Leadership & Team-Building Archives

Do What Seth Godin Says

24 Feb 2022 by Daniel G. Taylor

You may have heard of Seth Godin. He writes one of the most popular blogs on the internet, especially if you’re in the marketing field, and he’s written a shelf of books.

One idea—and challenge—that he has issued on his blog is that everyone — yep, you, me, everyone — needs to publish every day.

This past week I’ve put that advice into practice on LinkedIn, writing an article a day.

I’ll share the links in a moment, but first I thought I’d give you a couple of tips about how-to maintain a daily publishing schedule.

Set a deadline. When will you publish your post?
Stick to the Rule of One. Make one point in your post.
Keep it short. Ideally, you want your post to be somewhere between the length of an email or just slightly longer.
Ship before you’re ready. The perfectionist in you may want to wait till it’s perfect, but you want to be judged for the quality of your ideas, not the quality of your writing. Write. Then use a tool like ProWritingAid or Grammarly to check the grammar and style. Read it through once (preferably aloud). Hit publish.

So here are the links to each of my articles over the past week, ranked by order of views:

I’d love to hear your feedback on any of these articles, or on any of the tips I gave on writing and publishing daily. And please, if we’re not connected on LinkedIn, add me or find out more about me.

3 Lessons from Running a Crowdfunding Campaign

24 Jun 2016 by Daniel G. Taylor

Daniel G. Taylor crowdfunding campaign — Photo credit: Joyce Ong

You may or may not know that recently I went through a rough patch. In the first six months of this year, I lost my partner of four years, my grandmother’s home (which had been in our family for 60 years), and my pet child, the notorious Mr Scruff.

Stick with me, though, because I guarantee I’ll make you feel good by the end of the article.

However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.
Stephen Hawking

When I had to move out of Grandma’s home—and move fast!—I launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for the moving costs.

Here are three lessons I learned from doing so:

1) Completed is Better Than Perfect

Seth Godin teaches this. No one cares about your ideas. They only care when you ship something. If you have a blog, publish content. It’s better to launch something and then adapt it based on feedback rather than getting something to a point that is theoretically perfect. Reality snaps theory. Any theory will need to be changed to match reality.

I launched the crowdfunding campaign before I was ready.

And it worked.

2) Relationships Trump the Law of Exchange

Money goes to those who have earned it. To make my appeal attractive, I offered 7 services to donors. Of these, only one was popular (a personalised reading list, where I recommend books you’ll enjoy and find helpful). The other offerings were great value—my copywriting services at half the usual price. No one wanted them.

But people continued to donate.

When I offered something to the donors, a common response was, “Pleasure mate, no need to give back. Hope all goes well for you.”

Likeability is one of the key factors in success. It’s a foundation for relationships. Without relationships, life is meaningless. People donated because of the relationship I had with them.

That is a powerful piece of knowledge.

The purpose of a business is not to make a profit. It’s to start a profitable relationship with a customer and keep that relationship going for as long as possible.

3) Place a Positive Spin on Your Story

When it comes to downers, my story has all the elements. But people get enough bad news from the mainstream media. Don’t add to that mess through your social media posts (or your crowdfunding campaigns).

When I showed my initial campaign to one of my American Writers & Artists Inc. teachers, Gary Hennerberg, he said my story needed a positive spin. To be precise, I needed to show how people donating would help me transform from the darkness of yucky circumstances into the light of new hope.

There are a bunch of marketing lessons packed into the points above. Please comment below with what you think of them.

Where to Find Money Online

27 May 2016 by Daniel G. Taylor

Almost ten years ago, I was reading Inspired Marketing!: The Astonishing Fun New Way to Create More Profits for Your Business by Following Your Heart (2008) by Joe Vitale, who is most famous for appearing in The Secret (which you can now watch on Netflix).

His book taught the idea of acting on the inspirations you receive as fast as you can.

Shortly afterwards, I got the idea of starting a weekly email newsletter. I didn’t know what I was doing… where it would lead… how to do things properly.

But I acted on that inspiration and made a start.

It turned out to be one of the smartest things I ever did. I wasn’t offering products or services to my list; I was simply creating useful content.

But my subscribers—several of whom who started reading my newsletter in 2008, still read it today—appreciated that I showed up in their inboxes week after week. Those readers referred copywriting clients to me, and for the first time, I earned an impressive amount of money doing what I love. (Before I focused on my career as a mental health speaker, I was a copywriter.)

Building a list of email subscribers is one of the smartest things you can do. In copywriting circles, we’re taught, “The money’s in the list.”

I want you to consider building your own list.

You don’t need to be a writer. My friend Josh curates content instead of creating it. Each week he sends out a list of links to articles he’s found interesting. Guy Kawasaki recommended a similar content creation approach in a now irrelevant book on how to use Google+.

You don’t need to be ready to start. I wasn’t ready. In fact, I was so clueless and cheap that I cut and paste the names of my subscribers into Gmail. I didn’t know about email marketing software like ConvertKit, which is what I use now.

You don’t need to know where it will lead. This isn’t about possessing the perfect knowledge of where it will lead. Get started, then ask your audience what is they’d like to know about. Let them direct your future direction.

When I got started, I didn’t even have a website. I have one now. Somehow you’ve found it, and I’d love to hear what you think of it and have you learn about me. So please share your thoughts in the comments. And if you’d like to get the weekly email newsletter I send out on a Friday morning, fill out the form below.