This post is one part of a 7 part bootstrapping guide from Amy and Alex. This is part 6 of 7. Want to get the rest of them? Get the guide here!
Now, on to part 6 – where you learn our system for building an audience, no matter how unfamous you are.
“Oh, well, it was easy for Amy to launch Freckle and her classes and ebooks and stuff. She’s internet famous! Her husband/business partner…he’s internet famous too. And Alex runs a coworking space known all over the world. Nobody knows who I am, this stuff can”t work for me!” We hear this a lot. Let’s talk about it.
Quickly now… How do you know Amy? No, really. How do you know her?
Don’t just skip your eyes to this paragraph. Pause, answer the question for yourself.
Can you remember?
Amy’s been writing online about tech, design, and biz topics since… 1998. Yeah, that’s right. 1998. She ran a daily Mac news & commentary site, wayyyyy before it was cool.
But you – and the other 3,850 folks receiving this email – probably don’t know Amy from those days. Very few folks do, myself included (for the record, Amy and I met in line for coffee at sxsw, 2007)!
So how did you find out about Amy? Maybe you know her from back in 2005, when she began writing about her difficult experience starting with Ruby & Ruby on Rails.
Orrrr… given that you’re on this email list, you likely found her just recently, from one of her business bootstrapping essays (hilariously cat-filled Twitter feed).
The point here is that each time she changed topics – from general tech, to Rails and design, to business & bootstrapping – she lost almost all of her readers. Every new audience has had very little carry through. So she’s learned a lot about building a readership, from scratch.
Trust me: You don’t need to be famous to bootstrap a nice profit. Hell, whatever you may think, Amy, Thomas, and myself are only really “famous” in our relatively tiny circles.
Ramit Sethi mentioned he has over 200,000 people on his mailing list. This list is under 4,000. Ramit has 50 times more readers than we do, and I still constantly meet people who don’t have a clue who he is.
You see, when Amy and I talk about how Internet Fame Doesn’t Help You Sell Shit, we know whereof we speak.
So how are you supposed reach people without “fame”?
In the last email, we talked about how to write a persuasive pitch that’ll hook a potential customer by their pain, and draw them in to find out more.
But the next question we usually get is, “How do I get people to look at my pitch?” I’ll be straight with you – the answer isn’t as sexy as fame (and only marginally sexier than “research”).
Pitches get people listening, but their attention alone doesn’t translate directly to sales. Rather than sitting around and waiting for sales (and never knowing why some people buy and others don’t), or plastering a link to your pitch all over the internet, you need a way systematically build trust with the audience before they even see your pitch.
If you’ve learned anything from this series, it’s that 30×500 is full of systems. Amy and I love a good system. We’re weird like that.
Maybe you’ve heard about content marketing. The basic concept for content marketing is pretty simple: you create content, people like it (and share it), and then you point them to your product. But it’s not exactly a system, per se.
In fact, let’s look at step 1.
- Create Content.
In the land of “actionable advice” telling someone to create content is about as useful as telling somebody to “just eat healthy and exercise”. We know it’s good for us, but we don’t do it. Why?
If you’ve tried to take a stab at content marketing, you’ve stared at a blinking cursor before. “What kind of content should I write?” By the time you’re even asking yourself that question, any motivation you might’ve had is gone.
How can you be sure that the time you spend on creating content is worthwhile?
Enter, your system for building trust and writing great content – the ebomb!
Ebombs – or education bombs – are a very special and specific type of content marketing that you can learn how to create in 30×500. The best ebombs don’t just educate the reader, they give the reader a result. A fix. A tiny win.
Ebombs can come in many different forms – written, recorded audio or video, code samples and more. But in all cases, ebombs deliver a tiny win.
Once you start creating ebombs, you can drop them where your audience can find them. Ebombs lead to people signing up for your list, where you can continue to build trust with more ebombs. And thennnnn….you’ll actually make sales when those people see your pitch.
Not to mention that people will share your ebombs when you help them feel a tiny win.
Ebombs are the secret to jump-starting a virtuous trust building cycle that’s a MILLION times more valuable than being “famous”.
If you can help one person, you can help a hundred (or a thousand, or more).
We cover a bunch of different types of ebomb types in 30×500, but today I’m going to share my personal favorite secrets for creating ebombs.
Even the tiniest amount of visibility on the internet comes with a pretty predictable result: strangers who email you out of the blue with questions.
Nearly everyone I’ve spoken to about this problem faces the same conundrum: they feel like a jerk totally ignoring the person and saying “no”, but it’s not good for business (or even possible) to give away free advice to everybody who asks. Helping people feels good, but it doesn’t seem to scale very well.
Here’s the realization that changed my approach: if one person in your audience has a question, there’s a really good chance that other people in your audience have asked, or will ask, the same question.
So when you replying to that single person, you can easily turn your answer into an ebomb that others will benefit from! You’ll want to do some minor editing to provide any missing context in the blog post version.
Note: You should also be sure to check with the person you’re replying to – I’ve had exactly ZERO people tell me that I’m not allowed to publish the free advice I just gave them so that others can benefit from it.
Some people may want to be kept anonymous, others won’t mind being mentioned by name. You just don’t want to catch them off guard by having them find the email you sent them up on your blog.
And as an added bonus – now that you have this ebomb on your blog, the next time someone asks you the same question you can just link them to the ebomb, which will invite them to join your list for more helpful tips and how-tos in the future! You save time, effort, and you look like a pro because you’ve got an answer prepared, AND you can continue to build trust with that person using your list. Boom.
There’s one more unsexy truth to help you bootstrap your product biz.
In the next (and final) email of this series, Amy’s going to show you the difference between typical “fanfare” style launches that you see on Techcrunch and HackerNews…and launching the 30×500 way, which leads to sales from day 1.
Stay tuned :)
Alex