Hey Guys,
A couple of people asked me why I’m writing 52k words and what I’m planning to do to monetize it.
I thought this would present a good opportunity to lay out my plan for you.
Most of the plans I have are in my head, so I’ll do my best to communicate my thoughts:
- Why 52k words? – Well, there are 52 weeks in a year, so I thought it’d be awesome to finally create a ‘year-long’ piece of content that would be useful now and five years from now.
- It makes me feel cool LOL. Don’t underestimate this. If you aren’t proud of what you’re creating and it isn’t somewhat unique, you may struggle to execute OR execute poorly. So do the ‘warm and fuzzy’ sense check – do whatever you’re working on making you feel like that? (like this does for me)
- Value now and over time – by producing an immense amount of value with the content I produce, I believe it’ll help me monetise other ventures I have. This begins with giving lots of value upfront
- Building an audience – this is a big thing I’ve really been terrible at. I have a sprawling body of work online but this will represent the first time I’m making a concerted effort at building a personal audience of people who are simply following my journey
- My own products and affiliates – where and when it’s relevant I’ll be making reference to products I’ve built, services I run or companies I recommend
- Putting the letter for sale in singularly, in batches and in its entirety – I’m still figuring this out somewhat in my own head but the idea is you can get this letter for FREE over an X-day sequence, or you can buy to access it all at ONCE for $14.99 or buy specific letters for $1 apiece. In this way, people can really choose how they wish to consume the content
- Expanded premium content – I’ll get further questions about specific things I’ve done and based upon this I’ll roll out much more in-depth content about a specific thing, whether it’s agency stuff, property, apps or something else entirely.
- The continued growth of this content. I might keep it at 52 emails. Maybe it’ll end up becoming 365. But that furthers all of the opportunities above
- Evergreen content – I’ve chosen NOT to make this blog about specific tactical how-to’s because they can go out of date pretty fast. Furthermore, the stories of my life will never change – so this stuff should still be good 10 years from now 🙂
- The unknown – this is a very exciting part for me – and the unspoken value with things that have a fluid structure (a bit of a juxtaposition there lol). I truly don’t know what and can’t say where it’ll end up. Let’s see
I won’t lie. I’m feeling kind of genius right now lol.
Anyway as it stands – I’m at a stage where I’m writing the very early stages of 52k words and I plan to edit, modify and improve this over time to keep the value high.
If you feel like making a donation to buymeacoffee I’d really appreciate that!
In time I hope to generate over $10,000 in sales from this project, and maybe even create a membership community to ensure I keep writing for you guys – with all my thoughts, plans and experiments.
Of course – this could completely fail – but in the worst case, I’ll have a likely 60,000+ words body of content that’ll serve as my way of sharing my journey with the world for those who are interested in my story.
A secondary question you all might have is how am I going to market 52k words?
This is something I plan to do passively (for now) vis a vis the following:
- As it stands, I get 50-100 people adding me on LinkedIn weekly – they get a message with a link to the landing page
- I’m messaging 20-50 people a week within my Facebook network
- I’ve added the landing page to the menu on deepakshukla.com and I’ll also add a pop-up
- I’ve added a popup to the company page after 1 minute also
- I meet people through my agency and networking in general pretty often so I’ll share this with them where appropriate
Paid ads aren’t on the agenda just now but in time they will be 🙂
As I launch my apps and SaaS products (more on this later) I naturally hope I’ll get more personal traction and this is where the passive growth for 52k words will pick up, as people become more curious about my story.
The learning in all of this is that cross-leveraging all of your assets is really important because it makes the network effect of everything you’re working on that much stronger.
I’m definitely someone who likes to introduce friends to each other and share with everyone what I’m working on as I feel that’s how you have the opportunity to elicit the best feedback and build faster friendships.
It’s the nature of disclosure and I’m sure you’ll agree you feel more connected with those who share exactly what they’re working on rather than playing their cards close to their chest.
I personally find the ‘cards close to your chest thing as annoying as f*ck.
So I’ve hit the 900-word mark and I’ll transition to this insight; consistency definitely builds momentum.
It’s the power of starting and THEN sticking with something that’s huge.
Right now my girlfriend Daniela is having a Swedish massage for an hour that I bought for her as a surprise.
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And I walked her to the spa and then dived into the nearest cafe with my Macbook that’s sitting on a 14% charge:
(if you look carefully you’ll notice I’ve since edited this email)
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I decided to write this actual piece as a result of a Whatsapp conversation I had with my good friend Francesco when I mentioned the 52k words and he said:
‘ah you’re writing a book’ – and I thought no, I need to explain this properly.
Randomness is such a huge potential winning factor if you can harness it and combine it with execution because then it allows you to build connections in ways that other people can’t.
e.g I can now (thanks to Francesco’s question) share this project with absolutely anyone who asks me anything – as this is going to basically contain my opus moderandi.
And having a 13% battery places pressure upon you.
And the pressure is key – it’s part of the reason I posted this on Facebook:
In total that’s 133 comments (half of them my own lol), so 66 people more or less who are interested in the project.
I also said gave myself a timeline:
I also told a bunch of people in my network privately because I was excited about it, and when you combine it with the 100+ comments you can see here…it’s an effective combination.
Part of the reason I feel relatively comfortable embarking upon seemingly ‘big projects’ like this one is that I set myself up for success:
- I’m excited about this project
- It’s connected to my broader ambitions of growing my various companies
- I have a ‘defined’ route to monetisation
- I made a public commitment
- I made a public commitment and gave myself a launch deadline of 4 days after I decided upon the idea
- I have 50+ people waiting to start receiving the letter
- I wake up at 430am every day, so I have the freedom of time to do this without it affecting my other work (more on this later)
And all of this in combination makes the execution of 52k words and my ever-solidifying plans to grow it that much more achievable.
Right, I hit almost 1300 words.
Producing this letter is so much fun for me at the moment. I get to talk about myself the whole time so no wonder lol
Anyway – catch you in the next letter guys
