The one thing

By Fiona Boyd |  Email This Post

As things are speeding up and getting incredibly more hectic as the Christmas break looms, I’ve noticed my mind wandering and not really keeping up with all the bits and pieces going on around me.

This year has been an unusual one for David and I – we wrote a book together in February and March (Niche Content Millionaire), and then we started a blog site, softly around May as a way of producing content that built on and expanded out from our learnings over the past 15 years in the online space.  Most of of which we share in our book.

We also had a need for a new income stream into the family and as luck would have it, a former client who David had written a technology platform for, called him to return and work on the next version of the technology. They had outsourced version two of the platform and had nightmare on top of nightmare, disaster on top of disaster during the experience and just wanted the guy who developed the original thing to come back and sort out the mess.

And that’s what David has been doing this year – sorting out another company’s messy overwrites of his technology and then prototyping up the next version and some new modules that look set to give this company a way to have a really good grab at a rather huge market. Interesting work, and quite exciting now that David can see that what he originally developed six years ago, has been able to lead to something much bigger and way more interesting. As things stand this means that our family is considering the possibility of a move to the US to support David in leading the rest of the technology development with this firm.

What's the one thing you can do that will cut through to the heart of your business and create amazing results?

I’ve also pursued some new strands to my skills set and in February did an intensive life coaching course with the Life Coaching Academy based on the Gold Coast, and have taken on a couple of clients. This is enormously satisfying and interesting for me because it allows me to work with people starting up new businesses and to help them work out the steps required, the order of those steps and how to keep themselves focused and achieving at a time of maximum newness. All things I had to conquer when I was involved in starting up, growing and then selling the Arts Hub business.

But as the year nears its end I’ve been struggling with a ‘to do’ list that never quite seems finished I’m reminded of the days at Arts Hub when I always felt under pressure, under the pump so to speak, to do a zillion more things to bring in new members.

What I learnt at Arts Hub was that when you feel you have to do an enormous amount to get through, then it’s time to simplify your approach and ask yourself the question – ‘what is the one thing I can do, that if I put a heap of effort into it and do it consistently for as long as is required, will lift my business (or life) to the next level up?’

I remember clearly heading towards year’s end at Arts Hub and we had a big outstanding tax bill that would have to be cleared by February, sales were down as they usually are moving into Christmas and all was looking a bit gloomy. Instead of coming up with some vast plan on how to get revenue up, I asked myself the ‘one thing’ question and came up with the notion that if we could get members to renew their membership early for a special benefit to them, then we could bring some cash flow forward and clear our tax debt and set ourselves up for a good start to the next year. We hadn’t explored the potential of an early renewal strategy at Arts Hub prior to this and only having been around for three years, it clearly could be quite risky. However, I think our offer was good (there were prize draws and members got additional free months for renewing early) and our copy was snappy, to the point and got good results.

I go into this issue of good copy in our book, Niche Content Millionaire, in quite a bit of detail. My firm view is that really elegant, well-written copy can help sell your product like virtually nothing else. Great copy reaches out and grabs us and makes us want to get involved – it’s clear and honest and not shouty – and doesn’t claim that if the person doesn’t act on the offer they’ll suffer damnation. Instead, good copy points out a benefit or two, has an offer that has a value, and is good to read, often it can be fun to read and can make people smile as they consider whether or not they’ll pull out their credit card and act on it.

So back to the one thing. Life coaching also seems to be about finding the ‘one thing’ that your client can get on with in the week between seeing them again, that will make a large difference to what they’re doing. What’s really interesting is that the ‘one thing’ is often not difficult, overly challenging or demanding. It’s just if you do that ‘one thing’ instead of a zillion other, less relevant things, you’ll get your results much quicker. It also means that some of the other things you’ve been doing methodically and religiously and that yield way less impressive results, end up falling off your list as you allow your ‘one thing’ to have a primary place in how you go about your business.

I’d like to ask you now to consider the ‘one thing’ you could do either in the lead up to the holidays, or when you come back in the New Year that could make that out-of-proportion, big positive difference to your business in 2010?

Niche Content Millionaire is a downloadable eBook that tells you the true story how we made millions from subscription content and membership websites. Buy Niche Content Millionaire Now

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