Are You Perfecting Yourself into Poverty?

You have an awesome product or ebook in you, but you’re not selling or making any money from it. It’s in bits and pieces on your hard drive and scattered among the posts of your blog like the brightest stars in the night sky.

“Oh, it’s not ready yet,” you say.

And just like that, your perfectionism prevents anything from happening. Perfectionism has become an insidious form of procrastination, because it appears virtuous at first glance: you want what you produce to be good, dammit, and when it finally is, that’s when you’ll sell it and watch your inbox fill up with PayPal notices.

But there’s more. In order for it to be “good enough to sell” you keep expanding on the premise. You keep mentally building new rooms onto its house, until the project becomes so big it would require an insane amount of “perfect” to get off the ground.

So it doesn’t get done.

And you’re perfecting yourself into poverty, because you can’t make any money if you don’t fucking sell anything.

You can’t sell anything if you don’t make something, and you can’t make something unless you plant your ass in front of your keyboard and make it already.

Oh, but you don’t have time for that because now it’s a big project that requires a lot of time to complete.

Better to wait until your schedule frees up a bit. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Repurpose, Revise & Relaunch Your Way to Wealth

Ok, maybe “wealth” is a bit much, but it sounds so good after the word “way” it just has to be there. My point is there’s another way. A completely different way that takes such so little apparent time it allows you to keep doing what you’re doing while cranking out product after product and sell them.

I just used this method myself and not for the first time. The more I do it, the more I see the beauty of it because this is how the web works: it’s iterative. Nothing’s permanent. Every document is a “living” document subject to being rewritten and revised at a moment’s notice. Nothing is set in stone, anymore, and that is tremendously freeing.

Repurpose

You can take stuff you’ve already done and captured and repurpose it into ebooks and products. How to Write an Ebook that Doesn’t Suck originally began as a series of blog posts. I repurposed those blog posts into the beginnings of an ebook, and then spent surprisingly little time adding to and revamping the text to flesh it out into something worth charging for.

Then I uploaded it to E-Junkie, wrote my sales post, and that was that: in a few days I had over a hundred sales.

I didn’t worry about it being perfect. I knew already that I meant to follow this process of rapid revision and relaunch if it was gonna take off. If it was gonna be a dud, then I’d know to reexamine my original idea or just drop it and move on. But it did take off so I ran with the momentum which was being generated.

Revise

I became a feedback fiend: every person who I chatted with who bought the book I asked to go leave a comment. I received excellent feedback from buyers who kindly replied to my emails. I took those comments and made them into testimonials. I took the feedback and revised the book to make it better and even more obviously the right choice for any busy online entrepreneur marketing with a blog, social media and email.

Specifically, I:

• Redid the formatting. The first version was landscape-oriented. When I ran a poll, overwhelmingly you said you preferred portrait orientation! Woops… So I reformatted from landscape to portrait.
• Expanded and added to the book in the areas which addressed your biggest concerns: having enough time to create an ebook and worry that with your small audience size you wouldn’t make much money.
• Expanded beyond the book format by recording the entire thing in audio to make an audiobook and creating a video to show how easy it is to make cool ebook covers using simple tools everyone already knows and has.
• Raised the price in line with the added value (while still keeping it really affordable) and introduced an affiliate program for it.
• Created an upsell in the form of The Un-Sucky Ebook Bootcamp to further help you do everything possible to get that ebook out the door.

Relaunch

I graduated from merely offering the ebook from a blog post to creating a unique domain with its own Headway-powered WordPress site. I’m just running with the momentum and relaunching it in the snap of my fingers. And now the new version is selling well at the new price and that’s pretty damn awesome.

Perfection is Evolutionary

You see, the notion that something has to be “perfect” or “just so” before you release it serves nobody. It does you nothing good. That unfinished ebook isn’t making you a damn cent! It’s bullshit.

Perfection is evolutionary.

With each new version, each new relaunch, it just gets better and better (and the price keeps going up). It will eventually become the perfect product: meeting its buyers’ needs at a price which is no object. Eventually, all grammar and spelling mistakes will be eliminated. Eventually, nobody will ever say, “I really wish X was in this book.”

As I bring in A/B split-testing to the sales page, I’ll make even more from the exact same number of visitors by increasing conversion rates.

Time to Break Up with Your Perfectionism

Forget totalitarian perfectionism and embrace evolutionary perfectionism. Take that product you’ve been mentally expanding in your mind and break it up into story with a beginning.

Then, create just the beginning and sell it. You can sell the rest later! And until you get feedback from your buyers, how do even know what should come later, anyway?

Evolutionary perfectionism for the win.

If you want the lowdown on how to do all this, get How to Write an Ebook that Doesn’t Suck and get on the notification list for The Un-Sucky Ebook Bootcamp.

Image attribution: andrecarol