Michal Stawicki's Blog, page 15

4 Unproductive Thinking Habits that Suck Your Life Dry

When you think about lack of productivity, think of its opposites. What connotes with them? Of course, organization, clarity, can-do attitude and a few others. Unproductive thinking habits are their alter egos.

Lack of productivity starts in your mind, so if you can target those nasty thinking habits that are coming your way, you can do something about them and improve your productivity.

1. Laziness.

It’s not an accident this habit took the ‘honorable’ #1 spot. I’m not talking about idleness per se, but about idleness in thinking. If you are a lazy thinker, nothing can help you. You cannot analyze what’s wrong, you cannot come up with better solution, because you don’t think at all. You let your life be led on autopilot.

The rule of thumb is this: if you consume more than you create, laziness in thinking creeps in. So, all of the modern, so-called entertainments – TV, video games, YT, social media – rob you of your productivity.

When you consume content, especially with close to no reflection about it (mindless browsing on YT, sitcoms and soap operas, arcane games) autopilot takes over your mind’s steering.

The magnificent organ you have between your ears is of no more use than your liver or anus. It’s as passive as those other organs.

2. I can’t.

This is easily the #2 enemy of productivity. His cousins – “It’s too difficult,” “I don’t know” and “I will not” are not far behind.

When you think you can’t do something, you abort productivity before it has even a chance to be born. If you can’t or you won’t, well, how can anything happen?

Listen to the wise grandma:

If anyone else has done it, you can do it, and if someone else hasn’t done it, you can do it first. — Jeremy Frandsen’s grandma

This unproductive thinking habit often comes from habit #1, laziness. It’s so much easier to say to yourself “I can’t” than to try doing anything.

3. Chaos.

When you run amok, don’t know your priorities nor tasks and let a back pile grow too much, it’s hard to be productive. You are overwhelmed, and in the end you do nothing.

I let my inbox grow once again and, as a result, I’ve been avoiding my email altogether. It’s not the best course of action to get things done, don’t you think?

Create plans, schedules and frameworks. If they don’t work for you, tweak them and improve, but don’t try to run your life by the seat of your pants.

4. Wrong questions.

If you ask yourself “Why does it always happen to me?” or “Why can I never be on time?” your brain will be busy finding answers to those questions, instead of being busy with the stuff you want to get done.

The human brain is a search engine. This is its primary function. Whenever you throw a question at your brain, it happily chases it. It loves it, this is what it was created for. And it always provide you answers.

If you give wrong questions, you will not be happy with the answers. But the worst damage is done by occupying your brain with something totally not constructive. It’s like asking a Senior IT Engineer in your company to clean a toilet with a toothbrush. The guy is totally capable of doing this job, but you’d have so much more value if he got busy with your IT stuff instead.

Change your questions into “How” questions:

-how did others do that?

-how I can learn this?

-where can I find resources?

-how can I amend my ways to achieve what I want?

Your brain will chase those questions, and it will bring you the answers. This time, however, the answers will be encouraging, not demotivating.

There are a whole lot more of unproductive thinking habits, but if you deal with the four above, you will get rid of 80% of the obstacles. Watch yourself especially for #1 (laziness). Stop mindlessly consuming, start creating.

The post 4 Unproductive Thinking Habits that Suck Your Life Dry appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

Fifty Eighth Income Report – January 2018 ($2901)

Are you curious about a 3-month delay? I explained it in my first income report.

The beginning of January 2018 was slow. In the first week there were three holy days, so I didn’t work much.

I anticipated it for quite a sometime, but it was nice to finally check the numbers at the beginning of January and conclude that indeed, I earned more than $1,000 from my AMS service in December. That was the first month I reached 4-figures from that source. And I started advertising the first book that wasn’t my own in May! And I was paid exclusively from the profit I made for my customers.



It felt fabulous. I earned over thousand bucks, because my customers earned well over $2,000 thanks to my ads.

Coaching Services Revamp

In December I followed CoachMe’s CEO, Tony Stubblebine, with his new marketing program for coaches. At the beginning of January I was at last able to implement it. I changed my coaching profile, I deleted most of the coaching goals and left only three. As I focused more on writing, I showcased my books on the profile.

I also got lucky. Around that time a few of my coaching clients graduated and gave me good marks. For the first time since I started coaching my ratio of ‘clients who marked my coaching helpful’ rose above 85%, which is CoachMe’s measure between the best coaches and the rest of the crowd. I was featured at the main CoachMe coaching page.

Coupled together, it brought great results. Within 6 days I got 7 new coaching clients.

Well, my luck didn’t last as some of them weren’t a good fit and my metrics went down again. But it lasted long enough that for the first time I had over 20 coaching clients simultaneously.

The Flu

In the middle of the month I caught a nasty flu. I was bedridden for a week with a fever and my voice didn’t fully recover for about a month. After the first week of the flu we drove to my sister in Germany for her birthday party.

The long journey nor partying till 3 am improved my health. So, for the two weeks I was barely managing to keep up with my habits and regular business activities (checking on my coaching clients, communication with prospects, etc.). I spent the last week catching up with everything.

But my income didn’t show it at all. Again, like during the 10-day retreat in December, I worked only as much to keep afloat, but our income remained stable.

My Beloved Wife

My wife surprised me big time twice in January 2018. In the first week she agreed for my travel to the USA for my mastermind’s retreat in April! Time, security and money were all her concerns, but she let me go anyway. I tell ya’, I didn’t see that coming.

Even bigger surprise came from her on 19th of January. She agreed that I work half-time in my day job. My dream came true.

In retrospect I think a hefty sum I gave her for her birthday one day before just might’ve got to do something with her decision.

Visa Application Process

So I spent at least several hours on the visa application process. All those forms were a pure nightmare. The level of details needed -mind blowing. Including the meeting with a consul at embassy and taking a special visa photo, the whole process consumed over one workday of mine. But at the end of the month I had a new USA visa in my passport.

I also spent several hours researching for affordable flights to the USA. In the end I bought plane tickets for about $1,000 which was less than I had thought it would cost me. Unfortunately, I have three planes in each direction.

AMS Services

The whole month I was getting a steady trickle of prospects. Not much came out of it, I started cooperation with one fiction author with a couple of books. My ads elevated her ranks from around the 1-million mark to around #100-200k.

My son created over 150 new ads for my customers. We were mostly filling gaps- we missed some books earlier or just a few sets of keywords for specific books.

AMS gave me a nasty surprise at the end of the month – for 10 days in a row they didn’t update sales figures in their reports. I had no idea if the ads were profitable or not. I had to change arrangements with my customers. They agreed to calculate the profits till the point when data were still updated and extrapolate for the rest of the month. What a mess!

Book Sales

January 2018 was a good month for book sales, like each January is. The standard explanation is that people who got Kindles as gifts are shopping around for books. Not exactly true, because paperback sales increased as well. I think New Year resolutions give additional humph to personal development genre in the beginning of the year.

I sold over 1,100 copies of my books. The pricing still trick worked for a few of my paperbacks, so I earned disproportionally more on paperbacks.

At the end of the month Create Space royalties for an abundant December arrived, so I had cash to pay for plane tickets and my mastermind fee for the whole quarter.

The Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €986.12 ($1222.79)

CreateSpace royalties: €2599.32 ($3223.16)

Coach.me fees: $541.48

Draft2Digital royalties: $33.98

Audiobooks royalties: $40.5

PWIW personal coaching: $191.9

AMS service remuneration: $1148.73

Affiliate commissions: $46.31

Total: $6448.85

Costs:

$29, Aweber fee

$20, InstaFreebie fee

$1752.75, Iron Sharpens Iron mastermind

$101, royalties split with co-author

$30.15, my editor’s share in profits

$1306.95, Amazon ads

$91, RAs’ (RAs = Real Assistants; my sons

How to Fight off Overthinking and Self-Doubt

There is a plethora of techniques to draw from in order to limit overthinking and self-doubt. But the first most important step is to realize you have this problem and decide to do something about it.

Without this decision, no method will be truly helpful, because well… you will be overthinking and doubting it.

So admit, too much thinking, overthinking is bad for you. Constant self-doubt robs you of power and, in effect, from living a fulfilled life. Treat them as enemies. Fight them relentlessly till the end of your life.

Those vices are part of the human constitution; they will always accompany you. Even millionaires face them. Resolve to always fight them and never give up. Only then, reach for specific techniques.

Three Brains that Add to Your Overthinking and Self-Doubt

We have three brains stuffed inside our skulls.

The reptile brain that is responsible for all the anatomic functions and the most basic emotions.

The limbic brain that is responsible for emotions and social interactions. In big part, it creates the subconscious mind.

And the rational brain in which our conscious mind resides. Its language is… language, words, abstraction, symbols.

A faulty self-talk is a result of a faulty feedback system between the three brains. Your reptile brain finds cortisone (the stress hormone) in your veins and signals: “Heck, something is very wrong with us. Beware!”

This signal stirs the limbic brain, and it generates emotions of fear and anxiety. Those emotions reach your conscious mind, and you speak blabber to yourself: “I’m no good. I’m afraid to do this. I’ll fail and my world will end.”

Those words generate even more negative emotions, and they cause to generate more stress hormone…

It’s insane. It’s not a way to lead one’s life.

If you want to turn the situation around, you need to employ your conscious mind. Here are some effective ways:

1. Journal.

Words, the structured language is a natural environment of your rational brain. It’s your territory, not your subconscious mind’s.

Talk with yourself on paper, not in your head. In your head, you are beaten before you even start. Each exchange of words spawns zillions of signals in your brain. You react to them, instead of act. You fall prey to your awful thinking habits: “You’re worthless. Yeah, I’m worthless. Let’s eat some ice-cream. Oh now, you are even more worthless…”

One thought generates another in a habit loop, and you almost don’t consciously process those words.

Take this dispute on paper, and now it looks ridiculous. Your subconscious’ arguments are weak and stupid. You can at last “rationally” talk with your emotions.

2. Mantra.

Break the dispute in your head with mantra. Don’t talk to yourself like that. If someone else would’ve ever used toward you the lines, you would’ve been deeply offended or outraged (“worthless s**t,” “good for nothing,” “f**khead,” “moron,” “failure,” “idiot”).

Be as irrational as your emotional brain. Refuse to talk with it on those terms. Whenever self-doubt strikes, answer with a short line of your own. Couple it with some catchy tune and sing it several times in your head.

I got my favorite one from Les Brown- “It’s possible.”

Refuse to get into any counterproductive dialog with yourself. Use the demoting phrases from your subconscious as triggers to your mantra:

“You are a failure.”

“It’s possible, it’s possible, it’s possible, it’s possible!”

“You can’t do it.”

“It’s possible, it’s possible, it’s possible, it’s possible!”

“That will end badly for you.”

“It’s possible, it’s possible, it’s possible, it’s possible!”

“You don’t even know how to start, you pathetic fool.”

“It’s possible, it’s possible, it’s possible, it’s possible!”

3. Meditation.

While meditation will not solve your self-talk problem on its own, it will make you more aware of what’s happening inside your head.

Acknowledging thoughts bouncing in your mind while not following a train of those thoughts, will give you the power to step between the impulse and stimulus during normal everyday actions. You need this foundation to do anything about your thoughts. If you don’t notice them but respond to them in a habitual manner, they will always release the same self-destructive impulses in response from your conscious mind.

Journaling has a similar awareness-increasing effect as meditation, but you can meditate in short chunks of time and practically everywhere, because you don’t need any tools for that. A 2-minute meditation is a great beginning of a meditation habit.

4. Take Tiny Actions.

Examining your self-talk is only half of the job. In order to truly get out of the overthinking habit, you need to take action more often.

You function in the infinitive Belief -> Thought -> Action -> Feedback loop, and the easiest way to affect this system is via taking action. An average person has little to no control over their thoughts and even less control over their beliefs. However, it’s relatively easy to take action, especially if it’s tiny in your eyes.

If you want to exercise, start from one push-up. If you want to read more, read one paragraph. If you want to become a writer, write a sentence. If you want to save more money, put away the first dollar. And do those actions consistently over time.

Each time you take such an action, your feedback will change and will affect your beliefs and thoughts. And, most importantly, every second spent on doing is not spent on overthinking. You cannot overthink and take action at the same time. With each tiny action, you rob the overthinking habit of its mind space.

Do not fuss over how small your actions are. They will compound with time. That’s the law of life.

The Compound Effect

When I started writing, I began with 400 words a day for five days a week. My first blog got only a handful of readers. My second blog did even worse. My first fiction story was trashed with critique, and rightfully so.

But I never stopped writing. After a few months, I wrote my first book. In a few years, I wrote 14 more. I wrote well over 1.7 million words. I sold over 32,000 copies of my books.

However, I started with only 400 words at the first day and never stopped adding more and more.

The post How to Fight off Overthinking and Self-Doubt appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

Fifty Seventh Income Report – December 2017 ($1939.74)

Are you curious about a half-year delay? I explained it in my first income report.

I spent December 2017 in accordance with the saying “work hard and play hard.” The first 20 days of the month were pretty intensive. The last 10 days of the month I spent mainly on a family get-together in the Polish mountains, and I did very little business-wise.

AMS Analysis

I continued evaluation of my old campaigns. December brought a rise of prices in AMS ad bids.

I have a theory that the pre-Christmas period is more of a time for browsers than buyers. I mean, my price per click didn’t rise significantly, but I got many more clicks and not many more sales. There were often days that I paid over $50 for ads and barely made it back in book sales.

I determined that re-creating old successful ads was a shortsighted strategy. Yes, those ads were guaranteed to get a nice initial traffic. Unfortunately, this honeymoon period was very short, and new ads were then performing much below the level of the old ads.

All this ads shuffle resulted in several more keyword templates for my customers. My son created about 400 ad campaigns in December 2017.

Real Artists Don’t Starve Challenge

My Quora stats

On 12th of December, the 30-day publishing challenge ended for me. I succeeded at publishing a new piece every single day, although I cheated a bit and sometimes re-used my old content. I was writing every day anyway, so I thought I could afford this small “change of rules.”

The results were quite extraordinary, and I summarized them in the Real Artists Don’t Starve Facebook group.

My Medium traffic increased about 10x, and my Quora traffic more than doubled. I got hundreds new followers on both platforms.

Medium stats: 30 days before the challenge

Medium stats: 30 days during the challenge

However, the challenge was quite taxing. I had been spending about 1-2 hours every day on preparing my content for publication: editing, correcting, formatting and looking for relevant stock photos. I pretty much maintained the pace right after the challenge, because I had content coming from my proofreader. But once I went to a holiday break, I published nothing.

I was able to face the challenge only because I wrote only half an hour a day, not one hour as I used to write.

Laptop Lifestyle

On 22nd of December, we drove for a family get-together in the Polish mountains. On the way back, we visited our friends, so we were back at home on 30th of December, and the next day was Sunday.



I spent 10 days doing nothing. Well, “nothing” in my case meant that I wrote for half an hour every day and checked on my coaching clients. I had only about 10 of them at that time, and half of them had holidays as well. Because of the multitude of holy days in that period, I wrote as much for my novel (leisure writing) as the other content (mostly the summary of my goals from 2017). Oh, I also diligently downloaded my customers’ ads data.

Despite my low activity for 10 or 12 days in a row, my revenue remained stable. Having a look only at my numbers, you wouldn’t have noticed that I was doing next to nothing.

Of course, it wasn’t because I am so bright but because of the nature of businesses I built. My ads are running on autopilot, so my books sell “on their own.” Ads of my customers also run on autopilot, and because they are profitable, they earn me money every day around the clock.

My coaching fees aren’t directly correlated to my activity, that’s one thing. The other thing is that my coaching is asynchronous. I don’t have to report at a specific time. An Internet connection is everything I need to provide value to my coaching clients.

Family Time

So, for 10 days I spent time with my friends and family. I also slept a lot. For 9 days in a row, I slept 7 hours or more. It was the first such streak since I started tracking my sleep in July 2013.

On a get-together, we were missing only one of my sisters who lives in Canada, and one cousin who has a special care toddler and couldn’t travel with him.

We had an awesome time. I had an awesome time. We celebrated Christmas together and were hanging together for a few days eating, chatting, sightseeing and enjoying a sauna.

That time left nothing but good memories in my mind.

 

On the way back, we visited my friend, Gabis. He is one of the three friends I dedicated “The Art of Persistence” to, and it was so cool to gift him a paperback copy of the book.

 

From time to time, something extraordinary happens, and it hits me how my life has changed in the past few years.

On 12th of December, I noted down in my journal:

At 9:30 am, I had a coaching call with my new coaching client, a small business owner from Australia.

OK, I’ve read the above sentence and still felt a pang of surrealism. I, Michal. Had a call with a new coaching client. The guy is a small business owner. And he lives in Australia.

It reads almost like a fiction story for me. Coaching wasn’t on my radar 5.5 years ago, nor 3 years ago.

AMS service

In December 2017, I was still getting inquiries from authors and corresponding with them. Not much came out of it. I got one new customer for my advertising services. Admittedly, it was a good client. I finally got a grip on who my ideal customer is, and I tried not to waste my time on less than ideal customers.

One author finished a cooperation with me in December. He reverted to selling his book for 99 cents, and I couldn’t guarantee profitability of my ads at that price point.

The Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €907.23 ($1088.68)

CreateSpace royalties: €858.22 ($1029.86)

Coach.me fees: $540.93

Draft2Digital royalties: $29.27

Audiobooks royalties: $83.66

PWIW personal coaching: $167.87

AMS service remuneration: $517.12

Total: $3457.39

Costs:

$29, Aweber fee

$20, InstaFreebie fee

$94.94, royalties split with co-author

$27.14, my editor’s share in profits

$1044.97, Amazon ads

$91, RAs’ (RAs = Real Assistants; my sons

My Four Daily Rituals to Stay Laser-Focused

My foremost ritual to stay laser-focused is my morning ritual. It takes me about 40 minutes to finish, and it has very little to do with any task I perform on an everyday basis.

But it reminds me what is important for me, what is my mission and why do I live. It perfectly serves as lenses of focus for my whole day.

My Morning Ritual

Every day, I wake with a purpose in my mind. As soon as I open my eyes, I start repeating my personal mission statement in my thoughts.

My mission statement has very little to do with what I’ll do in a given day. It’s the vision for myself at the end of my life. I talk to myself about how I should react to failure, success, what is important for me (love, God, family), how to govern my tongue and not waste time on trivia.

I guess, my personal mission statement gives me at least 50% of my focus.

The rest of my morning ritual consists of a quick intensive workout, prayers, journaling, looking at my vision board and going over hundreds of quotes and three books that shaped my personal philosophy. All those activities are directly or indirectly related to what I consider important in life and my core values.

Setting Daily Priorities

At the beginning of my work day, usually after I write in a given day, but before I start any other tasks, I take my notepad and jot down things I want to accomplish in the nearest future.

Sometimes, I have only a few points there, often several to a dozen. Those are all things that I can do in one day, usually in less than an hour. They are not huge projects, but tiny pieces of my projects.

For example, I’m going to publish a book in a month or two, co-authored with Jeannie Ingraham. The latest daily priority related to this project is not “Publish a book” or even “Write the book,” but “Write an email to Jeannie and ask her to send everything she already wrote.”

Whenever I don’t put out the fires or mindlessly browse through the Internet, I open my notepad and scan those daily priorities. When I have time and concentration, I’m able to knock plenty of them and even add a few more to the list. When I don’t have time, I do 1-2 the most urgent. That way, all my various projects are moving steadily forward.

My Habits

I have dozens of daily habits.

Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.

~ Benjamin Franklin

I firmly believe in this saying of Ben. I’m obsessed about doing my habits every day.

Studying the Bible, doing pushups, praising my kids, reading a book written by a saint for 10 minutes, writing at least 600 words, praying, practicing speed reading, checking on my coaching clients, gulping 2 glasses of water in the morning, keeping my three gratitude journals, tracking my daily actions in The Progress Journal, meditating, sending a gif with a cute animal to my wife, journaling…



My days are rarely structured to the T, so each daily habit is a small point of focus for me. I’m going through my days from one habit to another. I mark them off mentally in my head, and later mark them off in a Coach.me application whenever I access it.

I’m always more focused about doing my daily habits than I am focused on daily drama, life trivia or even the job I had to do.

Intentions

Recently, I’m into it for only a few weeks, I increase my focus by giving an intention to every single thing I’m doing. Well, that would be the ideal. So far, I succeeded the most with about 60 daily activities.

Everything – from brushing my teeth via cleaning the kitchen and doing job-related tasks to writing an article – gets one prayer intention attached to it in my mind. This habit both keeps me mindful about what I am currently doing, about the bigger picture and about my relationship with God.

I fight with myself to have it always in the front of my mind, and coupling my everyday actions with my prayers makes a great progress to that goal.

Those Were My Daily Rituals to Stay Laser-Focused

What are yours? Please share in comments.

The post My Four Daily Rituals to Stay Laser-Focused appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

Fifty Sixth Income Report – November 2017 ($587.58)

Are you curious about a half-year delay? I explained it in my first income report.

November 2017 was insignificant. I could take a “boring” month after everything else that already had happened in 2017.

My Amazon ads got stale in October. My book revenue dropped to about $1,700, so I took a closer look at all the ads I ran. I had several hundred of them at that time. I turned off at least a couple hundred of the oldest, because they were close to dead. In exchange, I created new campaigns with the best keywords found in the old campaigns.

I also created many more ads using keywords extracted directly from my manuscripts.



My workmate wrote a tiny program for me that parses TXT files and extracts from them the list of unique words. This was by far the best keyword research tool after KDP Rocket I’ve ever used. I processed all of my manuscripts through the tool and created 10 new keyword templates. So far, I earned on them over $800.

All of this processing resulted in five new keyword templates that I used for my clients. My son created well over 250 ad campaigns in November 2017.

Starving Artist Challenge

Around the middle of November, I joined Jeff Goins’ 30-day publishing challenge. Every day, I was supposed to publish something new.

Using a few tricks, I pulled this off. Sometimes, I reused my content from one platform to publish it on another (e.g. took a Quora answer and published on Medium), but it was always involved with some work.

I had been spending about an hour a day formatting content and looking for relevant images to add to my articles. However, the results were quite extraordinary and immediate. As soon as I started cranking out content every day, my statistics skyrocketed. I got more views, reads and followers on Quora, Medium and my blog.

AMS service

I had plenty of interactions with authors inquiring about my advertising services, and I reviewed many book pages on Amazon. But I got only two new clients in November 2017, including my old friend who was scared shitless of providing Amazon her husband’s credit card data. We advertised her fiction book.

My other customer was a nonfiction author with several titles. I got him on board in the last week of November and created first ads for him on 25th of November.

Case Studies

The fiction book of my friend initially did very well and sold about a dozen copies in the first few days. Then it tanked, like most fiction books tend to with keyword ads. Her daily spendings dived below a dollar a day.

But I still consider her book resurrected. It had sold zero in the previous few months. Since getting the help of my ads, her book sells now 10-20 copies a month and the ads are actually profitable.

This book was dead, well below #1 million rank.

In the end of October, I got a nonfiction book. It had an excellent track record and the bestselling rank around #11,000. This book did even better than the fiction book of my friend at the beginning. It sold over a dozen copies in a few days.

And then, exactly like with my friend’s book, everything tanked and remained that way. The book was still selling well organically, but my ads provided very little traction.

Wins

I used the same pricing trick I used a year ago for the Christmas period. I priced my paperbacks high and let Amazon discount them for my readers.

However, this year the effect was weaker. Fewer of my books got discounted, and Amazon was faster in bringing them up to the full inflated price. Nonetheless, I earned an additional few hundred bucks, thanks to this trick.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Like every year since 2015, I made a huge promo of my books for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Unlike in previous years, I had no promotion strategy nor any additional email blast for a Cyber Monday, so the number of sales at that day was not impressive at all. Black Friday made up for it. I sold over 130 copies of my books in one day. In the whole promo weekend, I sold well over 200 copies.



I did it three times already, enough to conclude that it works every time. Especially, if you collected over 1,000 email addresses in one year, so new readers may be interested in your old titles.

Black Friday/Cyber Monday promo gives you a boost of sales just before the Christmas season. Amazon algorithms don’t miss such spikes. It’s worth it to “lose” some revenue at $0.99 to compensate for it during the Christmas season.

Losses

I continued running ad campaigns for my permafree books. I wanted to determine if more free copies in hands of readers translated into more sales afterwards. All I could determine was that the correlation is impossible to determine.

Well, I also concluded that it cost me about 8 cents to generate a single download.

 

I attended an all-hands call in my ISI mastermind with Jeff Goins. At the end, he told us how we can reach him and he would gladly help. I took him for his word and sent him an email about what I have to offer for other authors. Jeff replied, asking what exactly I expect from him, and I asked him to connect me with his audience via a guest post or podcast episode, whatever he deemed more relevant.

At that point, the conversation went deadly silent. So, I approached him from a different angle. I discovered that his first book was self-published and sent him detailed instructions how he can improve his book page (and sales). The only thing he applied was changing price from $1.99 to $2.99 (with quite good results).

I followed Jeff once again and at the end of January, he replied that he would be up for a guest post about my recommendations on his blog.

Once again, I found out that it’s hard to cooperate with celebrities, even if you are introduced to them and don’t use ‘cold call’ approach.

 

I wrote less in November 2017, only 22,900 words. The only good thing about my writing that month was that I immediately published almost everything I wrote.

The Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €1019.44 ($1182.55)

CreateSpace royalties: €628.05 ($728.54)

Coach.me fees: $600.13

Draft2Digital royalties: $10.33

Audiobooks royalties: $119.25

PWIW personal coaching: $310.92

AMS service remuneration: $453.59

Affiliate commissions: $46.31

Total: $3451.62

Costs:

$49, Aweber fee

$20, InstaFreebie fee

$1752.75, Iron Sharpens Iron mastermind

$114.13, royalties split with co-author

$35.18, my editor’s share in profits

$674.98, Amazon ads

$118, RAs’ (RAs = Real Assistants; my sons

Fifty Fifth Income Report – October 2017 ($1406.31)

Are you curious about a half-year delay? I explained it in my first income report.

On the 1st of October, 2017, I was going back from a get-together organized by my employer. The whole way back, I chatted with my director. We discussed corporate policies, personal development, my road to becoming an author and my future half-time in the day job. That was an interesting time.

Failure

Once again, I’ve heard somewhere that video is on a rising tide. I decided to produce 30 FB live videos in 30 days.

I failed terribly. I recorded over 15 episodes when a retreat with my church community broke the streak. Then the ‘what the hell’ effect kicked in, and I made a one-week pause. Then I recorded several more episodes. It’s February now, and I still need to record two or three episodes to finish the challenge.

Family

My wife enjoyed the freedom from a day job. The whole family enjoyed it. She and my eldest son went to Poznan one week after I got back from there. They were on some computer games fairs. Well, my son was. My wife sightsaw the city.

Going through my journal, I noticed we were at a theatre and on a concert of a band which concert we attended the last time when we weren’t even married.

My schedule is always full, but with her day job with irregular shifts, we simply had fewer opportunities to meet together.

Somewhere in the middle of October, my wife took over the first ever part of my business tasks. She started downloading the data of my clients’ ad campaigns every day. This needs to be done in approximately the same time of the day, in the morning, when I am at work. It was always an effort to me to remember about it and to smuggle this task between other tasks.

Well, that was as far as my wife was willing to help. Whenever I tried to show her other things I would like to outsource, she was always “busy” or “tired.”

However, I didn’t mind it at all. Pat Flynn often mentions that his wife is the most important person in his business, because she mitigates him from many household chores and children care.

This is so true. I remember when I kept a time journal in 2012 and found out that life’s trivia takes up to four hours of my days. Chores, shopping, preparing meals and so on, consumes a huge chunk of our lives.

Thanks to my wife, they consume less of my days now. I almost don’t do shopping anymore. I almost never see kids off to school anymore. I help them less with homework now that my wife is at home for the full time. It all sums up to many hours that I can dedicate to neglected house fixes, my business or quality time with my family.

Permafree Experiment

Once again, I started advertising my two permafree books via AMS. I wanted to check if increasing the number of downloads of free books does in result cause more purchases of my paid titles. I ran those campaigns for over one month, and I couldn’t find a clear correlation between those two metrics. I paused them again at the beginning of December. The only thing I concluded for sure was that it cost me about 8 cents to generate a download.

A Headline Story

Till October, I reviewed about a hundred book pages looking for the signs of low conversion. I explained to authors dozens of times what the best practices are. I often used my books’ pages as examples. And I discovered that some of them are poor examples. “99 Perseverance Success Stories” had no headline in the book description.

A huge mistake! Your headline is responsible for at least 50% of sales. At that time, this book wasn’t doing very well. After the successful promo in August, the sales shrunk to about 60 copies a month. I quickly brainstormed a headline and included it in the description.



The sales took off immediately. In the next month, I sold 100 copies. I was pleasantly surprised that my stuff actually works. As I tell every author who inquires about my services: “A book without a headline cannot be successfully advertised.”

Lesson:

If you don’t have much traffic to your book, this may not be so obvious. But I advertised “99 Perseverance Success Stories” when I added the headline to the description. I already had people landing on the book’s page. Thus I had seen the effects immediately.

You never know when a tide of traffic will arrive to the shore of your book page. Prepare in advance. Fix your book page according to best practices ASAP. Otherwise, when the traffic will arrive, you will regret it converts so poorly.

Networking

In October 2017, I followed up folks from The Progress Fairs which I attended in September. Nothing tangible came out of it, but I got the proof that people are interested in getting on American Amazon.

One small publisher and two authors met with me. One author was too busy for the proper launch in the USA. Another one has to translate his book into English first. I had enough on my plate, so I didn’t follow them up again.

But those leads are still warm, and I have them all in the back of my mind.

In the middle of the month, I also had a retreat with my church community. I was able to work on my mobile with my coaching clients. I also remember recording a live video using the hotel’s Wi-Fi. The advance of technology is amazing. When I was going to retreats 20 years ago, I didn’t even have a mobile phone. We were completely separated from the world.

Resurrecting Books

I got a referral inside ISI, and I got the order for a full book’s page revamp once again.

This time, a rewrite of the book description was necessary. I discovered that my proofreader is also a copywriter! How awesome is that? And what were the chances that a woman who volunteered to proofread my stuff several months ago also had skills that I would need in several months?

She changed the book description (she had to do it twice, because the first iteration wasn’t exactly what the author expected), and I obtained the author’s password and changed everything on his page: formatting of the descriptions, editorial reviews, etc. I also created an AMS account for him, an editor’s account for him and started ads.

It was another case of a book that resurrected nicely and retreated to a ‘zombie’ status. Nowadays, it is selling about a couple dozen copies a month. Before I took it, it sold a copy in the last three months.

But advertising was not all roses. I had to split with a children’s books author. My ads simply didn’t deliver enough results to be profitable.

Another Case Study of Providence

In October, I had to start paying for the Iron Sharpens Iron mastermind. Our budget shrunk, because my wife quit her job. I had no idea how I’d pay for that in the long run. I felt lucky that my business ventures brought a stable income, but the growth was very slow.

Two weeks before the ISI payment, my other mentor dissolved a mastermind I was a part of for almost 20 months. That was a huge surprise for me. I didn’t see it coming at all.

However, I could use those $265 toward my ISI payment. Suddenly, ISI mastermind became almost affordable. I paid for three months in advance in hope that it would be beneficial enough to afford future payments from the income generated by being involved in the mastermind.

I’ll spill the beans a bit, because this three-month period is about to end: yes, it was worth it. My business generates right now enough revenue to cover the ISI mastermind cost. It looks like in the future, I will easily make up for this initial three-month payment.

The Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €844.56 ($979.69)

CreateSpace royalties: €720.04 ($835.25)

Coach.me fees: $437.96

Draft2Digital royalties: $14.98

Audiobooks royalties: $94.88

PWIW personal coaching: $167.07

AMS service remuneration: $416.64

Affiliate commissions: $92.92

Total: $3039.39

Costs:

$29, Aweber fee

$20, InstaFreebie fee

$265, Business on Purpose mastermind

$108.07, royalties split with co-author

$75.38, my editor’s share in profits

$653.4, Amazon ads

$110, RAs’ (RAs = Real Assistants; my sons

Instant Gratification: A Success Poisoned

The kind of success we constantly see in media can poison our minds. Golden medals at the Olympics, massive IPOs, scaling a business from five figures to seven figures in a year, wonderful weddings, decisive military victories or losing 100 pounds in five months. All those stories have common themes: they are shiny and fast.

They all fit the dictionary definition of success:

The accomplishment of an aim or purpose.

The above examples may or may not be success, it depends on the cost attached to it. My friend has a friend who was a very “successful” gymnast. She represented her country and won medals when she was young. Nowadays, she cannot sleep, because her body is in pain every single night.

Is business success worth it, if it leads to the end of your marriage? A wonderful wedding means nothing, if the marriage will not last. Was achieving a military victory worth the lives of soldiers? What if the guy who lost 100 pounds in five months gained 200 in the next 12 months?

Poisoned Success

Success is NOT achieving an aim or purpose. Not if the cost was too high. But we don’t see the full equation in media, only the shiny part.

The faulty definition of success causes us to be skewed toward instant gratification. We want badly those shiny results, and we want them NOW. It’s better to lose 100 pounds in one month than in five, to get your business to six figures in a year, not in three, or to win an Olympic result after a 3-year career, not a 10-year one.

And hey, if you could condense each of the above examples, don’t shy away from doing it!

So we want success, and we want it now.

Which Leads to Frustration

It’s so easy to feel frustrated when you are full of instant gratification mindset.

You try a new diet and get frustrated when you lose “only” 4 pounds in the first week.

You start a business and close it down after two weeks, because customers didn’t knock down your doors.

You start a blog, keep posting for a few weeks and then look at the statistics. Heck! Only you and your mother visited the page.

It goes like that with everything. You cannot stick to a chosen path, because you expect results too soon. You expect them immediately.

Shiny Object Syndrome

And then comes the worst. You cannot stick with one thing long enough to see results, so you look for the next big thing to give you the desired breakthrough. You find it quickly… but again, you cannot persevere long enough to get results. So you seek again for another instantaneous solution.

Your life morphs into this vicious cycle: a shiny object gets your attention, you jump on it with ferocity and dedicate a lot of your energy… for a short time. You get disappointed with your lack of progress, so you shop around for “something better.” A new shiny object draws your attention, you jump on it.

And it goes like this on and on.

Instant Gratification Makes It Worse

Have a look at this chart.

The Slight Edge chart

If you repeat the cycle of hope-frustration-hope, there is no space in your life to introduce perseverance. However, perseverance is what gets you on an upward curve and keeps you there.

If you keep chasing shiny objects, your life will go in a downward spiral. It’s unavoidable.

Is there a remedy? Yes, absolutely. First, you need to redefine success, then stick to one method for long enough to see the results. Once you get effects, frustration will have a limited access to you, and you will be less prone to pay attention to shiny objects.

How to do that? That’s material for a whole different post.

The post Instant Gratification: A Success Poisoned appeared first on ExpandBeyondYourself.

Fifty Fourth Income Report – September 2017 ($2195.05)

Are you curious about a half-year delay? I explained it in my first income report.

September 2017 started wonderfully, from the best day in my life. The 1st of September was the last day of my wife’s day job. She sent me a message at that day:

You made up for all my f*ing childhood.

You can only guess how much that meant to me. I was high with joy for the rest of the day, calling like crazy to my friends and family and telling them how happy I was.

At the beginning of the month, I was busy with collecting the latest version of my books’ manuscripts. I updated them all, removing expired links, etc. And I added at the end of each a mention about my coaching services. Then I uploaded the manuscripts on Amazon.

A Live Event

We exchanged books. I got “The One Thing” in Polish

In the middle of the month, I attended The Progress Fairs in Warsaw, a live event focused around personal development. I decided to go there and just feel the pulse of the industry in Poland. I got there at Friday, right after work. The first evening was quite nice. I chatted for an hour with a small publisher, talking about the publishing business in Poland and worldwide. He was fascinated by my self-publishing story; I was curious about the state of things in the Polish market.

We both were entrepreneurial spirits, so he had already thought about possibilities for future cooperation. This gave me the idea that I have something to offer to Polish authors. I know only one person more qualified than me to give the advice on publishing in the USA, and he isn’t interested in the Polish market as far as I know. I spent the rest of the Fairs talking with authors and inquiring if they would be interested in being published in the USA. I collected several business cards.

AMS

But mostly I was extremely busy with getting my AMS business off the ground. After the landing page was ready, I started to get a few inquiries a week about my service.

If you have little to no idea about SEO, join your forces with someone who has. Those few prospects each week came from Dave Chesson’s free course about AMS ads. I’m sure he get dozens, if not hundreds, of leads to his course every week from Google, because he knows how to do that.

The Process

So the process of onboarding new clients and running their ads had been solidifying.

At the beginning of the month, I made calculations (or rather guesstimations) of my few existing clients’ ads and my share in their profit. By the way, all of them had some profit.

When a new client signed up via a landing page, I reviewed his/her book(s) and sent them an email back with my recommendations on how to improve their books’ pages. There is little to no sense in bringing paid traffic to a page if it doesn’t convert. I didn’t start cooperation with them till I was happy with their book pages.

Then, usually, a frantic email exchange happened. Authors wanted more guidelines, better guidelines, how-to advice and asked about my prices. I patiently replied to everything they sent my way. I lost quite a few prospective clients at this stage, mostly due to my remuneration model, which is admittedly tricky. I’m paid from my ads’ profits, and it seems like Amazon has done everything in their might so authors could not exactly calculate their profits.

Then goes the starting ads phase. An author has to deliver me ad blurbs for their book and create an editor’s account for me. At the beginning, I worked exclusively with authors who already ran at least a few campaigns before. Later on, I discovered that if they had no previous ads, I could not start the first ad from my editor’s account.

Creating ads was easy. I already had some keyword templates from advertising my books. It came to lots of clicking, copying and pasting.

Once the ads were running, I needed to track them. Again, Amazon makes it insanely hard. Again, thanks to experience with my ads, I knew what to do. Every day, I was visiting my clients’ accounts and downloading their data to the file. Then I uploaded the data into a Google sheet.

The whole business process finished at the beginning of a new month when I was doing profitability calculations.

Employees

Luckily for me, I have two teenage sons. I hired them to help me run the AMS shop. One is specialized in creating ads, the other is in charge of data tracking.

It took some tweaking, but in the end I create only one campaign for each book and then send the order for more to my younger son. I tell him which keyword templates to use for which book and how high the bids should be. In fact, I don’t tell him, but send all those details over Messenger.

I cooperate similarly with my elder son. He receives CSV files with data into his email inbox, processes them in Excel and copy-pastes into Google sheets. I need only to visit my clients’ accounts once a day, download the data and send them to my son.

The only things I need to do are corresponding with authors, downloading the ads data and making monthly summaries.

Hard Work

Employees or not, the September was busy. I exchanged dozens of emails with authors, had a few introductory calls and recruited 6 authors from all of this hustle. I was constantly assessing book pages, creating ads, replying to emails, scheduling calls, fixing book pages, sharing best practices about book descriptions and editorial reviews, teaching my sons, starting more ads, downloading data, analyzing data and so on.

I didn’t like all of this. I was more than happy to outsource some mundane tasks to my sons. I liked to talk with various authors. But I loved the most that I was resurrecting books.

The business started rolling in. I was referred to a man with a good business book, but a dead one. We had mutual friends, so he put enough trust in me to give me his password. I revamped his book page. I rewrote the description, formatted it using HTML tags, added and formatted editorial reviews, created an AMS account and sent an editor’s invitation to my account. Only then did I start the first ad campaign and resurrect his book.

And the author asked me for the invoice. So I issued the first ever PayPal invoice in my life for $100.

The book sold well in the first week, then not so well. The usual story. Amazon didn’t love it very much, so didn’t give it a lot of impressions. But when I started my work on the book, it had a rank about #800,000. Now, it’s below #400,000 and since September, it has been consistently selling 10 to 20 copies a month.

Books & Ads Stories

I would say this is the standard story, if there is any “standard” with AMS. I got other stories in September.

I took a romance author with 5 books. I advertised his books for a few days and burned $40. We didn’t sell even a single copy. The author swore he didn’t see any improvement in his KENPs. That was shocking. My ads have usually about 100% return on investment. Nothing similar had ever happened to my ads before… nor afterwards. But I haven’t had a romance author since then. We finished cooperation after this fiasco.

I advertised children’s books for a few weeks. In the end, they about broke even. I offered to return the author’s $20 that he lost on ads, according to my calculations. He said to give it to charity. I did.

I took a book of my friend. An ultra-thin workbook with pretty indistinct cover. I told him what to change the description, but he was very slow with that. The ads started working before he did any changes.

That was a huge mistake. For some reason, Amazon loved his book with 19 reviews. I had never seen such a torrent of impressions in any book I had ever advertised. We paid for 160 clicks, and there was not a single sale because a book page didn’t convert this whole traffic into a single sale.

When we finally fixed the book page, it was too late. But at the end of the month, the book broke even. In December, it earned almost $40 from my ads. Amazon still loves it.

Buck Books Promo

Oh, on 4th of September I had another BB promo with 4 of my books on it. I sold 98 copies and almost made my investment back at the promo day.

Writing

But all the hustle with AMS ads didn’t change the fact that I was still writing. The usual stuff: Quora answers, income reports, Medium articles, email broadcasts and a novel on Sundays. I wrote over 34,000 words in September 2017.

The End

I spent the last weekend of September in Poznan on a get-together organized by my employer. Well, it was time off the day job, but not my business. I remember discussing for over half an hour with an Indian author interested in my services on Saturday evening.

I enjoyed the trip and the time just for myself, but my heart was no longer with this company. My heart was committed into my business.

The Income Report Breakdown

Income:

Amazon royalties: €1236.54 ($1446.75)

CreateSpace royalties: €856.61 ($1002.23)

Coach.me fees: $362.68

Draft2Digital royalties: $17.58

Audiobooks royalties: $98.34

PWIW personal coaching: $167.87

AMS service remuneration: $204.96

Affiliate commissions: $205.17

Total: $3505.58

Costs:

$29, Aweber fee

$20, InstaFreebie fee

$265, Business on Purpose mastermind

$138.37, royalties split with co-author

$43.22, my editor’s share in profits

$607.84, Amazon ads

$89, RAs’ (RAs = Real Assistants; my sons

Goals for 2018

It’s the beginning of the year, the time to set goals. My attitude toward goals is ambiguous at best.

Yet, I still set them year after year, so I set goals for 2018 too. I recognized that they are useful tools for focus in the long haul. Pondering them is a useful exercise on its own. I definitely consider the previous year to be the best in my life and not a small part of the reason was that I seriously pondered my goals for 2017. I drew conclusions from my past failures and prepared a better battle plan. If not that reflection, if not the change of the course, I might have gone insane already.

Hopefully, it will work the same way in 2018 (not going insane; having the best year of my life, that is). Like in 2017, my goals for 2018 are set by priority. Thus, the priority number one is:

#1 Prayer

I firmly believe my 2017 was awesome, because of my focus on prayer. When God is in the first place, everything is in the right place.

I freely admit I focus mostly if I say all of my prayers, not ‘how’ I say them. It’s because the quantity I can control, it’s not so with the quality.

Plus, in 2017, I added to my repository of quotes a sentence from “Revelations of a Divine Love” by Julian of Norwich, a medieval English mystic:

“For in dryness and bareness, in sickness and feebleness, then is your prayer well-pleasant to Me.”

The power of prayer lies not in spiritual ecstasy, but in the relationship. When there is a relationship, the space for effusions is created. But without relationship all ecstasies are false.

#2 Control My Daily Schedule

Especially on working days. Go to bed before 10 PM. Wake up about 5 AM. Work in the morning for myself. Reserve evenings for my church community, my family and occasional calls, because I have clients and friends all over the world and quite numerous in the USA, so my mornings are not the best time to be awake for them (11 PM to 4 AM EST).

This is my fundament. If I can do this, the rest of my goals will likely fall in place. If I blow this goal, others have low probability of materializing.

#3 Quality Time with My Family

I’ll keep this goal in the same form as in the previous year: to spend at least 1 hour a week with each of my kids and wife.

Now, when she quit her job and hinted that regular dates may be possible, maybe we can work out some fixed schedule for dates. Who knows?

In 2018, this goal is #3 because I want to have my schedule in order first. I failed with this goal in 2017 too many times because I had too much to do when I actually WAS at home. And too often, I was simply exhausted and sleep deprived.

I will also keep tracking this goal on my wall calendar. This is what kept my focus on it throughout the whole previous year.

#4 Automate My Businesses More

I need to revamp my landing page for coaching services and my coach’s profile on Coach.me.

I need to focus on one type of coaching more, and this will in effect allow me to use some scripts and pre-prepared materials in the process.

I should do the same for my book advertising business. I already know which books work best with my ads – nonfiction in the personal development genre.

Thus I should focus on authors with such books. Also, thanks to dozens of interactions with authors, I know what types of personalities are hard to work with.

Now, I need to define clear guidelines for myself as to which clients to refer to other services and which to accept. I need also to define follow-up rules, and procedures to register all interaction, because with increasing number of clients I’m getting swamped with all necessary actions and forget, sometimes for weeks, to follow up.

As you can see, I didn’t think this point through very well. Tracking my interactions with clients is a good start for a daily action regarding this goal.

#5 Publishing

I want to publish two books this year, one with Jeannie Ingraham and one on my own.

The first one, “99 Habit Success Stories,” is half-ready. We just need to collect more stories.

The second project has no title yet, but it will be the next volume of “Six Simple Steps to Success” series, the one about habits. I have plenty of content about this topic on Quora. I just need to reorganize it and put into a coherent whole. This one, I’ll probably release around September.

#6 Podcasting

I found it relatively hard to get on successful blogs with my guest posts. On the other hand, I already have been invited multiple times as a guest to a podcast. Most of the times, it happened after a host read my book.

My story is interesting enough, my expertise in self-publishing is attractive, and my progress in personal development is apparent. I have many angles to approach a podcast host, including the following I gathered in a by-the-way manner on Quora, Medium and my email list.

And I found giving interviews an easy way to spread my message. All I need is to show up and answer questions. It doesn’t absorb much of my time. It actually gives me the energy because I love to connect with people, and podcast hosts are usually a very interesting bunch.

As it is the lowest priority goal, I want to give an interview at least once a month. The one for January is ready. I gave an interview for View from the Top, and it will be on air within a few days.

Well, those are my goals for 2018

You have my permission to keep me accountable for them. And, as usual, I’ll report next year how I managed to achieve (or blow) them.

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