Don't Let Everyone Into Your Poetry Course

When you create a poetry course, whether in-person or online, set a cap of how many people you want to be there. This is a suggestion adapted from Daniel Priestley.

So, 'Okay, I'm gonna make this video course, and my goal is I'm only going to make this video course available for 10 people.'

And I know that sounds very counter-intuitive, too, because, you may be thinking, 'No, I want people to keep coming to it.'

But when you're doing your initial launch, you want to keep it small because people buy under three situations: they're buying based on logic, but they're also buying based on emotion, and they're also buying based on urgency.

And if you're missing just one of those concepts, it's going to be very difficult for your product to do well. So, this is why we need some sort of constraint. So, for instance, by limiting the size, you're adding an urgency component.

Another thing that you can set up, for instance, a time frame. 'Okay, we're closing at this time, so we need five people to sign up by the end of next month.'

You see a combination of these approaches with Nike or Apple; when a new product launches, pay attention to the narrative they use. The supply is limited. They won’t be able to meet demand. So, you have this sense of urgency because you're going to be one of only this many people that are able to get it. This even while you're thinking to yourself, 'Man, do I need this?'

When Apple releases the Apple Vision Pro or whatever, one of the things you're going to see is they're not going to have hundreds of thousands of units available because no one will buy it because there's too many. It’s also so new that no one understands how it works; there's too many doubts about this. In fact, other companies have already tried this sort of product before, and not done well. So, what you're going to see is Apple saying “we only have 10,000 units worldwide.” This happens despite the fact they have the billions of dollars and infrastructure to create many more.

See the full video: https://youtube.com/live/sINbkkPQDOY

This Amount Is More Important Than How Many Books You Sell

When marketing your writing, it’s not about the sale.

I've been doing a lot of listening to a marketer named Daniel Priestley, who has a book called Oversubscribed. One of the things he's really talking about is when he's focused on trying to reach an audience, marketing to an audience, it's not about the sale. That he's not worried about that.

Instead, he's looking for signals from people. This comes in the form of interest, engagement, especially the type is visible to others. The more people detect that other people are also interested in what you're offering, the more they want it.

A market itself can create want or intrigue from people. Even if I'm like, 'Man, I wouldn't necessarily be interested in this,' it's like other people are interested in it. That's actually what happens in a lot of movies, right? In movies, you have companies that will pay, you know, millions and millions of dollars to have their product well-represented in the movie.

An easy example is Transformers and the cars. More recently, the Barbie movie was like a two-hour commercial. She has this pair of high heels, and it's a pair of Birkenstocks, and then I, as soon as I saw it, I was like, there's a product. There’s an integrated product that's going to happen. The day after Barbie, came out, those shoes suddenly cost $500 a pair. It's people who saw that the main character of this movie wanted those. It's also, like, what this thing represents. Because now you assign all this meaning to this thing, which, again, is how commercials work.

A lot is tied to identity, because when you're buying something, you buy something because you're, like, I am someone who does this thing. There is often a group identity to this. Again, Daniel Priestley is talking about, hey, we're not marketing to people, we're marketing for signals, we're not worried about the sale, we're just trying to see interest and get people engaged in interacting.

See the full video: https://youtube.com/live/sINbkkPQDOY

Everyone Is Not Your Readership

There's a concept in marketing I got from Seth Godin called the smallest viable market.

When we're making a video course, it is really important to be thinking about the audience as well, because you are not making your course for everybody. No one's going to buy that. We need to target something really specific.

If we were making a course titled, 'Poetry for Stand-up Comics' or something like that, well, now we have a specific market. Who's our market? We're targeting people that are interested in doing stand-up comedy and incorporating some poetry elements into it. So now we have someone really specific.

You could even try to narrow that even more, you know, you could focus on, like, clean stand-up comics or you could focus on stand-up comics that are focused on family. The more you can narrow in on this, the more you can target the specific people that you have in mind and the more you can get their attention.

I would ask myself, who are the 10 people that I could see that would benefit. I need to visualize and know everything about them--what's individual to them.

See the full video: https://youtube.com/live/sINbkkPQDOY