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building and a new business in the center of venture capital i am alex edmonds some people on the internet call me supreme romham and this is the building and indie business podcast all right so today i'm going to be discussing um the errors and mistakes that i made um in the book processes isn't just the launch but the entire process so i'm going to be talking about my mistakes um what like what i did wrong each time or what i should have done i'm also going to talk about things i should have done and then what i'm going to do the next time i release a product okay so let's get into it my first mistake was the fact that i didn't use any urgency in my my my promoting or anything really so there's these like six concepts of persuasion um and one of them is urgency and i it's something very simple that i didn't think to add into my promoting so i kept saying like pre-order my book but i didn't give a time limit um and i didn't say you can only get the pre-order until july 31st i just said pre-order pre-order pre-order no urgency whatsoever and then that's another thing um i announced too early i announced the book too early so i announced that i would be um releasing a book in april and the book was pretty much done by then well not done the book was mentally for me was done in april because i had written about three-fourths of it seventy-five percent and uh i just had that twenty-five percent i knew what i was going to write about i just hadn't written it down um and so that's why i said in april okay i'm going to be doing this so mentally the book was already done but i said the release date was july 31st to give myself some time because something always pops up like i started working um in may and i didn't know that was gonna happen so that that pushed back the book a little bit if i had if the time i spent working if i spent that time writing i would have released the book even earlier so um there was no urgency right i announced it too early and then i don't think people pre-ordered the book because they thought or no they were going to be buying a very unpolished product i didn't have the cover ready yet um when you pre-ordered the book you just got sent the uh the google doc that i was working on the book with so um it would take some time like you would have to come back every week and read the new chapter if you wanted to um read the full book you couldn't just read it right away yeah okay um the next area where i messed up um in terms of promoting um is twitter so um i haven't i've i've been figuring out tweaking it around but i before this i haven't i didn't really figure out how to like promote something on twitter and make it all look very nice and so that was one of my problems and then i don't follow many people on twitter i follow like 20 people and those 20 people are famous people they're musicians and comedians they're not people in my industry so my tweets don't get a lot of engagement so every time i would announce something it's not getting eyeballs on it right it's just being tweeted out into the twitter sphere spear okay um another problem that i had is that um i stopped promoting the podcast in the newsletter um on social media and so um i just happened to start an experiment like right before i announced the book i started the experiment in march and decided to write the book in april um and so the experiment was uh what is my engagement without promoting the podcast and so i just wasn't promoting it like i usually do i wasn't promo i wasn't uh adding the podcast episodes to dev2 or um reddit or on twitter so i'm getting less less eyeballs on my stuff and that means less people are hearing about the book and getting interested in the book and then another thing that was the result or another problem that occurred because i stopped promoting is that um it cost me backlinks so i'm trying to improve like get organic traffic to my blog and the podcast website and they're not getting backlinks because i'm not promoting it at during this time so now i have to do that over again or i have to start that process again um yeah and that that was a problem um yeah so then i started promoting again in july and that kind of helped because that that was where the urgency came in to buy the book at the pre-order price because um i was like yeah the book's coming out at the end of the month which it did so yeah that's one thing and then um another problem that i created or a mistake i made was there was no schedule for the release of information i would randomly release information because i would announce it as the information came like i didn't have a cover at all until the 29th or 30th of july and so originally i wanted to like make an announcement of the cover and like have a little release of the cover and announce it everywhere on reddit twitter and the hackers but that never happened because i was so busy formatting the book and getting it ready to be released i just got the cover and that was it um yeah so no one was expecting anything which you know that means the stuff that i was promoting got no engagement okay um another mistake i made was i stopped streaming uh yeah i stopped producing content um and that means that i wasn't at the top in the like top of mind for some people because they weren't seeing my face and my content being created every week okay another mistake i made was uh i wasn't creating milestones on indie hackers so um the reason why this was a mistake is because um it's free right and it's very good of visibility um yeah so on the on the end hackers milestones you're at the top of their website and um if you get like in the section that you don't have to click on to see like before you hit more milestones that's pretty good visibility i've gotten to that point and i got like maybe 75 to 100 clicks because i was there and so i should have created more milestones to get more clicks i should have made a milestone out of the cover i should have made a milestone out of um like finishing each chapter even just to get those eyeballs um i should have created a separate email list i should have had an email list for the book and so i could send out those same exact updates to an email list and speaking of email i should have optimized the blog for collecting emails so before shaw helped me with this shout out the shaw on twitter um i uh there was no way to like the bloc i don't know how to say this but like it was very difficult to sign up for the open podcast email list when you got onto the blog so there's no pop-up signup form that showed up when you scroll to the end of an article um there there was no way to sign up for the um email list in the middle of the blog post or at the beginning like there is now yeah and so my first two articles that i wrote blog posts um about interviewing and solo podcasting those were my most successful reddit posts and those people on reddit had no way to sign up for the email list so yeah that was unfortunate okay hiring so um i've hired a bunch of affiliates for the book i used indie.com i will talk about this in a different episode but the mistakes i made with um hiring is the job description was a little confusing so less people clicked on it um i started hiring too early so i started hiring in may and i go through like 100 different applications or like uh candidates so instead of writing the book and finishing it as soon as possible i had to waste my time hiring these people and i only hired like three people it wasn't worth it um another mistake i made with hiring is i said i made the job commission um based sales associate and i should have made it either marketing associate or affiliate marketer so yeah um those were my mistakes for hiring okay now bigger um mistakes that i made not just around the launch because that's what i've been talking about recently or for the past few points um i think the book was too ambitious uh like i just said i decided to write the book after two blog posts of mine kinda got some traction on reddit and other places but read it specifically and no one asked me to write a book so i had all these like ideas that i had from the podcast and i decided to put them all together and release it as a book but no one asked me to do that so now i'm i'm releasing a book that no one asked for to my small audience what i should have done is start small that's what i needed to do i needed to um so one thing that i did was i took i was going to add a chapter in the book about my workflow and every tool that i have used to produce the podcast and what i did was i took this chapter out i made it on its own a separate product uh let people have the option to pay for it and then um i made it a lead magnet for the book and so every time someone downloaded that still it still does this every time someone downloads the workflow document 24 hours later gum road sends them an email and the email was something that i wrote saying hey if this gives you value my book might give you value and bam it's a link to the book so what i should have done is just the workflow document and waited um because i have their email right so i should have waited and promoted only the workflow document i would have made some money because some people are willing to pay for it and so i have this i'm building this audience with this workflow document yeah so i should have just stuck without and then eventually wrote the book another thing in terms of starting small i should have released all the blog posts because the day i released the book i had maybe 10 blog posts that were chapters in the book that i should have released to build the audience even more okay um another thing i should have done was promote the blog posts more so i was i'm still promoting the original blog posts to grow the audience of open podcast and instead of releasing the book i should have worked on those blog posts getting them in the eyes of more people so that way i could collect more people's emails had a bigger audience to release the book too okay um another mistake i've made is that i i kind of don't promote my my content to the right audience so i'm kind of in like the tech indie maker audience like that's my crowd right now and i should be promoting my content more to the podcasting community because those are the people that i want to buy the book well i want to i want people that have an interest in starting a podcast to buy the book and that way i'm like this is your guide to podcasting okay one thing with promotion that i made my mistake is that i didn't ask people for help when promoting stuff on twitter or anywhere usually well i think fire via via alert becoming content being organically viral i think that's fake and so what people do is to get the initial um like retweets and likes i think other people either pay someone or like pay some agency to grow make something go viral or they ask their friends so what i uh use sometimes what i do like when i tweeted out um that i'm looking for a job i asked people to retweet it for me i specifically sent them a link and said hey can you retweet this tweet for me and so that helps me get more eyeballs on that post and i only really do that for something that's important and this is important for me and i didn't ask for help but i should have okay what i'm going to do next time um i release a product so next time i'm going to start small i'm going to write a chapter i'm going to make it a product on its own i'm going to make it a lead magnet and then i'm going to promote that as much as i can and then i'm going to collect people's emails and then maybe write more okay and then i'm going to plan out the release on the information i'm going to say hey i'm going to release the title of the book i'm going to say hey i'm writing a book after all the lead magnet stuff hey i'm writing a book then i'm going to be like in a week i'm going to announce the title of the book then i'm gonna do the same thing with the cover but i'm gonna do the same thing with the chapter list and yeah so on and so forth i'm gonna plan out the release and then as soon as i have the idea to create a product another book a course i'm going to start collecting emails immediately so here's my plan to collect emails immediately i'm just gonna put a sign up form everywhere i'm gonna put it on the open podcast blog uh saying like hey i'm thinking about releasing a book a second book about i don't know technology or another podcasting book let's just say that i'm gonna put like second book as a page on the podcast blog this and then i'm gonna say i'm gonna release a book maybe make a cover too and then sign up when you want to be notified about the release of the book then i'm gonna do that for the podcast website just collect emails immediately um the next thing i'm going to do in the future is announce the book within a month so i'm going to announce it at the end of june and say the release date is july giving myself a month so i can create some urgency and tweet about uh like the the pre-ordering of the book um and not like annoy people because if i was doing that uh from april to july i think that would annoy people right so not annoying people all right i'll give myself a month then release a preview chapter as a lead magnet i already said that um i'm going to tweet more i'm going to tweet nicer like like it's going to look aesthetically nice my tweets and from now on i'm gonna do that um and also another problem another problem i have is like tweeting because consistently so i'm going to tweet more consistently and grow my audience on twitter yes i'm going to create more milestones so the title the cover the chapter list all things that can be made into a milestone and then every chapter i complete will be a milestone um release more content before announcing the product so if i create a book based on blog posts that i've written i'm going to release all the blog posts and promote them properly before announcing the book and then finally what i'm going to do is i'm going to announce that i have an announcement so i'll say on monday hey i'm going to announce a new product on friday and i'm going to keep tweeting about it for the rest of the week and then i'm going to actually make the announcement on friday all right that's all i have for this uh episode thank you for listening if you have anything for me you can reach out to me on twitter supremeroomham on telegram supremeratham and email me supremeramham gmail.com if you have an interest in podcasting you can reach out to me record the podcast episode that you want send me the audio send me what you want in the show notes and i will put it on the open podcast community podcast and that will help you get the experience of podcasting without having to go through the hassle of setting up a podcast because i've already done that okay and also there's the uh open podcast blog if you want to write about podcasting you can write a guest post on the open podcast blog and i will give you authors access so you can post it yourself um just reach out to me and we could set that up alright thank you for listening have a nice day bye