Mastering a Niche and Creating Your Own Empire
by writing, speaking, publishing, and product
development
Newsletter #4 / February, 2009
Welcome! I’m Gordon
Burgett.
The purpose of this free newsletter is to provide useful ideas for the
creation and expansion of your own empire. That, in turn, should help you
create “LIFELONG
WEALTH BY BEING INDISPENSABLE.” It is automatically sent to you each
month either because you subscribed to it or because you are one of my valued
clients, prospects, seminar attendees, or product buyers. If you’d rather not
be a recipient, I appreciate your wishes—please just unsubscribe at the bottom
of the newsletter. (Our privacy
statement couldn’t be simpler: I will never rent or share your name or
e-mail address.)
If you have peers, kin, or friends or you know anybody else who would
benefit from this newsletter, I’m grateful. They can sign up at the opt-in box
that follows. Anybody brave enough to sign up will receive three free reports.
There is an archive below that also links to all of the newsletters sent to
date. Finally, if you wonder who in the world I am and why you might even care
a whit about what I say, here’s a quick bio!)
IT’S
ALL IN THE NAME: What
exactly are you and I selling?
I have been wrestling
with a pack of demons (five different titles) since I decided to focus on my
core topic and share it with you full time. What is the precise core of my
message, and how do I title it to convey in one sight what I do and why others
should want to know more?
Why the latter? I mean,
who really cares if anybody else suffers from the same curiosity and passions
that I do?
Since we are both in the
same shoes when it comes to empire building, we simply have to care if others
want to know more, and we must know from the outset where we will build our castle—and
why.
We are selling
information. Both words are important.
While we gladly give
away lots of it free, mostly through newsletters, blogs,
and podcasts, the goal is to create a highly profitable
empire by helping others do better what we love, know best, and they most want
to do.
An example helps here. I
suspect that I know as much about niche publishing as anybody else. No vanity.
I’ve been doing it well and profitably for years, had four books related to it
in print, have given 150 seminars and workshops about it, and have done lots of
one-on-one consulting and manuscript guidance. I’m passionate about the topic
and the process, and I gladly share what I know, freely, in person and print
(including in this newsletter). But when a person needs a four-hour
step-by-step seminar on how they can do it too, or they want me to work for several
hours or even days on their book, that’s paid work. My knowledge shared about
their specific project will make them money, and if they will prosper from it,
so should I.
So I must take
considerable care in properly naming my enterprise, so it will attract the
right kinds of followers for the right kinds of reasons. If it does, I will
develop the kind and volume of clientele that will let
me offer them full-time attention, plus additional tools to do even better what
they want to do. But if I’m careless with the naming, few people or none will
be attracted, and I must turn elsewhere to feed my family. I lose, but mostly
others lose who could greatly benefit from my being available and fully focused
on, in the case of our example, niche publishing.
If you are serious about
creating your own empire, you must feel the same way. Information is expandable
but ultimately it’s finite. There’s a delicate balance between what you freely
share and what must be rationed so you can subsist—better, deservedly
prosper—from it. (One easy guideline is that when you customize your knowledge
and its application to a specific client project, it becomes private and
marketable.)
So it gets down to a
name—and why next month this newsletter will have a new name. Let me wrestle
for 30 more days. I’ll tell you the objections I’ve heard from others, and why
I’m pulled four ways in trying to succinctly tell you what I do, so you can
know if that’s what you want or need to read (and hear) more about.
See you then. By then the
store will have a new sign!
-----
BLOGGING:
I’m doing it—should you?
I confess that I’m seven installments
into blogging, with many years to go! Where are those
seven short missives hiding?
At www.gburgett.wordpress.com.
Why am I doing it, and should you?
I’m blogging
because it lets me immediately share even more empire-building-related information
with potentially more people, in a general way, than I can through newsletters.
(But you guys get the best inside stuff—and can link directly to the best
products that I can find for you. So stay here, and subscribe there [free] too if
you want to get each blog as it appears). I’m doing
it because blogging is a public venue that lets me reach
and help the greatest number of people fastest, and it’s a natural complement
to newslettering.
Right now, the blogs
are explaining the steps one might take to create their own empire.
My thoughts, a few
weeks in? (1) It’s
a lot of work to do it right. (2) The host, Wordpress
(www.wordpress.com) is free, fast, and
a bit confusing. If you make mistakes, its helpers are fast to tell you what
you did wrong but slow to tell you how to correct it (like five e-mails slow). Still, it is the site of preference. (3) Unless
you scare your kin into looking at your blog, nobody
reads it in the beginning. You really have to be in it for the long haul to
make it work. (4) It quickly improves your positioning at Google.com. (5) If
you’re doing it for vanity, do almost anything else instead. (6) And, unless
you say something, who cares?
The best guide about blogging that I’ve read is Yaro Starak’s free, first-rate Blog Profits Blueprint (www.blogmastermind.com).
Download and read his 54-page e-book. Ignore the Aussie’s mane and youth; he’s
right on the button. Better yet, his straightforward, no-nonsense approach will
help you answer whether blogging is for you. (If it
is, tell me where your blog is hiding!)
Incidentally, see how well Yaro’s free e-book positions him in the blogging
world. Once your empire structure is up and working, you may want to do the
very same thing about a core topic that your beneficiaries need to know.
-----
PRODUCTS:
The toner con.
I hate to be conned. I
buy a perfectly good printer, this time the HP Color LaserJet CP1215. It costs
$200. I use the installed toners for a month or so, and all the color inks run
out almost simultaneously. I get a new black toner, for reserve, and a magenta, cyan, and yellow toner so the damn machine will
even print. The cost, with tax: $335!
That was at Staples.
Best Buy was about $6 less. I can get the $74 toners off the Web at about $58,
and refilled versions for $47 each, plus shipping. My objection is that I
simply hate having to pay the cost of a printer at least five to seven times
just to use it.
I know, go to options at
the computer print cycle and just use the black.
It’s like the gas companies, do the printerfolk
wonder why at least I don’t trust them?
-----
PUBLISHING: Time
Magazine discovers the obvious!
In the 1/10/2009 issue of Time, three pages (71-4) breathlessly reveal
that fiction publishing is suffering its “worst year in decades,” and that
while it won’t expire, it is “evolving drastically, almost beyond recognition.”
Even with an increase in readership and a global audience of billions with a
literacy rate of 82% and rising, its archaic business model
(and the current economic doldrums) are doing it in.
The root of most
of the evil? Apparently self-publishing. Novelists, rejected by big-house
editors, having the gall to print their own books, sell widely on the Web, get
an agent, and extort the big houses for contracts for six figures! The result? A new world full of digital books, podcasts, blogs, chapter selling,
and more horrors, plus a new kind of literature: “fast, cheap, and out of
control … trashier, wilder, more democratic, and more deliciously fertile.”
Guess what? In the empire-building
business our worst nightmare is some big publishing house taking a year to like
our book, another 18 months to get it out, receiving 10% royalties (at best) of
the marked price (figure more like 4% after discounting), and then discovering
that it’s being sold, if at all, through display ads in library journals—when our
markets are plumbers, tour managers, or pediatricians!
In the meantime, we’ve been testing
our markets first (title, cost, contents); self-publishing; printing only as
many copies as we know we can sell in three months; sending a pile of the books
free to our field leaders; talking about the book’s contents to our
associations and newsletters; blogging like crazy;
building a newsletter and e-list around the book’s singular contents; selling
it by chapters; making the book’s contents available bound, as trade paper, in
a three-ring binder, digitally, in software, on audio CDs and videos; releasing
updates or monthly addenda, and then offering to teach and consult about it
everywhere, in person, by computer, through teleseminars…
We’ve even had the cheek to ask our buyers to tell us what more they need so we
can do the same with related products again and again. Talk about vulgar: it’s
flat-out what empire-building is all about, and if we don’t know that our core
books will bring back triple their cost in a few months, duh, we just don’t pay
ourselves huge advances and print thousands of copies waiting to be discovered.
It’s been that way for about 15
years, when I wrote a book called Publishing
to Niche Markets. I didn’t invent a system that even then scratched its
head at the big-house folly. I simply explained an on-going process that was
working for us and the steps to follow that had been taken by hundreds (now
many thousands) of others, without fanfare. (Who shouts while the cashbox clangs?)
Time calls the rise of
self-publishing not only “a technological revolution, but also a quiet cultural
one.”
Shhh…and stay tuned. You might also take
a look at the newest edition of Niche Publishing. Our part of
the publishing world is flourishing. The center of our business model is to
tell others eager to pay to read and hear how they can do better, faster, and
more profitably what they most want to do—and to put that new knowledge in
their minds by as many means as they wish.
-----
WRITING: Why bother to
write articles?
In the “olde days,” maybe 20 or 30 years back,
we did it for money. Green money in check. form. The editor wanted 800 words on “what do you do about grumbling
mates?” For $200, we’d head to the library, research grumbling, check the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature,
interview both the mate of a chronic grumbler and the editor of the Grumbling Journal, type it all up, and
send it off. The less we knew about it, the more fun it was to write.
Not so in the empire-building world. You write articles mostly for
exposure and for the verification of your expertise by what you say. You might
get paid a few bucks too, but the gold is in that bio slug near the title or at
the end of your masterpiece. In fact, if your name, some recognition of your
uniqueness or prerogative to write the piece, the title of your most recent or
most related book (e-book, audio CD, etc.), and your website link aren’t
included in the bio slug, why do it? That’s the minimum trade-off.
Your article has to show the reader why he or she should link to your
website or buy your book, whether or not either is mentioned in the text. It
should show clarity of vision and expression, knowledge of the words the
readers use in their field or trade, and a clean tightness in the prose. Open
with a sharp, catchy lead. Tell the reader where you are going: “three things
that…,” “a new motif for each season…” Interview the top experts, tell stories,
give actual examples, use sub-heads every few paragraphs. Conclude quickly.
Write to readers who are eager to know more. Deliver it on time and make it
just long as you promised or the editor suggested.
Focus on those publications that your empire beneficiaries most read.
Your goal is to be on their pages every few months, as a writer or as an expert
interviewee cited by another writer. The very best positioning is a monthly
column—one that is always interesting or fun or instructive, or all three! That
starts with one solid article, then another…
We’ll talk more about articles… Blogs,
incidentally, are a great way to show your writing skills and to have fresh examples
on hand for wary editors to review.
-----
NEWSLETTER
CHANGES: As I
mentioned last month, I’m revamping my website—an exciting hassle. The goal
there is to convert to the new design and layout by the end of February. (It
will be so seamless even my dogs won’t bark!) At the same time, I’m also
changing my web server (just done) and switching my integrated marketing
software. That will also take place in February, to streamline the service and
make it quicker, safer, and more linkable for you and me. Stay tuned if you’re
into net marketing. I will also change the newsletter’s title. At heart, though,
it’s still me, same purpose, and I’m just as eager to share with you both new
and tested information about writing, speaking, publishing, and product development.
ARCHIVE of earlier
newsletters
Contact us at Communication Unlimited
Gordon@gordonburgett.com / www.gordonburgett.com
(800) 563-1454 /