Welcome to the densest, most competitive information marketplace in history.
Never before have people been so ready to send out more marketing messages. Never in history have people cared less.
Just five seconds ago I was invited to yet another religious Facebook group for a religion I’m not even a part of. Gee, thanks.
You already know this intuitively. There’s a reason people don’t join your groups, subscribe to your mailing list, or share your content. It’s why they’re not telling friends about your business. It’s also why, in the long run, you will become the vultures and hyenas of the attention ecosystem.
Effective immediately, the reality of the new world is that
if you build it, they won’t give a shit.
3 actual facts (that will actually help you)
ONE. Your ideas are actually total garbage. You are probably surrounded by yes-men, idiots, or both. They tell you that your idea is great because…
a) they have no idea how ideas succeed in the actual real world. Their only exposure to ideas is through the front page of the Huffington Post, the newspaper, the radio, or their Facebook wall. But I have a message for you! Exposure to ideas that have already won does not help you create winning ideas!!!
b) they are lying to you and you are surrounded by the wrong people. A business is like a living creature. Your idea must be exposed to the environment to survive, and you have created an artificially safe environment around you where people don’t tell you the truth.
If you actually think your idea is great (when it isn’t), the onus is on you. Your ideas are failing because of you. They are not interesting, they are not positioned correctly, they are not different or clear enough and you aren’t willing to put in the work to fix it!
Is your idea competitive enough? If you cannot launch a blog post, a marketing campaign, or a business and have people go WOW, instantly, then scrap it immediately and design it again. It isn’t good enough. Give it more edge, or more round. Make it stand for something. Notice and exploit a weakness in the marketplace, or a rising trend (not a fad!).
ONE THING YOU CAN DO RIGHT NOW. Multiply by 5 or 10 the number of ideas you throw out every day. Twitter, Facebook, blog, wherever else. See what swims and what sinks and then correct accordingly for tomorrow.
TWO. No one actually hears your idea. You are responsible for your own success and no one else. If you have no mailing list, no blog (or ability to get other bloggers’ attention), you are straight up DOA. No one will give a shit because no one actually fucking even knows you exist.
This is different from the previous problem, where people may know you exist, but they don’t care, because your idea is horrible (by the way, there are only two kinds of ideas– horrible and great– nothing else). The problem of platform is that no one has the ability to HEAR YOU because you have no direct connection to anyone.
The way I’ve encountered this most recently is through differences in book launches. You can watch Chris Guillebeau launch his book in a crazy successful way because he has impacted enough people enough times already and so they care about him. Yes, they care, and they will stop their day to help him out.
ONE THING YOU CAN DO NOW. Build a permission asset that will carry forward with every project you work on. It’s about YOU, not about the project, and so the people that follow will continue to be interested even past the project’s completion. Also, personal is the new cool.
Anyway, if you can’t build platform, you are 100% screwed. I think that’s clear, so let’s move on.
THREE. The people you know have no ability to help you. In the past three months since I have been working on my new project, due to my existing network, I have been able to get in contact with billionaires, CEOs of super successful companies, or people with just straight up valuable insight.Â
You might be like “oh look at Julien showing off” but hey, you know what? That’s bullshit because I worked fucking hard to have the network I have. And the people I know who have the same are among the most fearless, driven people I know.
Can you be counted among the most fearless and driven people you know? If not, you will never reach the people you are capable of reaching, and they will not be able to open the doors that need opening.
Here’s how I explained it to a friend the other day: “How do you expect to get deals done if you don’t know who’s signing the paper?”
ONE THING YOU CAN DO NOW, AND SHOULD. Connect mercilessly and remove your negative impression of “networking” out of your head. As Peter Thiel recently said, the best sales are covert sales. Likewise, the best network building is actually nothing more than just hanging out.
In other words, if your network building comes from “networking events,” you are fucked, because no one interesting actually goes there.
Platform, Idea, and Network are the new marketing. Here’s why.
Everything else you work on can be valuable, sure. But the reason these three are valuable is because the Idea, the Platform, and the Network are all MULTIPLIERS. They each compound on all of your success by producing more effort for less work.
But the trick is that the work is actually just front-loaded– like Kickstarter– and comes at no promised reward because there’s no project you’re currently using them for.
But your idea creation process will drastically help your future ideas because you’ll be subconsciously aware of what the market wants.
And your platform will continuously build, creating a bank account, compound-interest like asset which grows over time.
Finally, your network and its value will multiply your efforts ensuring every door becomes open when it needs to be opened.
Conclusion. Julien is a fucking genius. Bye.
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