Blog.

Imagine you had no ideas for content but you knew how to photograph and film stuff. Then you hit upon some strange-looking Maccas restaurants. (That's McDonalds for all you guys outside 'straya.) So, you trawl the internet to find as many as you can. This is genuinely how a man named Max Krieger started his content creation journey. He's now on a mission to document as many of them as he possibly can. The project, titled NonStandard McDonald's, "celebrates the eccentricity of themed locations", according to one article that I read recently. My first thought was, wow what a weirdo. Right? But then I realised the genius of the idea. Firstly, it's great for Maccas. They're never going to do it, or they would have done it before a whole lot of them (like the UFO-shaped one in Britain) were demolished. Secondly, millions of people go into a Maccas every year, all around the world....

If you want to hear a question that I'm asked a lot, it's this one: 'What do you think I should do?' The answer has often been: 'Well, how long's a piece of string?', though these days it's also, 'Pay me and I'll make some suggestions'. While I'm paid to write stuff, which I can do with a pen, or a stick, or even some glue and glitter if I had to, the main reason I'm paid is because of my intellectual property. Nevertheless, it's a question that people who pay for coaching almost always ask. Here's why it's the wrong question: It indicates that you're not willing to think for yourself, but are instead looking for direction. Getting direction from people is not always a bad idea. In fact, if you've been through the rounds of thinking, and pondering, and sleeping on stuff; if you've tried to capture that monkey on paper; if you've asked and...

Today a story about one of my students. She's on this email list. I'm sure she won't care. Meet Amanda Smith (that's her real name, yes indeed). When she was a digital nomad, she was introduced to my Content Athlete coaching. She thought her dreams involved creating physical products to diversify her freelance writing business. But it soon became clear that Amanda wasn't really into product. She thought she should sell products. She thought that productisation meant creating products. She'd been romanced by digital influencers of all shapes and sizes, all of whom were successful and all of whom had built product businesses. But it turned out that it wasn't what she wanted at all. So what did she really want to do? What was her real challenge? Amanda is a writer. What she really wanted to do was to write a book, to become a master and an artist in her domain. Her challenge was that she was working 7 days per week,...

I recently read a terrible line about a book sale in the transcript of an interview. It was: 'It sold so well that it's now out of print.' You what, now? The book sold so well that it's now out of print? I wonder who was in charge of that product line, then? Did they have any business sense? See, the thing is that when products sell enormously well, businesses tend to keep them in circulation. There's a reason why you can still buy Think and Grow Rich, despite it being a niche publication that first saw the light of day in about 1937. Of course, my horror at this idiocy is tempered by the knowledge that sometimes only a single run is commissioned. If it sells out, then that's it: And that's much more likely to be what's happened. Nevertheless, selling out an entire run of a book is a good reason to run a second...