Hello and happy Friday! Hope your week went well and you feel good about all the things you accomplished. I’m struggling to feel like I did a whole lot myself. I lost one full day to traveling, then at least one other to lack of energy. I try to give myself grace, though, and remember that my worth isn’t based on my productivity, and ultimately I continue to feel like the thought-work and writing every day are doing more to propel me forward than I give them credit for.

Some educational resources I found

Even though I did not produce as much as I would have liked this week, I did manage to do a lot of writing, note-taking, and thinking about my business. The writing I find is especially helpful. I feel like every thing that I write is sharpening my writing skills, adds a piece to the body of work that I’m building, and brings me one inch closer to my dream of being self-employed.

However, I recognize that my writing skills could use some help. Specifically, I feel like my writing is too flowery sometimes, too verbose, with too many adverbs and adjectives, and the point of what I’m trying to get across is often lost in the mix. I also want to learn to be more persuasive in my writing, since I’m trying to convince people of something that is likely very difficult to believe: that it’s totally safe and secure to build your own business, achieve success, and quit your job.

I’ve done some reading about copywriting lately, and I’m increasingly convinced that being good at writing copy is another fundamental skill to being able to promote yourself and the things you've built. So I started looking for really reliable sources of information about the topic, especially books and podcasts.

To that end, I started reading the book Tested Advertising Methods first written by John Caples about a century ago. The edition I’m reading is the same one I linked above, which I think was revised in the 90s by another author, but from what I understand, many people consider Caples to be one of the greatest copywriters of all time. This book is focused on the testing involved on establishing what is effective copy and what is not. Even though it is an older book, and at times feels dated, it is chock full of really important bits of information that are applicable to everything that I write to promote my business. I’m not done with it yet, but I’ve already gleamed a lot of incredibly useful information.

While trying to find additional resources about Caples, I came across a podcast called Copywriters Podcast featuring a man named David Garfinkel. The podcast at first seemed maybe under-produced, and David himself seemed to be a very mild-mannered man, and I was unsure about the actual value of the podcast at first. However, after just a few minutes into the episode I listened to about Caples, I was hooked. I went back to episode 1 of the podcast and started it from the beginning. Overwhelmingly the episodes are packed with information and guidance on copywriting, and in a straightforward manner, where you actually are learning multiple things per episode, and not having to browse through a bunch of YouTube videos struggling to understand what copywriting even is.

Garfinkel seems to be legit, with quite a lengthy and commendable career, and has lots and lots and lots of information to share. I highly recommend checking out the podcast. I’m going to be incorporating a lot of the stuff I learned there into my writing going forward.

The plan to quit my job

Last week I talked about a 5-step plan I had been tinkering with. I am for now referring to it as “The Plan to Quit My Job.” It’s something I’ve been thinking and writing about for a couple of weeks now, and I’m starting to give the steps more concrete shape. I knew that if this was something I was going to try to teach to others, I needed to test it myself first and use it to actually quit my job.

A rough outline of the plan is as follows:

1. Know Yourself
2. Prepare Yourself
3. Research
4. Post
5. Build

Steps 1 and 2 are focused on the prep work: learning about yourself and establishing your messaging, and getting a website, socials, etc. set up. Since I felt like I had these steps completed already, I felt like it would be a waste of time for me to do them again, and I could just move on to step 3. I started to do that at the start of this week, but I realized that I was fooling myself by skipping ahead to step 3. How was I going to teach steps 1 and 2 to other people if I had never tested them myself? If I had not taken the time to create the assets needed, and used them personally to see if they result in something strong enough to use?

So, I decided to go back to the beginning, back to step 1. I haven’t started on it yet, but I am going to create some tools, documents, etc. to guide people through the process of taking a self-inventory, of learning about themselves, and settling on what they want their core messaging to be. I’ll be starting on that at the beginning of next week, and hopefully will be able to post more about it next Friday.

Why I don’t want to build a Ponzi scheme

Something I think about often is how it seems like many people in the “teach other people to do something I am successful at” space have built their business models in such a way that it almost feels like a Ponzi scheme. What I mean by that is that a lot of the products that they are promoting and selling are targeted towards the people they are trying to teach.

What this would look like for me is if I was exclusively monetizing products that taught people how to quit their jobs, or supported people who quit their jobs. For example, I might have books, courses, or a mastermind, but also software that appeals and helps those people as well. So what I’d end up doing is teaching people to quit their jobs, by selling them things that I’m telling them will help them quit their jobs.

While I don’t think this is ACTUALLY a Ponzi scheme, and is totally fine to do in most cases (why wouldn’t you sell directly to your target audience as a personal brand?), I didn’t think it would do a good job of demonstrating to other people the types of products they can sell themselves, especially when held up against many other ‘indiepreneurs’ doing the exact same thing themselves.

So, I ended my week by doing some research into product ideas that don’t necessarily fit into the “I want to quit my job” category. I want to show that you can take any product idea that the market actually wants, build it, promote it, and sell it completely yourself. I’ll most likely be building things of that nature first, so that I can use them as case studies when building out materials for the coaching part. I’ll update again on that later once I’ve started to build some of that.

That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading, and talk to you next time!