is in the same boat of wanting to connect with people and discover the next big idea before their competitors do. This makes it relatively easy to get a meeting at a convention that you might struggle to get in day-to-day life.

You are at that convention to build relationships and make friends, and the after-hours booze fest known as “cocktail hour” is a great place to do so. For better or worse, conventions are fueled by alcohol; this can be challenging if you don’t drink, but either way, it’s critical to be out there taking part. Conventions, especially the after-parties, can also be tricky if you’re not a naturally outgoing person. I have friends and coworkers who are great in the more structured environment of the convention floor but struggle with the after-hours socializing. It’s critical that you are genuine, relaxed, and unguarded, so find something about the evening that you enjoy. Go to karaoke. Laugh. Have fun. Say yes to after-dinner drinks and late-night drinks; late-night drinks is where you can form the strongest relationships. People are relaxed, they open up a bit, and you will have a really memorable shared experience to refer back to as your relationship develops.

Lance: Ido and I never sit together at these after-hours events. We spend plenty of time together as it is! You should chat and catch up with your partner only when you go back to your room to debrief. These after-dinner and late-night drinks are work, and we stick to our divide-and-conquer strategy. If I had a huge ego, this would be a problem, but the reality is that there is room for only one star, and in this setting the star is Ido. In this business you have to put away your feelings of insecurity. You don’t need to show them, particularly when you are trying to sell an aspirational brand. So I’m cool with Ido having the spotlight, and I use my time most effectively in supporting him as he makes these connections with the major players. At the end of the day, we both end up winning.

Be the most noticeable guy in the room

If you have a key account coming to a trade show, do whatever it takes to have him or her to yourself for the night. Don’t book the best restaurant in town. Book the most fun restaurant in town. The dinner is not about spreadsheets and marketing plans; it’s about eating great food, drinking plenty of great wine (or, in the case of some of our most “fun” accounts, getting blasted on shots of Jägermeister), and truly becoming friends with people whom you generally do not get to see outside of a corporate setting. There are going to be a few meetings that are a tougher “get,” and these are generally the very biggest companies at the show. If you’re struggling to get a meeting with them, ask around and find out if they are throwing a party. Yes? Great! Go and have fun and shake some hands. This is an infallible strategy — if you’re invited! If you aren’t invited, then you need to worm your way onto the guest list. The more exclusive the party, the more important it is to attend. So here’s our crash course in, well, crashing.

1. Ask your neighbors and customers what they are doing that evening; identify the big-ticket party for that night. Are you on the list? No? Then get working!

2. Find the best-looking and most genuinely charming guy or girl from your booth. Brief them on their objective and send them off to infiltrate the booth of the company hosting the party. Arm them with free samples and big smiles.

3. If that doesn’t work, find out where the party is, dress up, and tag along with a few other people that you know were invited and behave as though you own the joint (works 95 percent of the time). Effusively shake the host’s hand and thank him or her for the invite. Now that you’ve been such a mensch (gentleman) there’s no way they can kick you out!

4. Party like they are throwing the event just for you! Don’t act like a fool, but make sure everyone at the event knows that you are the life of the party.

5. Convince your most important suppliers/friends/staff to join you for after-party drinks at the bar in their hotel.

6. Look at your watch and realize that the conference floor opens in forty-five minutes! Run up to your room. Do fifty push-ups and drink three coffees.

7. Repeat every night till you are ready to cry with exhaustion.

8. Go home!

Treat your booth with love, and it will love you back.

First, make sure you have lots of products to swap at the end of the show! Your spouse/partner/roommate will be very happy because you can barter your stuff for other people’s stuff. Second, all conventioneers love getting products for free or in a barter. They’ll give it to their friends, or even better, give it to their family members, and there is nothing more effective than a buyer’s family liking the product. Most trade shows end in the early afternoon of the last day, and most trade show rules stipulate that all attendees keep their booths fully open till the very last minute of the last day of the trade show. But that last day is hard; you’re exhausted, and all you want to do is go home and sleep. You suddenly realize that consuming nothing but coffee and pretzels for four days is a questionable idea. By noon the convention floor is almost empty, with only a few people running around to wrap up last-minute deals. The temptation to put up your “closed” sign and slip some teamsters $500 to make your booth go away is HUGE.

Don’t do it. As much as you may be sick of the sight of your booth by the end of an event, always treat it with respect. Remember that you are going to want to use parts of it again, so don’t just hand over the job of tearing it down to a couple of guys loitering around the coffee stand. Always make sure you know who is going to pull the booth down and where it is going to go. Make sure your original builder has supplied some kind of plan for safely packing and shipping the booth. We ended up flying two men over from Hungary to pull down our first booth; we reckoned that the additional investment was worth it if it improved our odds of still having a beautiful booth for the next trade show.

Third, and equally important, squeeze every drop of value out of that show. The last day is generally quieter and slower and you never really know who might show up at the booth. If the last day is very quiet, it can be a good time to start following up on the people you and your team met during the show. Make sure you speak to the show organizers to secure you the same or a better location for your booth for next year. (If you forget to do this, you may end up wedged in between the line for the toilets and the rubbishy food outlets. Not good.)

The Multibooth Philosophy

After a show, our booth is shipped back to a storage facility, which is a little like the government warehouse in Raiders of the Lost Ark. We have various booths in storage crated up and ready to go. Our philosophy is to never show the same booth twice at the same convention or trade show. For example, the Taj Mahal Carrot will never go back to Hong Kong, but it will do very well at Las Vegas. The goal is to keep things surprising and fresh. You want people to be curious about what you’ve done differently from last time, and by rotating the booths we maximize the chances of our important accounts seeing something new every year. You may not have the budget for this; if that’s the case, then get creative. Keep the same basic shell, the same colors and overall design philosophy, but change things up a little. Have fun, but make sure your aesthetics align over the years. You want to surprise people, not confuse them.

Getting people excited about Yes To was the easy part. The hard part was everything else! Even while we were circling the world on the Trade Show Express, we had to deal with the nuts and bolts of actually manufacturing and shipping ever-increasing amounts of product. Now, remember how we talked about how partners have to work well together, in good times and bad? Another one of those bad times is coming up right now.

Additional Resources

Trade Show Directories and Tips

1. 2012 Top 250 US Trade Shows
2. Trade Shows, Exhibitions, Conferences & Business Events Worldwide
3. Exhibitor Magazine’s Exhibit Design Awards
4. Exhibitor Magazine’s Sizzle Awards
5. 22 Tips on How to Operate a Trade Show Booth
6. Exhibitor Central – Tradeshow Tips
7. Barzilai Design (our exhibit design firm)

Tools

1. Evernote (for note taking)
2. BuildASign (for signs and print)
3. Chimpadeedoo (for capturing leads)
4. Square (for collecting payment)
5. Cafepress (for schwag)
6. InternMatch (for finding booth staff)

For the detailed story of Yes To’s improbable rise, including the stupid mistakes, near fatal catastrophes, existential crises, and fancy sales footwork, check out Get Big Fast and Do More Good: Start Your Business, Make It Huge, and Change the World.

The post How to Dominate Any Tradeshow, and Why Even Solo Entrepreneurs Should Try appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

The dream is simple: get your product in the hands of celebrities or “influencers,” and they create a ripple effect that skyrockets you to fame and fortune.

What if Kim Kardashian tweets about you?

What if Hugh Jackman wears your custom shirts on the red carpet?

What if a top blogger includes you in a top-10 list?

What if you got a mention on The Office or another primetime show?

Sadly, sampling to “stars” seldom works out.

People who move the needle get a TON of stuff sent to them. The pic below is just part of my mail, and I’m not even a real celeb! Blurb and blog promotion requests received in one day, with the exception of one book:

So…how do YOU break through the noise?

This guest post will teach you. It’s written by Marc Ecko, founder of Marc Ecko Enterprises, a global fashion and lifestyle company. I wanted Marc to write this post because — in my opinion — he’s an expert at selling yourself without selling out. As CNBC put it, “Marc is living proof that you can be a marketing and business whiz and still be a true artist.”

Once a graffiti artist with no connections, Marc left the safety net of pharmacy school to start his own clothing company. Using hustle and creativity, he turned a $5,000 bag of cash into a global corporation worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

He created a lot of this success by repeatedly getting his products to impossible-to-reach icons (e.g. Spike Lee, Chuck D) and planning elaborate PR stunts (e.g. Air Force One graffiti hoax; buying Barry Bonds’ homerun record baseball and letting online votes determine its fate).

This post will explain his 10 rules — the do’s and don’ts — of his unique “swag bomb” approach to getting influencer attention. I agree with all of them.

Enjoy, replicate, and prosper…

ALSO: Marc will be answering questions in the comments, so leave your thoughts after the end of this post!

Enter Marc Ecko

Before Ecko was Ecko, it was just me, a suburban kid in New Jersey airbrushing stuff in my parents garage. In terms of hip hop, I was the quintessential outsider. I didn’t know anyone, I didn’t have any connections. All I knew was that I was passionate about my art, and that I wanted to make a business out of it.

In other words, I was in the exact position that basically every entrepreneur, author, and creative person in the world starts in. I had to make a name for myself–I had to crack in. I could only think of one way: giving stuff away for free to people who would like it. Taking action.

Over the years I perfected this strategy, using it to launch and build countless brands from Ecko Unltd to G Unit to Cut & Sew, Complex and Zoo York. Ecko, alone, has done billions of dollars in revenue since those days in the garage twenty years ago. Our collaboration with George Lucas and the iconic Star Wars brand was a direct result of this strategy. I’ll go to my grave proud of the fact that George Lucas actually said–and this is a quote–“No one has made STAR WARS cooler than ECKO.”

A lot of people think that mailing samples is just that–throwing some crap in the mail and hope it works. Well, that couldn’t be more wrong. A Swag Bomb, properly executed, is a work of art. When done right can generate massive amounts of PR, connections and access.

When done improperly, it ends up here…in the pile of orphan books at the New York Times. Or worse, it ends up in the trash can or lays their unopened. You’ve worked too hard to let that happen, to throw that work away because you made some simple mistakes.

So let’s go back to that garage. I’ll show you how swag bombs were instrumental in building the Ecko brand and then the lessons I’ve learned–trust me, I made a lot of mistakes–along the way.

The first person I ever tried to send one to was Kool DJ Red Alert.  Back then he was one of, if not the, most dominant DJs in hip-hop, and Rolling Stone magazine would name him as one of the fifty most influential people in music. Every weekend night, in an era before iTunes and Spotify, everyone listened to Red Alert on the New York radio station 98.7 Kiss-FM, the audio bible of hip-hop.

I couldn’t wait until his Friday-night show. Red was famous for doing shout- outs. I had no patience for waiting on hold and doing the dial-up thing, so I went to my strong suit of communication: my art. During his radio show, I camped out at the Kinko’s and straight-up spammed his fax machine with “Echo Airbrushing” promos. Black-and-white pen-and-ink illustrations of MCs standing encircled in a rap cypher. Or images shot from the floor to the sky, showing MCs jumping across the stage. All the images were unapologetically self-promotion- al—self-referential—and clearly branded and signed “Echo.” (I actually have a photo of one of the hats still–check it out)

And then one Friday night I’m listening to 98.7 like always, drawing in my black book, and I hear something on the radio.

“I gotta shout out my man Echo for blessing me with this fly gear! Yo, he got the fresh airbrushed gear, the craze snapback hats! My man Echo Airbrushing, yeah, yeah, Big Up Lakewood, New Jersey, and my man Echo, artwork is crazy.”

Whoa, what!?

The shout-out tasted good. I wanted more. I didn’t get complacent and didn’t let it fizzle as a one-shot thing; I had an instinctive grasp of the power of inertia, so I doubled down and sent him more.

I knew that I was on the verge of something. I knew because it felt authentic. I could sense that the timing was right and that I needed to take it to the next level.

I hope these rules–many of which I learned the hard way–will help you do the same with your own efforts.

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TEN RULES FOR BUILDING A SWAG BOMB 

1. Never Send Directly to Someone’s Home

I’ve had that happen. It’s fucking creepy. Everyone has a business address, and in this day and age, they’re sufficiently accessible. No one likes to feel like you’ve violated their personal space–and if you do that, that negative feeling is associated with your product, thus defeating the purpose.

Even creepier? Sending actual bombs. Look, I know it is a “swag bomb”, but there is no swag in sending unsolicited items to a personal address, particularly when the items are disguised to look like explosives.

For example, if you’re sending out a book (as I did; more on this shortly), don’t send them to reporter’s homes. That would be creepy. I sent mine to their office address, through my publisher, like normal people would do.

The same goes for email addresses. Don’t find every single email address the person has ever listed and blast them all at once. Don’t scour for the “private” or “personal” email because you think they don’t check the main one listed on their contact form. It makes you seem desperate–and weird. Find their public email and make your pitch. If you do it well, it will work. If it doesn’t, the problem is your pitch…not where you’re pitching it.

2. Never Expect Your Intended Audience to Even See It

So make it good enough that even if it gets to only his or her lieutenant—which will often be the case—you still make a material impact. In other words, if you’re in the t-shirt business, don’t send one shirt. Send an enormous box fill. Make the delivery a big event.

My friend Ryan Holiday did the marketing for American Apparel and instead of sending some small package, he sent a crate. One of the bloggers uploaded a video on YouTube and it did 125,000 views. That’s crazy. Look at Pepperidge Farms, which overnighted a box of “Milano” cookies to a blogger who wrote about the cookie. The act was memorable enough that the resulting post on reddit scored Pepperidge Farms over 500,000 new views and fans. But even if that had never gone public, it was still a cool way to hook a fan up–and all they would have been out was a couple bucks.

Me, I seeded my brand with the bona fide artists and instigators of pop culture. The motivation wasn’t as simple as “I hope they wear this”; it came from a desire to educate them, to land on their aesthetic radar, and to build a literacy of who I was and what I was trying to accomplish. So even if the package doesn’t go all the way to the top, it’s still making waves where it matters.

3. Never Send Just the Stock Shit

Think deeply about what you will send them, and work hard at customizing the content so that the end user will recognize this as an amazing, highly personalized gift. And it’s just that—a gift—so…never have expectations beyond giving a gift.

Back in the day, I could quote Do the Right Thing and Mo’ Better Blues backward and forward, so I sent Spike Lee some gear too. I heard he had a new movie out—a biopic of Malcolm X—so I sent him a sweatshirt with a meticulously painted portrait of Malcolm X on it. Personalization is crucial. I must have spent two days on that one.

Spike Lee graciously sent me a thank-you note—an actual signed letter from Spike! Fucking! Lee!—and that felt good. “Ya-dig? Sho-nuff.”

Take HBO sending custom bags to promote premiere of “Liberace”. They featured items tying into the biopic of excess living and luxury to relevant journalists. Custom Moet & Chandon bottle, engraved necklaces, the works. They went crazy over the top because that’s Liberace. Something stock wouldn’t have made any sense.

Another fun bit of inspiration. Remember Woot.com’s “bag of crap” deal? The reason it was so fun? Every once in awhile somebody’s bag would be full of cash. You can bet the internet blew up every time that happened. You can create that reaction with your own products too. You can blow people’s minds with a surprise every now and then.

4. Never Have Expectations, as It’s Just a Gift

The joy and purpose has to come from the confidence that you did it; you took action. Not everyone will acknowledge receipt. That’s okay. The point is the send out a lot of these–eventually you’ll get one or two big connections that subsidize all the misses. After all, I didn’t just send to Red Alert, but also Public Enemy’s Chuck D. Q-Tip. KRS-ONE. Essentially, I sent packages to all the cultural pioneers who inspired me.

For my book Unlabel, I hand-packed 15 Ecko-branded white shopping bags with red paper inside. Inside each was a big white Ecko branded watch, an Ecko fragrance, the super sweet wireless speaker that looks like a black spray paint can, plus Ecko earbuds. The reporters I sent them to were likely expecting a t-shirt (or just a book in a plain envelope and instead got a Swag Bomb that said Ecko was much more than that. Even though we invested a couple hundred dollars in the package, I’m not going to be upset if they don’t write about it.

A swag bomb is not a contract, there are no guarantees. Even when it is a $50,000 swag bag at the Oscars. It’s all about the hope that if you send the right stuff and hit the right chord, magic will happen.

5. Never Handwrite Your Marketing Materials

It’s one thing to send a handwritten cover note (preferably a 6” x 4.5” stock postcard) that’s less than twenty words. Fine. But it’s something else to send an all-handwritten business proposal that looks like it came from Son of Sam. I don’t care how legible your writing is. Type.

Don’t think of this as sending “fan mail.” This is a professionally produced, hyper-customized presentation. When you send me (or anyone) a solicitation of your idea, or your product, or the marketing materials of who you are and what you’re trying to sell, work backward from the experience of cracking open the box from its taped seal.

6. Never Use Second-Hand Packaging Materials

A used Trapper Keeper folder— with maybe a sticker over the dents so that you pass it off as new—ain’t cutting it. Why should I take your idea seriously if you’re not even willing to make a quick trip to Staples? Presentation is everything.

For example, early on I helped my best friend Cale (an aspiring R&B singer) get a meeting with Michael Bivins (Biv) with one of my jackets. Biv, a member of New Edition and Bell Biv Devoe, was the Simon Cowell of early-1990s R&B; he had a knack for discovering young talent, taking chances, and making stars out of nobodies like three Philly kids who became Boyz II Men.

We went all out. I made the jacket in the Blue Room of my garage, using a canvas of Swarovski crystals I had copped from a rummage store. Black, pewter, red, and clear. I bedazzled the hell out of that thing, one crystal at a time. Then, I tucked the cassette of my best friend Cale, along with a note, in the left chest pocket. That’s what we really wanted him to see.

Same goes if you’re more established–don’t just have the warehouse or your manufacturer (or Amazon.com) send some package on your behalf. Be legit, handle it like it’s a work of art. Someone complained to Old Spice recently, so they unsolicitedly hooked the guy up. But look how professional it looks–it wasn’t a couple sticks of deodorant in a box. It looks legit–like they actually care.

7. Never Stalk

If you have a phone number or email of an executive assistant, fine, it’s okay to call once in advance and then again once in confirmation of receipt. (You can also send it with a certified receipt, so you know who signed for it, and when.) But don’t call repeatedly like some psycho. Not cool.

Look at all the gift bags they give out at SXSW each year. Can you imagine if taking one was an implicit contract with the companies to follow you on social media or beg you for favors? It’d be a nightmare. People would be afraid that taking a t-shirt was akin to signing your life away.

Treat handlers (assistant, publicist, manager, associate) with respect. Not only is this the right thing to do, but this could be the hand of the king—and they’ll later whisper into the king’s ear.

In fact, after you confirm the receipt, consider the ball to be in their court. Don’t do anything until they make the next move. Got it?

8. Never Forget to Include Your Name, Email, and Phone Number

 Don’t presume that anyone is going to read a long letter. If the visual impact and the overall wraparound isn’t there, you’re dead. So make sure it looks good, feels good, and that it emotes your goals. And make it as clear as the sun who sent it. God-forbid you make a connection and then they don’t know what to do about it.

After we gave the jacket to Biv, we sat on pins and needles waiting. At three o’clock in the morning, the phone rang.

“Yo, is this Marc? This is Biv.” Biv’s signature gravelly voice.

“Hi, um, yeah, this is . . .” I tried to remember my name.

“I want to hook up with your man Cale. Tell him to be at the Sheraton in Red Bank in thirty minutes.”

Three thirty am. Cale didn’t chicken out. Cale jumped on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Cale took action. Two weeks later, Biv signed Cale to his newly formed imprint on Motown Records called Biv 10 Records.

When you get, The Call, be ready to go. No matter the time of day.

9. Never Send a Picture of Yourself Fan-Boying Out

Again, creepy. Let the content and the high concept speak for you. Don’t send some weird headshot.

Don’t be the guys and girls in these photos. Don’t! Look how miserable (but patient) the celebs are. But that would immediately stop if the people followed up with “Now let me tell you about my awesome business idea.” That chance was blown.

If there ever was someone to fanboy over in my personal life, it was George Lucas. However, instead of sending strange photos of my star wars collection, I waited until I was near Lucas, and casually showed him my geeked-out Yoda BlackBerry case I had personally made, and we instantly had a good vibe. There is a time and place for fanboy-dom, and pre-pitch isn’t it. (Here I am with George–see how calm I am being? It was hard but I made it.)

10. Never Gush

Notable figures don’t like being fawned over. Be careful to whom you say—and how often you say— “I love you.” (Good rule for life in general.) Don’t tell them, “You are my idol.” Speak matter-of-factly, and acknowledge the traits or practices that you respect and admire.

When Barry Sanders scored a touchdown, he would casually toss the football back to the ref, shrugging, and living by the credo “Act like you’ve been there before.” That should be you.

 Leave the gushing to them. After all, if you do it right, they’ll be so grateful or impressed by the gift that they’ll give you the treatment.

 CONCLUSION

There is one reality every entrepreneur has to face. You’re always pitching. You never stop auditioning. Even for Spike, even Mark Zuckerberg, even for the president.

The Swag Bomb is part of that. Get your stuff–because it’s great–in the hands of as many important people as you can. Sweat and bleed and innovate to make that happen.

 An authentic personal brand is more than just an idea. It’s not static. It’s not enough to say I have a brilliant idea and then lock it in your laptop. And it’s not enough to just talk about it, tweet about it, blog about it. Talk is cheap. An authentic, unique voice is a doer.

You will always keep pitching, and you will always have to deal with rejections. This doesn’t mean you should give up; it means you’re human and you have a pulse.

It’s tough to find famous examples of companies, artists, or individuals who didn’t get there in some way with excellent presentation and artistry in bringing in important early influencers and adopts.

The more telling example is the thousands of companies and millions of people you haven’t heard of: the artists, entrepreneurs, creators, and would-be instigators who talked a good game but never put themselves or there or did the work to get noticed.

Afterword by Tim

The “Swag Bomb” approach has many applications. Instead of customization, you can choose a unique venue, as I did when I gave away 500+ copies of The 4-Hour Chef at a TechCrunch Disrupt event, knowing that bloggers and other media would be there. It was unexpected, and the copies disappeared within hours, leading to tons of social media chatter when it mattered (during launch).

Last but not least, it often pays to NOT go for the most popular celebs, Twitter accounts, or otherwise. Remember the bar scene in A Beautiful Mind? On a 1-10 scale, 10 being the most trafficked, three or four 7 bloggers featuring you is far better — and easier/faster to achieve — than you obsessing over landing one 10 blogger.

For more tips and tricks for how to jump from niche to mega-mainstream, I highly recommend you check out Marc’s first book, Unlabel: Selling You Without Selling Out.

Marc will also be answering questions in the comments, so please share your questions below! If you have any sample-sending success stories of your own, I’d love to hear them.

The post Marc Ecko's 10 Rules for Getting "Influencer" Attention appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Preface from Tim

This is the second post by Alexis Ohanian for Entrepreneurship Week on this blog. Here is the first post, which covers his founding of reddit, which he later sold for millions of dollars.

This post covers a critical topic: how to get massive attention for your company from national media. How do you pitch press? Develop relationships with influential journalists?  The real answers might surprise you.

Most books and articles on this subject are pure BS. Speaking as someone who’s been on magazine covers (Outside, Inc. Magazine) and section covers (NYT Style Section, Travel Section), I can tell you: there is a science to this.

Alexis is a master. Enjoy.

Enter Alexis

I’m back!

Tim very kindly invited me back to give you another excerpt from my book that draws from all my experience over six years as a Y Combinator advisor and startup investor (70+ companies).

I want to help you do what Steve and I did (not in costume) to grow reddit into the top-50 website it is today… with a total advertising budget of a few hundred dollars. I spent that all on stickers…

Sidenote: The first one of you who tweets at me (@alexisohanian) with the correct answer for Steve’s Halloween costume in the above photo will get a signed copy of Without Their Permission, plus some fun extras.

Traction: Everyone wants it, here’s how I think about generating “buzz”

I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.

—Jay-Z, “Diamonds From Sierra Leone”

I believe in startup karma.

Being the kind of person who’s always asking for favors and hustling others is a reputation that not only gets around, it sticks. It’ll work in the short term, and perhaps there are some exceptions to the rule who have made it work in the long term, but being someone who’s always asking for favors makes the already difficult job of starting something new immeasurably harder.

Instead, look at every meeting as a chance to do someone a solid. This especially matters when dealing with representatives of the media, because just buying them a coffee doesn’t mean you’re getting a front-page story. Look at every meeting as a long-term investment. She’s not writing about your startup? That’s okay!

Be helpful. What’s she thinking about right now? Some kind of trend is going on in X that’s not been covered yet, and she’s looking for a founder doing Y. If you can connect the dots, make the introduction for her. You’ve just helped two people with one e-mail. Cha-ching. More good karma.

Over the years, you can build a reputation as a connector in your field. Connectors are a journalist’s trump card when they need to get a lead on an unreported idea, or when they need an introduction in order to land a useful interview. This is a valuable position for you to be in, because it means you’re going to stay at the tops of their minds. When your journalist friends are writing about something in your field, whom do you think they’re going to reach out to first?

Never Turn Down Cannoli

In between bites of cannolo (yep, that’s the singular form of cannoli), I was explaining to Rachel Metz, freelance reporter for Wired, why reddit.com was going to become the front page of the Internet. She seemed interested, but she could’ve just been enjoying her cannolo.

I’d taken the Fung Wah bus down from Boston to meet with her in downtown Manhattan because a few weeks earlier, I’d met a friend of hers named Jennifer 8. Lee. Jenny had attended a Halloween party that Steve and I had thrown at our Somerville home and office—which should explain the above photo—and we hit it off. We discussed the subject of her book proposal, which happened to be, of all things, Chinese food. I managed to impress Jenny with my knowledge of Chinese cuisine, so we got to talking that night and that led to her introduction to Rachel.

A few days later, Rachel would confess to me that while she initially wanted to write a story about reddit, she felt we’d become friends and that it wouldn’t be professional for her to pursue the story. That was fine by me. No Wired story came from that, but I got a new friend in Rachel, one who happened to mention reddit to her editor at Wired, Kristen Philipkoski. Kristen, the wife of Kourosh Karimkhany, was doing business development for Conde Nast and heard from Rachel about a pair of plucky founders in Boston working on something interesting called reddit.

And then one day (February 22, 2006, to be precise) this e-mail popped up in my inbox:

I’m a friend of Rachel Metz. I’m also the director of biz dev for CondéNet, the internet arm of Condé Nast, which, as I’m sure you know, publishes magazines like Wired, GQ, Vogue, New Yorker, Vanity Fair, etc. I’m intrigued with your technology and was hoping to set up a time to talk about possibly working together. I’m open the rest of the day today and Thursday, but will be traveling for a week starting Friday. Do you have time for a phone call? Also, are you based in Boston?

Little did we know that exactly one year after that fateful party on Halloween, Steve and I would be celebrating the acquisition of our company. As if you needed more reasons to throw a Halloween party. Or eat cannoli.

Everyone Is the Media

The traditional public-relations industry model is broken. Good riddance.

The only time I ever wrote a press release was when Condé Nast made me do it for the announcement of our acquisition, and I wasn’t about to argue with the company that had just bought my company. Full-disclosure: Since writing this book, I’ve had to edit a press release the PR firm hired by my publisher wrote on my behalf. But the truth is, I’m not certain that press releases are as relevant as they were in the twentieth century.

These days, everyone you meet is part of the media. Every relationship you enter into, whether it’s with a customer or a writer at The Wall Street Journal, is a long-term investment. No self-respecting journalist wants to feel like all she does is publish press releases as “news,” although some do. The idea that a press release is magically going to compel someone to talk about what you’re working on is absurd. At a time when none of us have enough time to pay attention to all the content the Internet produces, you can be sure the professionals who are pitched every minute of the day certainly don’t have the spare cycles. This means you’re going to have to make yourself known. Here are some things to keep in mind as you do that. 

Be Helpful

If you’ve been doing your job as a founder, by now you should be an expert in your industry (and maybe even in a few others as well). Use that to your advantage when talking to the media. It gives you insights on bigger trends that are valuable to journalists, so be helpful—even if it’s not directly helping you or your company, it is actually still helping you and your company. Anything you can do to help someone else do his or her job better is going to win you that valuable startup karma. Noticing a trend in X meets Y, offer an introduction to some other experts in X meets Y. Be helpful!

Remember the RentHop team from chapter 4? ¹ While Lee Lin was getting his broker’s license, he found himself noticing trends. He validated that hunch when he and his co-founder, Lawrence Zhou, started mining mountains of New York rental-price data that revealed everything from how much more people are willing to pay for a doorman to how much less an apartment is worth for every block it sits away from a subway stop. At first, they had no plans to publish any of what they’d learned. Once Lee started promoting RentHop, however, he realized that these data were a tremendous resource. Whether it was a blog post he wrote charting the optimal time of day to search for rentals in New York (spoiler: between 9:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m.) or a statistic a journalist could cite for an article, it was a piece of added value that bolstered his company’s reputation as experts in apartment rentals.

Every time Tim does a great job breaking down exactly how he does everything he does, it’s being helpful. Over time, he becomes known as the guy for getting things done (not always in 4-hours, mind you) then turns around and does solids for people like me. Building for the long-term.

Speaking of which, I’ve got an entire class on online brand building (lessons from reddit, breadpig, and hipmunk) with specific examples of everything from low-cost social media campaigns I used to make people love our hipmunk chipmunk to the sticker strategy that spread reddit aliens all over the world. Grab some popcorn, it’s long.

Pitch the Right Journalists the Right Way (by Not Pitching)

Okay, you’ve found them. Warm introductions to mutual acquaintances from people who know you both well always help, but there’s nothing wrong with a cold pitch. Just be concise. I try to write e-mails in fewer than five sentences. Precision with impact is one of the most effective writing skills one can have. The best way to get coverage is to not pitch your product. Journalists are human beings. Whether they write for [insert your favorite, most venerable news organization here] or they just launched their first blog yesterday, they do not exist just to write about you or your big idea. Sorry, but it’s better you hear it from me now. In order to earn their attention (and their goodwill), you’re going to have to give them something. Pitch by not pitching—be helpful. You know what they’re into, so send them a link to a breaking yet underreported story you think they’d appreciate. If you can introduce them to a fellow founder who’s working in a sector they’re covering, offer it to them. Know they love futuristic watches? Let them know when NOOKA is having a sale. When and if the time comes to make a pitch (you’ll know it when it happens), then do it well. 

Tell Stories Around a “Peg”

Pardon the jargon, but it’s helpful to know how journalists think. Big trends, things that people are talking about, are “pegs” that you ideally want to anchor to your pitch. It could be as blatant and timely as the Olympics, or it could be more subtle. During the famed billion-dollar acquisition of Instagram by Facebook, Michael Seibel, CEO of SocialCam, a mobile video-sharing app and portfolio company, rode the wave of media attention surrounding the acquisition. It was no surprise that over the next few days, articles buzzed about who would be “Instagram for video.” It didn’t surprise me one bit when SocialCam was there in every discussion.

Over time you’ll develop an eye for it. If you’re reading about a particular idea that’s got everyone’s attention, find a way to connect your own story to it. If you don’t get written up, or quoted, or appear to have gotten anything in return for your time, don’t fret (and remember what I said about these people not existing to do you a favor). There’s always value in taking the time to meet someone. You shouldn’t always be pitching, anyway. Build long-term relationships and they’ll pay long-term dividends.

Don’t Forget to Document Your Startup 

Take photos around the office, screenshots of early builds, et cetera. No matter how things turn out, you’ll appreciate having these memories later. In the meantime, it’ll be useful in a blog post or tweet. And if things turn out really well, people will come to really value those behind-the-scenes photos or embarrassing early builds.

For instance, here’s a photo of Steve and me from just days after we’d launched reddit.

Please, please have a decent high-resolution photo of your founders readily available. I’ve had to arrange last-minute photo shoots for founders who were about to land some great press but didn’t have a single decent photo to send. Your smartphone won’t cut it. Borrow the nicest digital camera you can find from your nicest friend and take some photos. If nothing else, you can send them to your mom.

For good measure, record the stages of your product, too, even if it’s only so you can look back on them with a hearty laugh. No matter how your company turns out, you’ll appreciate having a record of its evolution. I use this first version of reddit as an example of just how embarrassed you should be by your first version.

Once You Get Press, Make a Note of It, Then Get Rid of It

This has been my policy since the day we finally got a taste of attention from the mainstream media. It was a different Internet back then, and it took me months of hustling to finally get someone to write about us. Oddly enough, it was a British newspaper, The Guardian, that wrote the first story—six months after we’d launched. It was great to see the increase in our traffic when a digital publication would write about us, but there’s something to be said for that palpable version of the news. The Guardian kindly sent us a few print copies. I reread the article, imagining better quotes I could’ve used, and brought it with me on my next trip back home. My parents had hoarded just about everything I did since I was a little kid (only child, remember), and my mom was thrilled to see her son’s name in print (I couldn’t tell her that it was less exciting than digital, which would have enabled us to actually get click-throughs to our site).

This started a tradition I continue to this day. Even though Mom is gone, I personally send my dad all the press I ever get, because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to think about it for more than a day. It’s a twenty-four-hour rule. I think I heard a football coach talk about this once in an interview. Feel good about the win for twenty-four hours, and then get your mind off it and think about next week. Same goes for losses, too. But I especially don’t want to dwell on past accomplishments, and I recommend the same for my portfolio companies.

Complacency, especially in this industry, is toxic. Remember what I said about your milk shake—forget that kindergarten advice and don’t share it.

Spreadsheets Are Your Friends

As a startup founder, you’re a cheerleader. You should always have a recent e-mail, or tweet, or quote from one of your users who love you readily at hand. Go a step further and keep a mailing list of those superfans who love you so much they’ve said they’d be willing to be interviewed about your business. List those people on a spreadsheet that you share among your team, and when you encounter a superfan, ask her if she’d be willing to be contacted by the press at some point and have a testimonial on record.

Each superfan should have his or her own row on your spreadsheet. Establish columns for a favorable quote, home address, occupation, and e-mail address. Always respect a person’s privacy and explain why these tidbits are so helpful; years later, when this list gets long and you’re trying to help a journalist who’s writing about graduate students in the Bronx using [insert your type of product or service here], you can get him connected to the perfect person.

Keep another spreadsheet for press hits, designating columns for important sort criteria like name, e-mail, publication, a pull quote from the piece, and the URL. This becomes your press contacts list. PR people will brag about the size of these as though they were in a locker room, but, as always, it’s not about size—it’s about how you use it. You’re building relationships. It does not matter how many people you have on this list if none of them give a damn about what you have to say.

Start small. As I said earlier, it took six months before any mainstream media wrote an article about us, and until then I was reaching out to anyone who had a blog in tech or media. As you grow beyond your niche, you’re going to be forced to connect your idea to bigger trends and find ways to humanize it with real people telling real stories.

Traction starts with a product people want; as word spreads, you’ll start seeing the week-over-week and month-over-month growth that gets investors pulling out their checkbooks and briefcases full of money.

Actually, most investments are done via duffel bags full of cash—or via wire transfer.

Get started being awesome. None of us know what we’re doing, but trying is how we learn.

[Excerpted from Without Their Permission: How the 21^st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed, by Alexis Ohanian.]

Get a Year of Mentorship

Bonus! I’m hereby announcing a Prizeo campaign to raise enough money to fund every single DonorsChoose.org STEM project in Brooklyn.

Yep, Tim inspired me with his DonorsChoose.org fundraiser, for which I had the pleasure of being a bonus-prize, and as we’re both advisory board members to this awesome non-profit, I figured this was the perfect place to launch it.

This means a lot to me, not just because it’s my home, but because of how much I believe in the internet to change the world for good. Yet this will only happen if we get all of us connected and armed with the skills to make the most out of this tremendous resource. This is one small step forward.

Anyone who clicks through this link to enter the campaign in the next 24 hours (ending 9am PT on 9/19/13) will get twice the chance of winning the grand prize — a year’s mentorship from me that also includes dinner with Tim Ferriss. I get emails every day from people asking about everything from choosing college majors (cough computer science cough) to advice on raising venture funding. I will be a text message away, like a firefighter-yoda (though much less heroic), to help with in-the-weeds strategy or just a motivational pick-me-up at a moment’s notice for an entire year of our lives.

It’s the sort of thing I’m already doing for my portfolio founders and I’ll gladly take on another if it means helping this many of Brooklyn’s kids.

###

About the author: Alexis Ohanian is the author of Without Their Permission.

Ohanian is a startup guy making the world suck less: reddit, breadpig, hipmunk, Y Combinator. Investor, speaker, host of Small Empires, and loves his cat Karma.

Afterword by Tim

Several commenters have asked, “How do I get to know journalists or bloggers in the first place?” Besides volunteering to work for free at events where they congregate (e.g. SXSW, GigaOm/PaidContent, etc.), here in an article that explain how to do it remotely:

From First TV to Dr. Oz – How to Get Local Media…Then National Media (Includes actual pitches, e-mails, etc.)

The post How to Get National Press With No Budget (Plus: One Year of Mentorship from Alexis Ohanian) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Did you enjoy this sample of creativeLIVE content?

If so, you’ll love my extended interview of author Neil Strauss on The Tim Ferriss Show podcast. Click below to stream or you can find it on iTunes (see #15):

The post Tim Ferriss Interviews Neil Strauss, 7x New York Times Bestselling Author, on the Creative Process appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

Debbie Sterling’s GoldieBlox is now grossing $300,000+ per month.

My specialty is modeling success. I analyze what works and ask: what recipe can I find that others can use?

In this post, we’ll dissect five successful online businesses. Some of them (e.g. GoldieBlox) are now grossing $300,000+ per month…and it’s the founder’s first company! One (Fresh-Tops) has gone from 1 to 20 employees in six months. Some of the other stats are even more impressive.

The highest monthly sales by a contestant in the FIRST two months of starting, excluding any pre-existing businesses, was $196,811. How would that change your life?

Out of more than 10,000 contestants in one of the last Shopify Build-a-Business Competitions, these five businesses are those that sold the most in completely different categories:

Design, Art and Home

Gadgets and Electronics

Fashion and Apparel

Canadian [Because Shopify is based in Canada. Go Canucks!]

Everything Else

So… What do they all have in common? And what can you replicate on your own?

For both questions, the answer is: more than you think.

[Sidenote: Have you seen the brand-new competition, launched yesterday? Grand prize is an all-expenses-paid trip to Necker Island, Richard Branson’s private island, to be mentored for a week by Richard, yours truly, Seth Godin, and a bunch of amazing folks. Check out this description.]

Without further ado, let’s analyze these five rock stars, looking at what they did right and, just as important, what they did wrong…

5 CASE STUDIES

Electronics & Gadgets Category Winner: GameKlip

Who are you and what is your Shopify store?

Ryan French, Creator of GameKlip

Describe your product in 1-3 sentences.

The GameKlip is a device that attaches your Android phone to a DualShock3 controller, normally used for the PlayStation3. This allows you to use a real controller to play games on your smartphone. It opens the Android platform up to more than just “casual” gaming with touch screen controls, and really gives you a full console experience at a fraction of the cost.

How did you decide on your product? What ideas did you consider but reject, and why?

I was frustrated with the controls on my smartphone. Touchscreen controls worked okay for simple games, but anything more complex was impossible. I made a bracket to hold my phone onto my controller, and realized other people might want one too.

I didn’t reject any other product ideas. I set out looking for a solution to a problem I had, instead of looking for a product to sell. Once I had my solution, the GameKlip, I focused on finding a way to share it with others.

What were some of the main tipping points (if any) or a-ha moments? How did the tipping points happen?

The first a-ha moment was when I snapped my phone onto my controller for the first time. I found myself playing games for hours, and really enjoying the experience. I stayed up all night bending plastic and trying out different shapes until I arrived at a design I thought was efficient and presentable.

The second a-ha moment was when I posted a video of my prototype and started pre-orders. I realized there actually was a demand for my creation. I used the pre-orders to fund my first batch of plastic.

The third a-ha moment came when I realized that I couldn’t continue hand-making the GameKlip forever. I spent all my money on a mold so I didn’t have to make the GameKlip by hand anymore. I couldn’t afford a mold for every phone, so I cut the product line down to just two versions, a model for the Galaxy S3, and a universal solution. The community met the new models with open arms and demand increased immensely.

My final a-ha moment was when I could finally contract my assembly process. I was able to use some of the funds generated from the new molded version to contract out an assembly line. Now that my production process was scalable beyond the hours I could put in myself, the GameKlip was finally ready for retail distribution.

What were your biggest mistakes, or biggest wastes of time / money?

About half of my time was spent struggling with my spreadsheets and dealing with the post office, instead of focusing on my product, so I wish I found solutions to those earlier.

It’s easy to say that I should have streamlined my manufacturing earlier, but each step along the way was a learning experience. If I had jumped into contract manufacturing and assembly earlier, it’s very possible that I would have taken on too much. If I had unlimited units to sell, with no ecommerce platform to sell them on, it would have been a disaster.

Key manufacturing and marketing lessons learned?

Keep things local. To find a manufacturer, I started with a simple Google search. I found that there was an injection molding company right across the street from one of the restaurants I frequent, but unfortunately their machines were all booked. Even though they weren’t able to take on my project, I was able to use their 3d printer for my prototypes, and they pointed me in the right direction for finding another company that could produce the part.

If you’re just starting out, I’d suggest doing some local searches and talking to as many people as possible. I started by calling a local shop that supplied plastic sheets for home projects. I described my idea, and asked if they knew anyone in the area that could help me make it happen. I found that most people were more than happy to spend a few minutes on the phone to help.

Try searching for a “rapid prototyping” shop in your area. They’ll be able to help make some physical prototypes of your product, and most will have connections with companies that can handle the manufacturing when you’re ready.

When I did get all my manufacturing processes figured out, I was really glad that I kept everything as local as possible. The GameKlip and packaging are made in the USA. It costs a little more to manufacture things here instead of overseas, but the added convenience of being able to drive over and talk to people is incredibly valuable. The packaging is printed, and the units assembled, about half an hour away from my apartment.

As for marketing, I approached that aspect of the company a little differently than most. Instead of making a traditional advertisement, I simply sat down and recorded myself showing the product and explaining what you could do with it. I think it’s important to let the product speak for itself. Everything exploded organically after that.

Any PR wins? Media, well-known users, or company partnerships, etc? How did they happen?

I was an active member on Reddit, and Android forums like XDA Developers, long before I started GameKlip. When I did launch my product, the members of both of those communities definitely helped me spread the word. I couldn’t have done it without them.

The GameKlip has been featured on Gizmodo, The Verge, The Fancy, ABC News, PC World, CNET, Phandroid, Android Authority, Ask Men, as well as many other blogs around the world.

I didn’t make any pitches or hire a marketing firm to get these mentions, they all picked up on my story on their own. In my opinion, having interesting photos of your product is crucial! I made sure I had a somewhat large selection of quality photos available, to make it as easy as possible for writers to feature my story. If I had to do it over again, I would have gone a step further and created a press kit ahead of time. That way it would have been even easier for blogs to pick up on my story.

What software/tools and resources, mentors or groups did you find useful for growing, if any?

The most useful tool to me was Google search. For example, to learn more about international shipping, I simply searched “best way to ship a package overseas” and found that lots of people post on forums with great information. The amount of information stored on forums is incredible!

Software wise, ShipStation is an app which allowed me to automatically pull orders from my online store and create shipping labels. Before I found this I was copying and pasting addresses into the USPS website manually. Now I click one button and the invoices come out of one printer and the shipping labels come out of another. The order processing efficiency still amazes me every morning!

If you were to do it all over again, what would you do differently?

Having a real shipping system and the hardware to back it up (a label printer), would have helped a lot. My two most prized possessions at this point are a shipping label printer and an automatic tape dispenser. When I first started I was running sticker paper through my home printer, cutting the labels out with scissors, and using tape from my local office supply store. I managed to ship over a thousand packages this way, but I could have saved a huge amount of time and money if I adopted a better system earlier.

Any other advice to people starting their first online businesses?

Don’t feel like you need to know everything, or that everything has to be perfect before you start. I knew nothing about running a business, had no idea how to have something manufactured, and had no idea how to ship a package overseas. I’ve now shipped thousands of units to over 80 countries worldwide. It won’t be easy, there’ll be many points where you feel like giving up, but it’s worth it.

What’s next?

I am still pushing forward at full speed. I hope to have the GameKlip on store shelves around the world.

Design, Art & Home Category Winner: GoldieBlox

Who are you and what is your Shopify store?

Debra Sterling, Founder of GoldieBlox.

Describe your product in 1-3 sentences.

GoldieBlox is a book series and construction toy starring Goldie, the girl engineer. Throughout Goldie’s adventures, she encounters problems she needs to solve by building simple machines. As kids read along, they get to build along with Goldie, learning basic engineering principles with each story.

How much revenue is your company currently generating per month (on average)?

Over 300K per month.

To get to this revenue number, how long did it take after the idea struck?

About 6 months.

How did you decide on your product? What ideas did you consider but reject, and why?

When I first started, a lot of advisors were telling me to ditch the idea of a toy entirely and just do an app. I decided to do a physical toy (in addition to an app, which we are launching around x-mas this year) because I felt that the tactile experience of building things was a better way to introduce mechanical engineering principles. Screen play alone just doesn’t do it justice.

My earliest toy sketches were girly Legos… curved shapes, tiny decorative pieces, girly themes like princess castles and stuff (a lot like the Lego Friends line of girl construction toys that just launched, actually). I ditched this idea because I felt like it was reinforcing all the same old gender stereotypes. I wanted to push the envelope and develop an idea that didn’t rely on those stereotypes to engage girls. I knew that little girls are more than just princesses and that I could make something different and empowering that they’d fall in love with.

What were some of the main tipping points (if any) or a-ha moments? How did the tipping points happen?

My big ‘a-ha’ moment came when I realized I needed to incorporate a book into the game element. I did extensive research into the differences between the learning styles of boys and girls. I met with neuroscientists and teachers, and I spent a lot of time playing with kids. I asked kids to bring me their favorite toy. Girls would always bring me a book. Boys would bring me a toy. After the fifth girl brought me a book, I decided I needed to blend the construction components of my boardgame with a story. This was a huge ‘a-ha’ moment for me because it significantly changed the direction of my toy.

What were your biggest mistakes, or biggest wastes of time / money?

My biggest waste of money so far was when I first hired a law firm. I met with a few different law firms and I felt really, really good about one with whom I really connected. I liked the lawyer, but he was expensive and because I had limited capital, I hired a cheaper law firm I didn’t like as much. I almost instantly regretted my choice. I eventually had to leave the cheaper law firm and went with my original choice. The cheaper firm made me pay money upfront, while the one I eventually went with was willing to defer payment until I was in a stronger financial position. I wasted a lot of money by making the wrong choice.

Key manufacturing and marketing lessons learned?

1. Prototype and test everything! It’s important to prototype everything beforehand. Then test the prototypes on your target demographic. Long before I approached a manufacturer, I designed the toy myself in my living room. I made crude working prototypes using ribbon, clay, wooden dowels, thread spools, Velcro and pegboard from the hardware store. I wrote and illustrated a book where Goldie built a belt drive to spin her friends, and mimicked the action in the book with the physical pieces.

I probably spent a total of $250 on the prototypes. I tested everything on children around the Bay Area – I went to over 40 homes and 3 schools. I observed girls and boys, ages 4-12, interacting with the game. Every time I observed a child and/or parent playing with it, I learned a new insight, which I incorporated into the next version. I quickly iterated and improved the design until it rocked.

2. Be prepared for the manufacturing part to take a long time. The whole process of prototyping and manufacturing is huge. Example: I sketched out detailed drawings and dimensions for each piece of the board game, but I needed the drawings in CAD. One afternoon, I snuck into an Industrial Designers Society of America “happy hour” to try and find an industrial designer who could assist me. I met a really talented engineer there who was passionate about my mission and agreed to help. Then, I needed the prototypes to be printed, so we used 3D printing technology to take them to the next level. I hired a professional sculptor to create the character figurines to match my drawings. I sent everything to the factory, and they made a manufacturer’s sample. Once I approved the sample, we began the tooling process, which is timely and expensive. It took several months of back-and-forth revisions of the plastic parts until the tolerances were perfect. This resulted in a lot of hair pulling. We are still tweaking the molds. Nevertheless, we finally hit the green light and went into production on a first run of 40,000 toys to fulfill our pre-orders from Kickstarter and our website. Seriously, you can’t underestimate the time that manufacturing takes.

3. Decide if you’re an entrepreneur or an inventor. When I started out I was incredibly secretive because I didn’t want anyone to steal my idea. But then a friend asked me if I wanted to be an inventor or an entrepreneur. An inventor works by themselves in a lab, but an entrepreneur needs to inspire others to lend their expertise. I realized that I needed help. I went out and found the best mentors in the fields I was working in and asked for their help. I had to be specific about what I needed and asked them exactly what I wanted them to do. I was amazed at how much help I got! I saved so much time and money by getting help from someone who had been in the toy business for 30 years.

4. Create an authentic and emotional story behind your product. When it comes to my marketing strategy, I am a brand-driven person and I believe that the most important thing is creating an authentic and emotional story and brand. We’re more than a product, we’re a social mission and I like to give the product a face and personality (mine!) For example, our decision to launch on Kickstarter wasn’t about raising funds. We used it as a platform for sharing our story in a video format. Because then it wasn’t: “Hey! Here’s this toy for girls,” it was: “Hey, here’s this female engineer who is trying to do something about a problem in our society.”

5. Plan your Kickstarter exit strategy. We started on Kickstarter, but a lot of these products just fizzle out when their campaign has ended. We started our Shopify store ahead of time so that people who missed the Kickstarter campaign could still participate. My online store was my saving grace because my video went viral and my shop was up and running to capitalize on the publicity. My online store far exceeded the sales I had made on Kickstarter.

Any PR wins? Media, well-known users, or company partnerships, etc? How did they happen?

Our first PR win happened very early, in fact months before we even launched. I was still in the earliest prototyping stages, but I created a blog to share my stories of building GoldieBlox with friends and family. A friend-of-a-friend’s sister found the blog, she was a writer for The Atlantic. Another friend-of-friend found the blog, who happened to be a writer for TechCrunch. I set up phone interviews with both of them and gave them the “exclusive story.” They both posted wonderful pieces about GoldieBlox the day we launched, which created a ton of buzz.

Another win was that we got Tim Schafer (cult video game designer / Kickstarter celebrity) to make a cameo in our Kickstarter video with his 4-year-old daughter. He then tweeted the link to his 90,000 Kickstarter backers. I met Tim through my banker. When I told my banker I was about to go up on Kickstarter, he made the introduction to Tim’s colleague, Justin, who had just joined on board at DoubleFine Productions (they had raised over $3 million dollars on Kickstarter). I arranged a meeting to learn how they’d done it and to get advice. I hung around there a couple times, until I ultimately persuaded Tim to appear in our video.

When we launched on Kickstarter, we had a lot of influential people in tech backing our project: Sheryl Sandberg (COO of Facebook), Craig Newmark (founder of Craigslist), Alexis Ohanian (Founder of Reddit), Mayim Bialik (Actress, Big Bang Theory), the list goes on.

We also got written up in Forbes, Huffington Post, The Guardian, Wired, TIME, Ms. Magazine, The Boston Globe, The San Jose Mercury News, interviewed on BBC world radio, and NPR. We didn’t have a PR agency or anything. These reporters simply emailed into “info@goldieblox.com” and we set up the interviews.

But our biggest PR win to date was on November 14, 2012, we call it “G Day.” Eduardo Jackson from upworthy.com posted our Kickstarter video about a month after the campaign had ended. It instantly went viral. In just a couple days, the video spiked to almost a million views. There were so many orders, we literally sold out of our first shipment and had to push back the delivery date.

What software/tools and resources, mentors or groups did you find useful for growing, if any?

StartingBloc, a social entrepreneurship fellowship program, was by far the biggest game-changer for GoldieBlox.

Pacific Community Ventures, connected us with a pro-bono advisor, Sam Allen (founder of ScanCafe) who has been instrumental to our business.

I got to pitch GoldieBlox on the main stage at SOCAP and met really great contacts in the social innovation space.

The books “Lean In” by Sheryl Sandberg and “Start Something That Matters” by Blake MyCoskie both inspired me.

And my mentors: Terry Langston (founder, Pictionary), Brendan Boyle (head of toys, IDEO), Bob Lally (co-founder, Leapfrog), Jake Bronstein (founder, BuckyBalls), and Clara Shih (founder, Hearsay Social) played a huge role in helping me learn about the toy business.

If you were to do it all over again, what would you do differently?

I would ask for help from the start. Also, in the beginning I thought I had to make a range of products, but this spread my team too thin and it wasn’t very realistic. I had this idea that if you are a startup, you have to work around the clock until you just about kill yourself. If I had to do it over again, I would only work on one thing at a time.

What’s next?

This month we’re launching into retail stores. And we’re also very busy developing new products to add to the line.

Fashion & Apparel Category Winner: Fresh-Tops

Who are you and what is your Shopify store?

Nella Chunky, Founder of Fresh-Tops

Describe your product in 1-3 sentences.

Fresh-Tops is high end fashion for hipster trendy teenage females. Our products are inspired by pop culture with a girly twist. We sell everything from leggings, accessories, crop tops, sweaters and anything that our customers requests that makes sense.

How did you decide on your product? What ideas did you consider but reject, and why?

I experimented with a bunch of brands until we found one that really worked. I ended up with my current brand by being inspired by pop culture, and a love for bright colors and creating fun, cute little things. I believe that to be successful in fashion, you have to stay fresh, and that’s where the name Fresh-Tops came from.

What were some of the main tipping points (if any) or a-ha moments? How did the tipping points happen?

My biggest tipping point was realizing how important social media is to the growth of my company. Being able to interact with our customers 24/7 on various social media platforms has been really, really important.

What were your biggest mistakes, or biggest wastes of time / money?

My biggest mistake was with packaging. When I first created Fresh-Tops I was convinced that fancy packaging and the experience of our customers opening our products would increase sales. Nope. Its better to focus on fast delivery and high quality products rather than packaging, which only eat out on your profits. Once our brand became more established it made more sense to invest in pretty packaging.

Key manufacturing and marketing lessons learned?

1. Network. Getting to know people in my industry played a huge role in developing my company. We found all our manufacturers through referrals from personal relationships. Get involved with the market of your specific products. If you’re in the fashion industry go to every fashion event you can.

2. You can’t ignore social media. Our marketing strategy is completely focused on our social media. We use Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram and Twitter to share pictures of our clothing. Then our fans share those pictures with their audiences. This social influence is very powerful. People tend to shop where their friends shop and they feel left out if they’re not involved.

3. Secure your brand name. We keep our ears open for the next popular network, and we’ll then immediately establish accounts. It’s important to do this for two reasons. First, to secure your brand name before someone else gets. Second, you want to be in these social circles in case they catch buzz. For example, there is a lot of buzz around Keek right now. It’s a social site which allows users to post videos no more than 30 seconds long. We don’t know how we’re going to use this as a marketing tool yet, but at least we have reserved our company user name before anybody else could.

Any PR wins? Media, well-known users, or company partnerships, etc? How did they happen?

No company partnerships as of yet but we are looking to partner with a PR firm and a very well known web development company this year.

What software/tools and resources, mentors or groups did you find useful for growing, if any?

We don’t really use any fancy software or tools. You’d be surprised how much you can do with very little integrated software. A couple of my mentors who I study, and who inspire me are Kimora Lee Simmons and Tony Hseish.

Conference wise, learnt a lot from Fashion Week and Stitch Trade Show in Las Vegas.

If you were to do it all over again, what would you do differently?

Our biggest challenges so far have been holiday seasons. During the holiday season, it was tough to keep up with increased demand, so I would have ensured our stock count was big enough.

Any other advice to people starting their first online businesses?

I would really suggest that if you are starting your own business, it’s very important to listen to your customers and use their input to drive the growth of your business. We relied on email requests and suggestions from our social media fans when deciding how to move forward and what items to add to our line, and it worked really well.

The second thing I would say is just do it. Keep experimenting and keep trying different things and different brands until you find something that works. Be versatile and flexible and you’ll learn and grow as you go along. Stick to doing a few things really well and don’t overextend yourself.

What’s next?

This spring we are starting a new line of shorts which are fun and colorful.

Canadian Category Winner: Canadian Icons

Who are you and what is your Shopify store?

Aron Slipacoff, Founder of Canadian Icons

Describe your business in 1-3 sentences.

Canadian Icons is an online museum and store that shares stories about iconic Canadian brands like Canada Goose and Manitobah Mukluks alongside rare objects from Canada’s past. We ship every order overnight for free – and sometimes even faster than that. Our aim was to make our website a place where you can always encounter an inspiring collection of Canadian treasures and find out about organizations working to produce, preserve and protect them.

How did you decide on your product(s)? What ideas did you consider but reject, and why?

We wanted to offer items with incredibly strong connections to Canada’s past. If it was something that really resonated with what could be considered to be truly ‘Canadian,’ and it was something iconic, the decision wasn’t really ours to make—the items and the stories behind them would just speak loud and clear.

The items in the Canadian Icons collection are as relevant now as they were 50 years ago, and they will be just as relevant 50 years from now. And, of course, everything had to be made in Canada.

What were some of the main tipping points (if any) or a-ha moments? How did the tipping points happen?

The only real tipping point was when the media began talking about our unique concept of combining storytelling with online sales.

What were your biggest mistakes, or biggest wastes of time / money?

We spent a lot of time early on pursuing a hard copy version of the Canadian Icons collection. We wanted to make a book that could live in the physical world but the web proved to be a much better medium to tell the stories and conduct business at the same time.

Key manufacturing and marketing lessons learned?

It’s important to learn where you can add value and how you can stand out amongst your competition. We quickly learned that customer service was the way we could really provide value. We saw opportunity to fill a gap with our Canada Goose jackets in particular because our competitors weren’t great on service because the demand for these products is so huge. So we decided to offer the best possible service to our customers. This meant overnight shipping in Canada and 90 minute delivery within 50km of our office. We also decided to offer a full return policy, no questions asked and no postage required. Risky, but ultimately worth it.

Any PR wins? Media, well-known users, or company partnerships, etc? How did they happen?

PR wins: Our PR approach for Canadian Icons was determined right up front, we wanted high quality links for Google juice, and we wanted brand mentions in good publications to help drive traffic and support our reputation. We hired a firm to help with PR and have received lots of positive media mentions in Canada.

Partnerships: First, I developed great historical content. I wrote stories about Canadian icons such as the canoe, the snowshoe, and the Group of Seven. I began to curate a collection of high quality content. Then, I approached national cultural organizations such as the Museum of Civilization and got them on board.

Once I had these great partners and stories in place, I presented an idea to some iconic brands, suggesting that Canadian Icons would be the most authentic Canadian place online to tell their brand stories and offer iconic Canadian products in a new way.

For brands like Canada Goose and Manitobah Mukluks, it was clear early on that they “got it.” Both of these companies take great pride in their product’s deep and unique connection to Canada.

What one thing (knowledge, skill, tool, etc.) would have saved you the most headache if you had it when you just got started?

There really weren’t any headaches. I had a lot of experience in Canadiana, in writing, marketing and PR, and I actually enjoy cold-calling and developing strategic partnerships and building relationships.

The hardest part, for me, was building the business online – the actual coding and backend – but that really wasn’t that difficult.

Any other advice to people starting their first online businesses?

Build it and they will not come! You need to put a lot of work into PR. Get your name out there, get featured in the press, get backlinks. Getting in the media really helped people to get to know us as well, but the links that the media mentions gave us really improved our SEO ranking.

What’s next?

We are going to continue to strive to provide Canadian products delivered in a manner never before seen in Canada, stories and world-class service you can only really get right here at home!

Everything Else Category Winner: SkinnyMe Tea

Who are you and what is your Shopify store?

Gretta Van Riel, Founder of SkinnyMe Tea

Describe your product in 1-3 sentences.

SkinnyMe Tea is an all-natural detox and weight loss program designed to provide fast results and kickstart a healthier you. SkinnyMe Tea is formulated with all-natural, high-potency ingredients rich in antioxidants, vitamins, minerals and fibre. The natural ingredients in SkinnyMe Tea aim to cleanse and detoxify, increase metabolism, assist in the digestion of food, suppress appetite and much more.

How much revenue is your company currently generating per month (on average)?

Over 600K per month.

To get to this revenue number, how long did it take after the idea struck?

It took around 9 months after we launched to reach this revenue; however, as we’re still a very young company (we turn 1 next month) our revenue is still increasing.

How did you decide on your product? What ideas did you consider but reject, and why?

I had a dream about “teatox” one night which gave me the inspiration for the name. When I woke up, I knew that I had a great idea and I started building my business literally the same day. While I have experimented with various ways to package and sell the product, my vision for the product has been the same from the start.

What were some of the main tipping points (if any) or a-ha moments? How did the tipping points happen?

The biggest tipping point is when our revenue from one week was above my yearly wage at my previous job. That’s when it really hit home. I get so excited when we meet targets we never even considered possible when just getting started. I guess it’s time we start setting more challenging goals.

What were your biggest mistakes, or biggest wastes of time / money?

Our biggest mistake was underestimating our rate of growth. We were constantly finding ourselves catching up. Apart from being quite stressful, this meant we had less time to look at the bigger picture and had no time for planning and creating strategies about the new directions our business should be going. That was a big mistake, being able to strategize high-level direction is really important for long-term growth.

Key manufacturing and marketing lessons learned?

1. Make sure you do your research and know which certifications you need. In Australia it’s important to find a manufacturer with TGA (Therapeutic Goods Administration) approval which isn’t always very common for tea manufacturers because tea isn’t often classified as a therapeutic good per say. That was a challenge in itself.

2. Make sure you will be able to scale your business to keep up with increasing demand. When you can afford it, be overstocked rather than under-stocked. In today’s push-button society everybody wants everything yesterday.

3. Social media can work both ways, it drives discussion but not always in the direction you intended. Be ready to deal with negativity, and listen to your customer’s feedback… sometimes that’s more important than the numbers game and driving sales.

4. Take a personal approach to social media. Your overall message should target your key demographic, but your responses should always target the individual.

Any PR wins? Media, well-known users, or company partnerships, etc? How did they happen?

We have a lot of very well known customers but of course for their privacy we cannot reveal who they are. No significant PR or media wins and no company partnerships, we have tried to stay quite low key while getting started.

What software/tools and resources, mentors or groups did you find useful for growing, if any?

We almost exclusively used social media to grow our brand. We found Instagram to be the best tool for us, we now have over 180K followers on Instagram! With social media we are able to harness the broader messages surrounding health and wellbeing and tie them into our marketing. We don’t just talk about the product, we talk about everything in the health industry and emphasis our product as a part of a healthy lifestyle, not a ‘just another diet’ per se.

If you were to do it all over again, what would you do differently?

I would have given us more time to plan things out. If I had anticipated the incredible rate of growth we would be enjoying, I would have embraced it and planned accordingly rather than considering it some sort of fluke that would pass.

What one thing (knowledge, skill, tool, etc.) would have saved you the most headache if you had it when you just got started?

With so many websites around now, it’s really important to be able to give your website an individual look and feel. You should do something to stand out. For example with the ‘Happy Ending’ Shopify app we now add a personal message that says “You’re Amazing!” at the end of checkout. Although it’s a small thing, it’s a nice personal touch which our customers have responded really well to.

Any other advice to people starting their first online businesses?

Just do it! Believe in yourself and your vision. Everyone has an idea, turn your dreams into plans before somebody else does!

What’s next?

We’re working on lots of innovative new products and the worldwide distribution of our existing products. We’re really excited for what’s to come.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Thinking of giving it a shot yourself? You don’t need to go it alone.

Check out this year’s Build-A-Business Competition — Entrepreneur Island with Richard Branson! Seriously, if you need a benevolent kick in the ass to get started, this is what you’ve been waiting for.

Once you’re all pumped up by the above, check out Shopify’s “Build-A-Business” competition forums, which include all of the questions and answers from past competitions. The forums cover almost every topic imaginable.

Also check out the “Build-A-Business” mentor lesson videos featuring Tim Ferriss (that’s me), Daymond John, Eric Ries, and Tina Roth Eisenberg.

What other questions or topics would you like explored? Please let me know in the comments.

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ODDS AND ENDS ELSEWHERE: $10,000 MEMORY CHALLENGE RESULTS

Here’s another example of a success “recipe”…

The biggest memory competition ever held now has a winner! The competition was co-created by me and Grand Master of Memory Ed Cooke, then announced on this blog — it challenged “ordinary” people to learn to memorize a pack of cards in less than a minute.

Irina Zayats, a 24 year-old Ukrainian woman, showed just how quickly a brain can be trained. Miss Zayats had no previous experience using memory techniques, but she learned to perform the gold standard of memory skills (memorizing a shuffled deck of cards) in just five days. In doing so, she won $10,000 and, to her surprise, a job offer from Memrise, the learning platform that ran the competition.

Keep in mind that the American record for this feat was, until recently, 1 minute 40 seconds. And those were trained competitors!

So, how did Irina do it? Here’s the full blog post, and an incredible video of her performance is below:

The post Case Studies: How to Build Online Businesses That Gross $250,000+ Per Month appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

How do you create a viral video?

I am asked this quite a lot. I’ve been asked by authors, TV producers, and first-time Kickstarter entrepreneurs. In my experience, the answers are the same for all of them.

In this post, I’ll deconstruct one example: The 4-Hour Chef (4HC) book trailer, which is now the most-viewed non-fiction book trailer of all time. Roughly 1.5 million views and counting.

Before we dig in…

First, let’s make a distinction: creating a “viral” video is not the same a creating a “popular” video, but both can be valuable.

If you use ads to drive 1,000,000+ views, a video is not viral; it is popular. If your views come from organic sharing (or incentivized sharing like DropBox), it can be considered viral.

This post is also intended as a companion to my post, Behind the Scenes: How to Make a Movie Trailer for Your Product (or Book), which goes into equipment, planning, and (tons of) other details that I’ve omitted here.

For later — below are resources that will save you a TON of time and tail-chasing…

Feel free to skip the box for now if you like:

VIRALITY RESOURCES:

YouTube Channel stats – http://vidstatsx.com/

Viral video chart – http://viralvideochart.unrulymedia.com/all

Trending videos – http://www.youtube.com/trendsdashboard

Good blog posts on the topic, probably in this order:

–http://gawker.com/5912376/

–http://www.socialh.com/a-little-bit-of-math-measuring-virality/

–http://tinyurl.com/bnowj55

Outlets that cover trends and tools in online video well:

–Reelseo.com

–Tubefilter.com

–http://newmediarockstars.com/

YouTube Creator Playbooks

– http://www.youtube.com/yt/playbook/index.html

– http://www.youtube.com/yt/playbook/guides.html

Now, without further ado, here’s how we got ~1.5 million views for my latest book trailer…

Step 1: Storyboarding

This is like creating a comic book for the trailer, scene by scene. It’s the same process used by Pixar, among many others (video example here).

Here was my first stab for 4HC:

Click here to enlarge the below.

Click here to enlarge the below.

Optional Step 2: If Budget Allows, Assemble a Team

For the 4HC trailer, I brought in several specialists to help with production and promotion.

Please note that a team is nice-to-have and not must-have insurance. To date, my most viral video had zero budget. Here’s what gets you 4-5 million views:

That said, I like to tilt the odds in my favor whenever possible. Here’s my A-Team for doing so when funds allow:

– Directing and post-production – Adam Patch

– PR strategy and implementation – Ryan Holiday and BrassCheck

– Marketing, YouTube influencers, and experimental campaigns – Mekanism (Thanks, Jason and team!)

But how do you choose someone like Adam, if it’s not Adam? You ask for proposals, of course.

Typically, before you hire a production lead like Adam (who also acts as a general contractor for the production team), they will put together a proposal or “treatment”, which includes an itemized budget.

For 4HC, since I’d worked with Adam before, things started with my storyboarding and an in-person lunch with Adam.

Below is the 4HC “treatment,” cobbled together from our subsequent emails and conversations. It gives you a good idea of what you might expect you see:

4-Hour Chef video trailer Treatment

Step 3: Shot List and Logistics

Once you agree on look and feel, you have to roll up your sleeves: it’s time to scout locations, find talent (if needed), and choose specific shots for a to-do list (the “shot list”) that you check off as you film.

Special thanks to Chris Young and the amazing ChefSteps team for letting us use their Mr. Wizard-like food lab in Seattle. We shot the entire trailer in Seattle as a result. Here’s the kind of fun we had (see first 15 secs):

Our full shot list is below. Note that “CU” stands for “close-up”, and “TT” stands for “tabletop”.

Step 4: Shooting Principal Footage

Not much to say here, other than shoot a TON of material when you have the chance. It’s easier to edit down than to add extra shooting days.

Below an example of original footage that will be magically changed in the next step. Here we used one of my favorite books as a stand in:

Step 5 – Editing

The first step is to cut down hours of footage into 120 or fewer seconds. This is tough but important work.

If you make the finished product look polished enough for broadcast, you might have opportunities (or make opportunities) to get it on major TV. Here’s the process I used to get bookings.

The 4-Hour Chef trailer was featured as my introduction on everything from Dr. Oz to The Hallmark Channel. It’s the perfect adrenaline rush and sales pitch wrapped into one. Especially for short-form TV interviews — typically 3-4 minutes total, with multiple hosts — you’ll be strained to get a word in edgewise. It’s fantastic to let your video hit the talking points, doing the sales job for you.

Now you have a “rough cut” of the trailer. This is first draft, without graphics or special effects.

Once the footage, cuts, and order of scenes is agreed upon, you arrive at “picture lock,” which means that the footage and length can’t be changed. Only at this point does it make sense for anyone to create time-consuming graphics, animation, or sync’d music. Something like this, for instance:

Here’s the complete progression from first “draft” to finished product. Can you tell what changes in each version?

Now that you’ve taken a shot, here’s the full commentary from Adam, taking you though it step-by-step:

And how exactly does Adam work his magic?

Let’s watch how Adam edits the opening atrium scene in The 4-Hour Body trailer, which also has roughly 1,000,000 views. But first, take a look at the finished trailer and notice the opening shot of me at my desk:

Now, we go behind the scenes:

Step 6 – Music

For The 4-Hour Body trailer, I chose music first (Splinter by Sevendust), which I then set visuals to. This turned out to be a licensing headache marathon, and I explain the whole how-to process here. And that was with the band offering it for free! For this new 4HC video, we had custom music produced after the video was complete. The talented Luis Dubuc provided a sync’d jam, and we were ready to roll. No fuss, no muss.

Custom music need not be expensive, and you can even use crowdsourcing with start-ups like Audiodraft. I’ve used them before as well (see here and here).

Step 7 – Launch and Promote

First, a super basic note on uploading. ENSURE YOUR VIDEO CAN BE VIEWED ON MOBILE DEVICES!

25% of global YouTube views come from mobile devices. I screwed this up for The 4-Hour Body trailer, and I’ve been unable to reverse the mistake and make it viewable on mobile; as a result, I’ve lost hundreds of thousands of views.

No option to change — shite!

So, avoid being a dumb-ass like me and get it right the first time. Back to launching once you’ve uploaded…

The 4-Hour Chef trailer premiered on HuffPo, then it was reposted to my blog here. When I announced the post my Facebook fan page, we promoted it through FB’s paid mechanism. Notice that this was all done on 11/7/12 and 11/8/12 — roughly two weeks before official book launch on 11/20/12.

One of the most effective promotions I did was a unique BitTorrent bundle of 680MB+ of free content. For the super-low labor involved, it drove fantastic numbers:

Watched the trailer on YouTube: 293K people

Visited the author’s website: 325K people

Visited the book’s Amazon page: 852K people

But that was just one piece of the YT traffic puzzle.

When it comes to YouTube, you need to realize what you’re up against in terms of noise: 72 hours of video are uploaded every minute. To capitalize on the opportunity (it’s the second largest search engine in the world), you need to plan. Spray and pray almost never works — your competition is too good.

So, what to do?

First off, do not split your ammo. If you’re considering ads to help drive traffic, do it when it counts: the first 24 hours, when you can combine it with all PR for a synergistic effect. Momentum begets momentum, and early success begets later success. I often pile nearly all book launch media/interviews into a 5-7 day period (Check out this madness).

Team Mekanism was responsible for 99% of all my YT-related PR and directly and indirectly 50%+ of traffic. BitTorrent and my PR that week make up the rest. Mekanism combined extensive PR outreach with early judicious use of TrueView ads and StumbleUpon traffic (Disclosure: I advise StumbleUpon).

Here’s Mekanism’s explanation of what they did, first as PDF with screenshots, then as text:

4 hour chef coverage from Mekanism

Bolded emphasis below is mine:

To help support Tim’s book launch, Mekanism took a three tiered approach: connecting him to relevant online influencers, hosting a contest on Pinterest (to expand his exposure among the female demographic), and promoted content within Slideshare.

[TIM: Slideshare is hugely underused for product launches. We used it for The 4-Hour Body as well.]

Online Influencers:

To drive widespread awareness of The 4-Hour Chef, Mekanism reached out to credible online influencers to help drive word-of-mouth. Mekanism reached out to bloggers and YouTubers across a variety of verticals relevant to each of the different chapters within the book. For example:

• Food Enthusiasts

• Male Lifestyle

• Science + Tech Bloggers

• Mom Bloggers

• Lifehackers

In researching outlets and people, Mekanism took an approach very similar to that outlined by Mike Del Ponte in his Hacking Kickstarter post. The key is establishing relationships, and ensuring your content/message is tailored to each individual blogger’s audience. To accomplish this, Mekanism not only crafted custom pitches, but also provided a wealth of assets that could be freely used: exclusive excerpts, interviews with Tim (live or recorded), his video book trailers, images, etc.

Without a doubt, the most engaged audiences were those of several YouTube stars/channels, specifically SourceFed & WheezyWaiter. These appearances led to thousands of comments and likes and contributed to YouTube being the second largest traffic drive to Tim’s target landing pages.

Slideshare:

We wanted to see if it was possible to get a deck outlining the benefits of the 4-Hour Chef on the homepage of Slideshare, vis a vis having it rank on Slideshare’s ‘Top Presentation’s of the Day’ section. Slideshare was chosen because it has a well-educated and affluent user base that matches the target consumer of The 4-Hour Chef (69% college grads, 37% have $100k+ HHI).

First, a Slideshare deck was created to outline the benefits/chapters of 4HC. Next, we did the math to determine how many views, and in what period of time, were needed to drive the into the ‘Top Presentation’s of the Day’ section. Based on our observations, it seemed as though 15,000 views within a 24-hour period was likely enough.

Having this understanding of required viewing density, we uploaded our deck and promoted it via paid StumbleUpon ads and drove the content to the homepage of Slideshare via “stumbles,” ensuring everyone visiting the site the day of launch saw the presentation.

Keep in mind that the sum is greater than the parts. Here are more of the parts, written in a report to Tim:

“Slideshare Presentation

– Made the ‘Hot on Facebook’ and ‘Hot on Twitter’ section (on homepage)

– Was ‘Featured’ (also on homepage)

– Peaked as 2nd most popular presentation last night

Sourcefed Video

-#3 most liked & top favorited ‘How To & Style’ video of the day

-#5 most viewed ‘How To & Style’ video of the day

-#65 top favorited & most liked video on YouTube today (of all videos across all categories)”

BLOG COVERAGE

http://sourcefednews.com/workout-systems-roundup/

http://www.tubefilter.com/2012/11/19/tim-ferriss-book-trailer-youtube-4-hour-chef/

http://www.dannyroddy.com/main/my-interview-with-bad-ass-mother-fucker-tim-ferriss

http://www.tubefilter.com/2012/11/19/tim-ferriss-book-trailer-youtube-4-hour-chef/

http://www.insidehook.com/nation/tim-ferriss/

http://gearpatrol.com/2012/11/21/tim-ferriss-the-4-hour-chef/

http://www.5minutesformom.com/67553/an-interview-with-tim-ferriss-author-of-the-4-hour-chef/

http://newmediarockstars.com/2012/11/tim-ferriss-interview/

YOUTUBE INFLUENCERS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ggiUlMujSE&list=UU_gE-kg7JvuwCNlbZ1-shlA&index=2&feature=plcp

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olSnJC3juXw&feature=youtu.be

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw7nZmqiH1I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J8fiuG7z-I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAJBnwBxAWs

The goal of all of this, of course, is to build a rapid view count number that pushes the trailer above the noise. This then propagates into additional organic sharing, all of which sells books.

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So, those are the basics of stacking the deck in your favor for online video. Most posts on “virality” are vague generalities, so I wanted to dig into the weeds. Hopefully you like this.

Are there any other details you’d like to see, or questions you’d like answered? Please let me know in the comments.

The post How to Create a Viral Book Trailer (or Get 1,000,000 Views for Almost Anything) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.