Life is unpredictable and doesn’t always go the way in which we plan. Sometimes when we’re running full speed ahead, obstacles can unexpectedly appear. So here I am, barely surviving day 3 of the challenge, and feeling a little on the side of discouragement. Where does time even go? There is just so much I want to do that sometimes its paralyzing when it comes to deciding what part to do first, even with a plan.
Needless to say, day three was a little rocky. However, my to-do list looks a lot better. Even with all of this done, the tough parts have still yet to come.
So far, I’ve found it’s much easier to get things done with my hectic schedule really late at night. Something about things being calm and peaceful at night, early mornings are great too, but they don’t compare in terms of productivity, at least for me.
The challenge for day three was to create your landing page. You can view what I went with here. Originally I wanted to do one on this site, but for now it will simply have to do. The goal isn’t to have things perfect, but to get things done.
Additionally, I focused on how I could incorporate this new audience into my current. Although Gumroad doesn’t offer a direct syncing option to MailChimp, with a little help from Zapier, I can instantly add someone to my newsletter once they’ve purchased a product. It would be cool to also have this syncing ability with the audience feature they offer for people to follow you directly on the landing page given.
To prepare for day four and beyond, I knew I would need something to use. With not a lot of time to design sit and perfect a whole new cover design, I reused the base of an old template and used a simple type treatment. While I’m able to not sacrifice much when it comes to the book cover design, I can now invest that time into creating the content and social media marketing collateral.
Overall, I feel pretty confident in being to able stay on track and get everything completed by the 6th of August. I will admit, with all the minor tasks out of the way the reality of the challenge does scare me a little but in a good way.
I always find myself saying what would be a good idea, or what idea of mine I’d like to execute but can never find the time or get excited enough to really pursue it. I’m not sure if it’s the energy from the community that is inspiring or simply doing something different and outside of my comfort zone that has me feeling a bit more optimistic than usual.
Now on to day four. Basic Marketing.
In this arena, I’m usually helping other people market things, promoting my own product will be quite the experience in itself. Even though I wrote and self-published a book last year, I never really promoted it as I should have.
After participating in launch groups for Jeff Goins and Dale Partridge recently, I learned quite a lot. There were stark differences between the two, but the thing that stood out the most was how Dale used design to get his message across. It didn’t matter if it was a Twitter, Instagram or Facebook post, it just stood out, and when it came to the book design the consistency was there too.
With this in mind, I wanted to create materials and a cover that kept things simple. Leveraging the colors from my own personal brand made the color selection process much quicker.
Another thing I wanted to keep in mind was the ability to have elements that I could reuse. One example I’ll share below is one of the social media marketing collateral items. It tells a small story and I can reuse this design within a poster or other item.
Now things are starting to feel a lot more legit. One of the hardest things when creating a new product is visualizing key aspects of it. Getting a message across consistently is a lot harder than it looks, especially with so many variables at play. The key is to take things one step at a time and have a way in which you can measure your progress.
Now, I can’t wait to jump into really writing and laying out the branding guide and finishing the rest of the posters. One thing I haven’t yet figured out is how to tie a physical product to a digital one on Gumroad, not a deal breaker in either outcome, just something nice to have.
So despite having a rough third day, things fell back into place on day four because even though I wasn’t able to get everything I wanted done on day three, I more than made up for it the next day.
If you’re interested in knowing when my guide, “Minimum Loveable Brands: The Art of Personal and Business Branding” is available check it out here. If you’re already a Gumroad user, you can find my profile here.
