Utah and Continuous Improvement
It’s time for the Sunday Store Update. I use this time every Sunday afternoon to tell you more about the small business I’m building to support the rest of the site.
This week I’m headed out to a family trip in Utah. All posts will continue as planned. Life is good.
***
My flagship product is the Unconventional Guide to Working for Yourself, and I’m proud of it. Hundreds of people have bought it and loved it. Flocks of new, very small businesses have been unleashed on the world. This makes me happy.
There’s just one thing: I wrote the introduction material (“sales page” in marketing terms) in one sitting last October, and put it up without thinking about it much. I intended to update it later, but then I got busy with all of the people who were buying the guide.
Close to six months later, I finally looked back at it and remembered I was supposed to update it. Whoops.
The funny thing about it was that as limited as the sales copy was, it has worked very well. Despite the fact that I only talk about Working for Yourself once a month or so, every day people buy it. Only about 10% of the sales come from affiliates, which means that most people buy it from here despite the lack of promotion.
There are probably two lessons here, depending on how you like to interpret things.
Lesson #1: It’s OK to just get stuff done. This one little product is more than 50% of the business side of things over here. It took a while to complete (I finished it during an all-night writing session in Columbo, Sri Lanka), but when I finally let it go, it went out to the world and I haven’t needed to touch it since then.
If you have an idea you’re working on, don’t wait too long to put it out to the world. Of course you want it to be good, but it’s true what they say about the perfect being the enemy of the good.
Lesson #2: It’s usually good to go back to something later. The nice thing about continuous improvement is that it can make a good thing even better. After the great response to the Art and Money layout, I decided to do the same for other products, starting with WFY. I’ve gone back to it, reviewed the materials, and wrote a new introduction. You can see it here, now live on its own home (freedomguide.org) along with a new video.
As part of the continuous improvement process, I’ll also be adding new bonuses from a few friends and other new material that I create myself. I haven’t finished that process yet, but it should be ready by the end of the week.
This also means that I’ll be raising the price for the first time ever.
Everyone who already owns it, anything that I add will be free for you. Fear not. But a product that guarantees to create a measurable degree of personal freedom should probably cost more than $39.
The price increase will happen later this week, probably Wednesday or Thursday during my vacation when I have time to upload the new content. It won’t be going up by a huge amount, but it will be more than it is now. If you’ve thought about it before and haven’t picked it up, this is the best time to do so. If not, of course, no problem. As I wrote long ago, there are always good reasons to keep your money.
Thanks for your support. I’m glad this has helped so many people.
In Other News…
Several people ask me every week if they can write a guest post for AONC. I’ve always said no, mostly because I know from other bloggers that editing guest posts can be a lot of work. I have a full schedule, a book that refuses to write itself, and so on. I also don’t want to get in the position of saying yes to a few people and no to a bunch of others – something that is naturally a part of the filtering process, but also not very fun.
However, I’ve been looking for a way to feature the great work of other people in the AONC community, and I think I’ve found it. Details coming in a few days; for now I’m flying Southwest Airlines to Salt Lake City. Maybe I’ll get the rapping flight attendant? We’ll see. I hope all is well with you this week.
###
Park City Image by AT
