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Introduction

Leadership is a skill that everyone should develop and cultivate. Being a leader does not necessarily have to mean being a manager or a politician – it could also mean being a thought leader, or even just being a great parent. The ability to inspire, command and guide others is something that is incredibly valuable and that can help you to accomplish more and even raises your confidence and self-worth.

In this guide, we’re going to examine what it takes to be a leader by looking at some of the most important traits that history’s greatest exhibit. Every leader is different and part of your journey to becoming one is going to be discovering your own ‘leadership style’. With that said though, there are still definitely some common traits that you can develop and some lessons we can learn from influential figures from history. And what you’ll find is that in some ways, the most important aspects of being a great leader are not what you would expect.

I hope this guide will change the way you approach leadership and thereby help you to drastically improve your own results.

1. A Great Leader Does Not Need to be Liked Should a great leader be feared or liked?

The answer is that it doesn’t really matter. What’s most important is that you focus less on trying to be everyone’s friend and more on getting results.

Ultimately, a leader is someone who is trying to accomplish a goal by leverage the power of their team. If your goal is to increase turnover, then you are a good leader if you increase turnover. It doesn’t matter if you are liked along the way.

And sometimes you will have to make hard decisions or break bad news. You need to be willing to do that and not to concerned with how it makes you ‘look’. For example, if your superiors tell you that you and your team are going to need to work late, then you need to pass on that information and not make excuses. The temptation here is to complain along with your staff, to whine about how unfair it is and to make rude comments about the capabilities of your higher-ups.

All this does is to make you look unprofessional, to damage the enthusiasm of your team and to make everyone question the rules they’re being asked to follow.
This is one of the biggest problems with politics too. In order to get re-elected, a leader needs to make positive change in a short space of time so that the electorate can see the results.

The problem is that some projects only yield results over a long period of time and might even hurt the economy in the short term. Making those decisions would be political suicide and so our country is only ever putting out fires, never growing! This is something that a few famous leaders have managed to break away from. Arnold Schwarzenegger most recently discussed this and the value of being willing to make hard decisions.

You don’t have to be unpleasant, but be willing to let your reputation take the hit when it needs to!

2. A Great Leader Takes Responsibility

The reason you need to care less about how others see you, is that this then allows you to take responsibility. You might be passing on orders but for all intents and purposes those are still your orders. Own them and don’t apologize.

Likewise, when things go wrong because your team was working too slowly, you need to take the flack with your superiors and take responsibility. You were leading them, so if they didn’t get the work done, that’s your fault. Throwing your colleagues under the bus will again only make you seem weak and like someone who makes excuses!

What’s more important, is that by taking responsibility for targets not being met and mistakes being made, you are creating a safe ‘buffer’ for those beneath you. They know that they can make decisions and do what they think needs to be done and not worry about the possible repercussions. You’re probably getting paid more than them, so it’s your job to occasionally get shouted at!

This extends even further to taking responsibility for your own actions and decisions. Leaders make decisions quickly and with confidence and that’s not because they always have the answers, but because they’re willing to take the flack if their decisions prove to be wrong.

The worst thing you can do as a leader is to force your team to make hard decisions. Looking to politics for an example again, we can consider the recent decision of David Cameron (England’s ex-prime minister) to vote on whether or not the country should leave the EU.

This was a decision that most analysts agree the country was ill-equipped to make. In this case, politicians were letting the general public do their jobs for them and the consequences may prove to be devastating. Meanwhile, leader of the opposition at the time (Jeremy Corbyn) was famously non-committal in his views on the subject, losing much of his party to lose faith in him. This is in stark contrast with Nicola Sturgeon – who most would agree is a much stronger leader – who has made her views on Scotland leaving the UK very clear.

3. A Great Leader Looks After Their Team

This is one way that a great leader will look after their team but you should also be doing this in every other way possible too.

As a leader, you are responsible for the health and happiness for those that you are in charge of. As long as they’re in your care, they’re your responsibility. That means that you need to protect them from unfair commands that come from up high and it means that you need to make sure they are comfortable, safe and well looked-after as they work.

A fun example of a leader who embodies this notion is ‘Agent Gibbs’ from NCIS. Gibbs viciously protects his team and will go to great lengths to get them out of trouble – not only with the bad guys but also with the organization itself. As a result, he takes on a patriarchal role and his team love him for it. Sure, he’s a fictional character, but this works in real life too! Your team is your most valuable resource, look after them.

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Unlock Your Brain’s Hidden Potential

Your Short Guide to Ultimate Brain Health

Your brain is just like any other part of your body. In order to maintain optimum function and to get the very most from it, you need to treat it right.

And this is rather important, seeing as your brain is responsible for pretty much everything you do. Whether it’s the obviously ‘mental’ stuff, like concentrating at work or performing complex sums; whether it’s physical stuff like regulating your breathing, helping you sleep and directing your movements; or whether it’s managing your emotions and helping you to feel happy and calm.

Whatever it is you’re doing or experiencing, your brain is at the route of it. And thus you can improve every aspect of the human experience just by focussing on your brain health.

How Your Brain Function Can be Enhanced

The trouble is that many people have very little idea just how to go about looking after their brains. This is the most previous piece of equipment in the world – more powerful than infinite supercomputers – but we tend to just ignore it and hope it all works out okay.

In fact, a lot of the time, we unintentionally subject it to a fair amount of abuse!

For starters, most of us eat entirely the wrong diet and this means our body doesn’t have access to the raw materials it needs in order to maintain optimum brain function. In the short term, this makes us feel groggy and slow but in the long term, it can lead to cumulative damage that results in neurological diseases and age-related cognitive decline. That’s right: it’s not inevitable that you should become forgetful and cantankerous as you get older!

The other problem is that most of us don’t use our brains enough. We don’t challenge them and we don’t train them. Due to a phenomenon called ‘brain plasticity’, it is actually possible for us to train and grow our brains just like a muscle. New neurons can be created and new connections can be formed and strengthened. This all means that it’s possible for us to develop certain brain areas beyond others and actually enhance our abilities as a result.

But when you stop challenging your brain or training it, it can lead to all kinds of problems. Especially when you combine that with high levels of stress and the aforementioned poor diet…

How You Started Destroying Your Brain With Bad Nutrition and Stress

The way that most people eat these days is enough to severely damage our health and lead to serious problems.

As mentioned previously, the brain needs a large number of very specific nutrients in order to function well. These include the all-important precursors to various neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are chemicals that change our mood and the way they think – they help us to sleep, to feel good, to focus and to remember things.

But the brain makes these neurotransmitters out of vitamins, minerals and amino acids. If you aren’t getting enough l-tyrosine for instance, then you might struggle to make dopamine – the neurotransmitter responsible for helping us to focus, stay motivated and remember things. Meanwhile, tryptophan is what the brain uses to create the ‘feel good’ neurotransmitter serotonin. This is then later converted to melatonin to help us sleep.

Vitamin B6 is a building block for numerous neurotransmitters including dopamine, epinephrine (focus), serotonin and GABA (calmness). Choline, found in eggs, is the precursor to acetylcholine which can improve pretty much every single aspect of your cognitive function!

Then there are the countless other crucial nutrients that the brain needs to perform optimally. For example, healthy arbs are what fuel the brain with energy, antioxidants protect the brain cells from free radicals and zinc enhances brain plasticity.

But most of us are not getting anywhere near enough nutrients in our diets. That’s because we eat far too much ‘processed foods’. Processed foods contain lots of calories to make us feel full but they are ‘empty calories’ that are devoid of the things we need.

Meanwhile, our switch to a more modern diet that doesn’t include things like fish, mean that even those who try to eat ‘healthily’ are generally not getting the things they need. A perfect example of this is the modern lack of omega 3 fatty acid. Omega 3 is a fatty acid found in fish (and some plants), which aids with ‘cell membrane permeability’ (especially the DHA form). This is important because it allows things to pass more easily through the cell walls – good things like nutrients and signals from other parts of the body. At the same time, omega 3 fatty acid is also used by the brain to create a number of hormones that are linked with managing the blood. This way, omega 3 is able to reduce blood pressure and heart problems.

Most importantly though, this also allows omega 3 fatty acid to reduce inflammation in the brain and the predominance of ‘pro-inflammatory cytokines’. This is highly important, seeing as pro-inflammatory cytokines are what make you feel so groggy and confused when you’re poorly or very tired. Brain fog is a serious problem and it’s made worse by the fact that most of us also have far too much omega 6 fatty acid. Omega 6 fatty acid is a useful nutrient in its own right but when we get too much of it, it can actually lower omega 3 and cause more inflammation. Most of us have far too much omega 6, because it is used in all kinds of preservative oils.

This is then combined with chronic dehydration, which most of us experience on a daily basis. Dehydration can also cause inflammation in the brain, while also generally leading to sluggish performance.

These processed foods are also examples of ‘simple carbs’ – carbs that have no sustenance and which the body processes very quickly. This results in a sudden spike in blood sugar that provides you with a burst of energy, followed by an immediate trough straight afterward.

Then there are all the toxins and high quantities of sugars that we consume regularly – and the cancer causing free-radicals.

Is it any wonder that you struggle to think through the thick haze sometimes?

The Role of Stress

Even worse is the role of stress. Today, it’s a sad fact that a great number of us experience chronic stress, leading to elevated levels of cortisol (the stress hormone) in our systems. This has a number of serious negative effects on our health and on our brain function in particular.

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Three Powerful Passive Business Models

Three Powerful Passive Business Models -- A Five Minute GuideA Five Minute Guide

Do you like the sounds of making money without having to work?

That’s pretty much a rhetorical question. I am pretty sure that the answer is going to be ‘yes’ for the vast majority of people. Why wouldn’t you want to earn money without having to work?

Of course for most of us, this isn’t likely to become a reality any time soon and there’s always going to be effort involved in making a good living.

But while you might not be able to get ‘something for nothing’, there is a good chance that you can bring in profit that is vastly disproportionate to the work you do. And what’s more, is that you can stop ‘swapping your time for money’.

And in fact, you can do all that quite easily.

What I’m talking about here is ‘passive income’. This isn’t ‘getting money for nothing’ but rather it means setting up a business model that can eventually sustain itself with little-to-no input from you.

That’s right: you create an automated system of selling or of publishing adverts, or of recommending products and from there, you can continuously earn money… indefinitely!

So you have put work in but once you’ve done that. You can simply kick back and relax and let the cash come rolling in.

You aren’t trading time for money anymore. That means that you’ll go to bed and wake up the next day a little richer. And it means that you’ll be able to go on holiday and continue to earn. And it means that if a friend invites you out for the day, you can just drop whatever you’re doing and go – no need to tell employers or clients.

Better yet, because passive income is automated and requires no further input from you, that means that you can continue to repeat the same business model over and over again and thereby increase your earnings over and over again too! This is called ‘scaling’ and eventually, you can be earning massive money by having multiple ‘income streams’ all working at once.

It’s kind of amazing…

But Let’s Get Real: Is Passive Income Really That Easy? Can Anyone Do It?

But you’ve probably heard promises like this before right? Normally on ‘make money’ websites that promise expensive schemes that involve illicit activities, usually involving ‘tricking’ Google in some way or another and often involving a lot of complicated jargon.

You buy the ebook, you read through it… and then you just give up, frustrated.

Is passive income really possible for everyone? Or is it just a pipe dream?

The answer is that it is very possible – but you just need to think about it in the right way.

For starters, you need to recognize that passive income does not equate to a get-rich-quick scheme. There is a lot of work involved and you’re not going to start seeing massive money overnight. If you go into this expecting to get rich with minimal effort, then in all likelihood you’re going to come away very disappointed.

Instead, you should get into this looking for a way to supplement your current income and lifestyle and to earn extra cash without having to work hard for it constantly. Best of all, this is a way you can earn while doing something that you love.

Creating a blog or selling a product can help you to generate additional income without having to continuously put in long hours. That means you can do it on top of your regular business or regular job. And even if you only earn $50 a week – that’s $200 a month. That in turn is enough to go on a few extra holidays a year, to put aside some serious savings, or to treat yourself to some exciting gadgets.

And it’s all from writing about something you love and from creating a business model that you can really be proud of.

And once you start seeing that cash flow and you stop trying to ‘get rich’, you’ll find that it’s surprisingly easy to keep it growing and to keep that money coming in.

And you can even repeat the strategy you just employed in order to multiply the income several times over.

The other thing to recognize, is that you need to be smart about the way you approach these business models. The key is very much to work smart rather than hard. You need to be able to understand the thought process of your audience and you need to know how to create something that will work without wasting lots of time and effort on small details that really don’t matter.

But I’m not just going to tell you what not to do. I’m also going to help you actually get started with one of these smart business models so that you can begin seeing that passive income pour in right away.

In this guide, you’re going to learn three simple ways to start making money while you sleep. And all of them will be simple, effective and easy to implement…

Selling a Digital Product Online

One of the easiest ways to start making passive income is to sell a digital product online. This is what Tim Ferriss calls a ‘muse’ – a very simple sales process that will bring in cash to fund the things that you care more about.

So where do you start?

First, you need to acquire said digital product. A digital product is anything that you can sell that doesn’t have a tangible aspect. A good example here is an ebook but video courses also work well, as do email courses.

Whatever the case, a digital product has the benefit of being completely free to produce (no overheads) and not requiring any delivery or storage. This means you can create it once and then sell it indefinitely. And you can also use a digital delivery system to take payments and then send the product.

To make this product, you can either spend some time doing it yourself (an ebook is just a PDF in most cases, which you can make with MS Word) or you can hire someone to do it for you. Writers and writing agencies are easy to find online and won’t normally cost you that much (a few hundred dollars often for an entire ebook).

You’re then going to create a sales page. This is going to be a single page designed to sell your product using persuasive writing and a smart layout. It’s very important that this page be well designed because you need to gain the confidence of your audience and look like a ‘real business’. There must be no concern in their mind that their payment might get lost in transit, or that you’re going to take their money and then never deliver the actual product.

It’s also very important that you make it as quick and easy as possible for people to checkout. That means they should be able to click ‘buy’ without having to worry about entering their payment information or sign up. Most sales are made on an impulsive basis and in order to take full advantage of that, you need to ensure your site allows for those impulsive purchases!

Finally, you’re going to use Facebook Ads in order to target your advert to the right people in a way that means you’re only paying when someone actually clicks one of the ads. You get to set how much you’re willing to pay for each of those clicks, which means that you’re going to be able to ensure that you’re earning more money overall than you’re spending.

In short, the right people get sent to your sales page, they get tempted by your sales pitch and they quickly and easily check out.

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Aspiring Lifestyle Entrepreneurs: Discover A Step-By-Step Guide To Live, Work, and Play Anywhere in the World Find Out The Exact Steps And Techniques!

The 7 Step Roadmap To Freedom - A Guide For Aspiring Digital Nomads

Becoming a digital nomad means becoming a pioneer. This is a way of working that would have been completely unthinkable even 15 years ago but now, thanks to the available technology, there’s no reason that we can’t take our laptops and start travelling around the world.

It’s taking a while for the world to catch up though. Many of us still work 9-5 jobs in stuffy offices, feeling stressed and far too exhausted at the end of the day to do anything worthwhile with our lives.

There’s an incredible, beautiful world out there and so much to see, do and explore. And yet most of us spend our lives working and sitting in the same dull rooms. We’re stressed, we’re bored and we’re exhausted.

Is this really what life should be like? And when the alternative is right there in front of you why would you continue to subject yourself to such a style of living? It’s time to make a change – and I’m going to show you how in 7 easy-but-powerful steps.

Step 1: Envision Your Journey

Notice I didn’t say plan yet. That’s because you’re not going to plan your journey just yet but you do need to have an idea in mind of what you want to do and where you want to go. Think about the countries you’d like to see, look for any particular landmarks or activities you’d like to get involved in and decide how long you want to go for.

While this isn’t a set-in-stone plan yet, what you are going to do is to try and be a little realistic at this point and decide exactly the kind of travelling you want to do and how you want to do it. And it also means thinking about the kind of travel you can do. Because being a digital nomad can mean different things to different people.

If you’re married with kids, then you might find it hard to up and leave. You’d have to either take them out of school, or be without them for long stretches. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still live the lifestyle – how about being a digital nomad within the country and working in different amazing places around where you are? Or how about going on lots of smaller trips?

If you choose to go for an open-ended trip, even better. But in that case, think about whether you want to go somewhere touristy, whether you want to go to Europe, or whether you’re going to climb mountains. Maybe you’ll do all three and you’ll plot a map through multiple countries.

Step 2: Ask Your Boss

A lot of people don’t feel terribly comfortable about starting an online business. Does that mean that they have to give up on the dream of being a digital nomad?

Not at all! Actually, they can just as easily become digital nomads by doing a ‘regular job’ but taking it on the road with them. Try speaking to your boss and see if you can do your current job while you’re travelling. If they say no, then try speaking with your current boss about the possibility of doing a different role within the organization. It’s nerve-wracking but you’ll probably find they’re more amenable to the idea than you expect. It is the 21st century after all…

No? Then another option is to look for other jobs. Again, this can be ‘normal’ employment just like you’d normally look for. The only difference is that you’re going to look for jobs that specifically lend themselves to working online. That could mean working on web design (which of course can easily be done online in most cases), being a copywriter or anything else. Some jobs will even mention in the job description that they allow you to work from home (which means ‘from anywhere’ to us!). Always be sure to double check in the interview though.

Step 3: Create Your Own Online Business

Failing that, you can create your own online business. This is a relatively easy thing to do, you just need to provide a service online and find clients who are willing to pay for that service.

So you might be a writer, a web designer, or a consultant. Alternatively, you could sell photography, you could run a blog or a vlog, you could look for a company to sponsor you on social media or you could sell a digital product or an affiliate product. There are tons of different business models you can run easily online and this is something you shouldn’t be afraid to experiment with.

Note that this doesn’t mean you have to hand in your notice tomorrow (as much as you might like to). There’s no need to take unnecessary risk, so instead, why not try creating an online business in your spare time to test your model and then quitting your day job only once you have proven that this method works.

Step 4: Find Your Gear

Now you need to get your tools and gear for travel and working on the go. Whenever you go travelling for a long time, your travel gear is going to be an essential consideration. However, when you go travelling for a long time and you’re going to be working online – then it becomes even more important still!

So what does the budding internet entrepreneur need to take with them on their travels?

In terms of your general travel equipment, you’ll of course need a bag. Invest in a good bag because this is going to be a highly important tool for you in the future. You’re going to use this every single day to keep your things in and thus it needs to be light and convenient to carry, while also protecting your worldly possessions and keeping them safe. Look for something with plenty of pockets and that is going to be small enough stow under your seat on the plane (this will save you a TON of time).

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The Modern SEO Blueprint Report

SEO has changed a lot since the days when you could just create a bunch of low quality links to your website and expect to rank at the top of your SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Google is constantly getting smarter and is constantly iterating on its algorithms and if we’re going to keep bringing in traffic, then we need to know how to adapt.

In fact, continuing with outdated SEO strategies is not only unlikely to work – it can actually damage the status of your site and even result in your site being entirely de-indexed. It is entirely crucial then that you stay up-to-date with your SEO strategies then and that you stay one step ahead of Google’s algorithm updates.

This guide will show you exactly how to do that with a step-by-step guide that will provide you with a complete blueprint including everything you need to do to see massive improvements in your SEO.

Why Old SEO Methods NO Longer Work

Perhaps the best way for us to illustrate how SEO needs to be approached today, is to first examine what doesn’t work anymore and how SEO has evolved since its earlier days.

When Google was first introduced, it worked using a couple of simple processes. In order to find new content on the web, Google will use scripts known as ‘robots’ and ‘spiders’. These trawl the net by looking for links and then add the content from each site to a giant index.

When a user searches for a specific term, Google then checks the index against the search term to find the best match.

Inbound links have always been important for SEO then, as they provide Google’s spiders with a means of actually finding your site. At the same time though, Google also views inbound links as referrals or testimonies. In other words, Google assumes that your website must be good if it has lots of links pointing at it – because that means other content creators must be recommending the site to their fans.

Google can also use links as a way to deduce the topic of the website. If the links come from sites about dogs, then it is probable that your site is about dogs. And especially if the anchor text used in the link says ‘best dog website’.

The other historically important element of SEO is keywords. Keywords, or ‘key phrases’, are the terms that users search for when looking for content. This is what Google would use to try and find a ‘match’ in its index – and without keywords, it wouldn’t be able to pair the right results with the right searches.

Thus, in order to get to the top of the SERPs, all a creator once had to do was:

- Build as many links as possible

- Repeat the keywords frequently within the anchor text and within the copy of the website

But then things changed…

And changed again…

Enter Panda and Penguin

While this system worked on the whole for Google, it was only a matter of time until marketers would begin taking advantage of it. It became common-knowledge that you could game the system by creating lots of links and lots of content and this resulted in some bad practices among site owners.

Link spam became common for instance, with users posting thousands of links on sites all around the net, regardless of whether they were relevant or high quality. Meanwhile, many site owners began writing low-quality content, with keywords ‘stuffed’ into them.

Keyword stuffing essentially means repeating the same keywords over and over again, regardless of whether they fit naturally into the content. For instance, a website about buying hats might have content that reads like:

“Welcome to buyhatsonline.com where you can buy hats online! If you’re looking to buy hats online, then this is the best buy hats online website!”
As you can see, this doesn’t exactly ‘flow’ naturally.

Some site owners even began using ‘content spinners’, which would recycle old content by swapping words for synonyms. In short, a lot of dross began to rise to the top of the SERPs and Google had to respond.

It responded with two updates to the algorithm called ‘Panda’ and ‘Penguin’, released in 2011 and 2012 respectively. Panda was designed to reward high quality content by looking for in-depth articles, external links and more refined use of key phrases. Penguin meanwhile was designed to punish link spam by making the quality of the links as important as the quantity. In other words, strategies were forced to shift from posting thousands of links, to landing links on the biggest and most popular websites in their niche.

While this improved the performance of Google dramatically, it was actually a very bad time for lots of creators who had been advised to use old-fashioned SEO techniques and now were having their sites penalized or de-indexed as a result. Businesses lost thousands of daily views over night and many went on to proclaim that SEO as an industry was ‘dead’.

This has changed our approach to SEO dramatically but even that is not the end of the story. Since then, Google has been continuously iterating on its search and building upon this more solid foundation. More updates like ‘Pigeon’ helped to strengthen things like local search, while Panda and Penguin have been refined greatly.

Also interesting though are the ways that Google itself seems to be evolving and the clear path that it is on. Google is moving from being a simple search engine to become a fully-blown AI. Google no longer aims to ‘match’ keywords but rather tries to understand the actual question being asked. To that end, it has begun to use smarter methods of assessing content – such as using ‘latent semantic indexing’ and even ‘structured data’. Search has become more personal and has integrated with other tools like Google Plus to that end.

Google Home and Google Pixel perfectly demonstrate this vision that Google has for its search – allowing users to simply ask questions and being presented with an answer.

Moving forward, this is likely to increasingly become Google’s MO. And then we have other factors to consider such as real time updates to Google Penguin.

Only the creators that are smart enough to keep their SEO up-to-date and future proofed against upcoming changes will be able to survive and thrive as Google continues to evolve. And that’s what you’re going to learn right here…

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The 7-Step Blueprint to Launching Your First Product

A product launch is a fantastic strategy that digital marketers can use to ensure that they truly maximize the sales potential of their digital products.

If you’ve spent time or money creating an ebook, an online course or a piece of software, then you need to ensure that it makes maximum impact when it goes live. If you just quietly release your product by adding a download link to your website, then you’re going to miss out on thousands of sales – not to mention the opportunity to work with affiliates, to build authority and to strengthen your brand.

A good product launch can take a poor-selling product and turn it into a bestseller. In this guide, you’re going to learn exactly what it takes to manage a successful product launch and to ensure that people can’t wait for your product to go live.

And we’re going to do it in just 7 simple steps…

1 Create Your Digital Product

Of course, the first thing you’ll need to do in order to launch a digital product is make one. Until you do this, you’ll have nothing to launch and that means you can’t expect to make much of a splash when you go live!

So what is a digital product? There are plenty of options here but some of the most popular choices for marketers are:

- Ebook
- Online course
- Video series
- Seminar
- WordPress theme or plugin
- Other software

Any of these will give you the ability to sell unlimited copies with zero overheads. That in turn means that you can recruit affiliates and share your revenue and it means that you’re minimizing the likelihood of a failure. Your product can’t fail when you only need to sell one item to breakeven!

Make sure that your product is unique, that it is original and that it has a real ‘emotional hook’ that will draw in your buyers. You can also help it to sell more by adding lots of extras, whether that means videos, access to a VIP area on a website or perhaps a free report.

Making the product means either writing an ebook in Word, creating a video with some filming and editing equipment, or outsourcing the entire process to a third party using a freelancing site like UpWork (www.upwork.com).

2 Tease Your Digital Product

If you have an audience already as a blogger or a social media marketer, then that means that you have a built-in customer base that you can market to.

That also means that you can start to build anticipation and interest for your product as early as possible. Don’t announce your product yet (we’ll come to that in a moment) but instead make it known that you have something on the horizon. You can do this simply by saying:

“Stay tuned because I have something very exciting to reveal in the coming weeks… it’s going to change everything!”

This allows you to follow the recommended sequence when it comes to hyping and selling a product: AIDA. That stands for:

Awareness
Interest
Desire
Action

Here, you are piquing interest and making your audience aware that something is going to be available in the future. That will make them more receptive when you eventually share more information and it’s also a good example of something known as ‘presuasion’.

This is also a particularly good time to ask your audience what they would like to see. This is one of the great things about a product launch – it gives you time to consult with your audience and to make sure that they actually are interested in the thing you’re about to spend ages developing. By getting your audience to vote on the kinds of things they’d like to see from you, you can get them more involved in the product (and thus more emotionally invested) and you can also verify that the audience exists so that you aren’t risking spending a long time developing a product that no one will go on to buy…

For that reason, this step two should actually start around the same time as step one. Once you begin work, let people know while simultaneously keeping the nature of that product shrouded in mystery.

3 Create Your Launch Materials

Now you’re going to create your launch and marketing materials.

So that means you’re going to make your press release (a letter that you will send to the press, telling them about your new product and why everyone should care), a sales page (a single page that exists solely to promote your product and collect sales) and maybe some other things like some email swipes for your audience and maybe some banners, cover materials etc.