No one cares about what everyone else is doing. So why should you?
Why should you care about me? Who am I?
What do I bring to the table? What value do you extract from my content? What's my offer to you?
Why are you even reading this?
Every time I begin writing a tweet, I pause. I ask myself, who cares about this stuff? Who cares what I’m up to? Who’s my audience?
Then I remember.
The people who pressed the “Follow” button, that’s who. The people who “Subscribed” to my letters.
They care. You care.
But you should only care if you find value.
No one cares until they do
Summer of 2001. My father has just refused to give me my pocket money two weeks in advance. I’m broke.
As a chemical engineering student, I realize I need money more than I need a degree.
I grew up in a family where everyone used to gamble. Lotteries, cards, sports bets.
Looking for the quick buck came naturally.
“Well, there’s that guy who brags that he beat casinos; maybe I can do that too,” I think. Suddenly, I care about how he does that.
I care about a total stranger.
I wait for the dial-up modem to connect to the internet. I begin searching in Altavista and Lycos search engines. Then, I find myself in forums. Blocks of text fill up my screen.
Little by little, I unearth information. Knowledge. For free.
“There’s a system! I can count cards in blackjack and start making money!”
December 2002. Casinos bar me. They refuse my entrance. My blackjack career has ended.
I have two options. Go back to my engineering classes or find another way to make money. Only now, I have more capital. And broadband connection.
Everything accelerated.
I stumble upon another stranger. He trades horse racing betting odds.
“3 out of 5 words are unknown to me“, I admit to myself. Trade. Horse. Racing. How can I learn? And is it worth it?
This guy posts a video on how he makes £100 in 10 minutes before a horse race even starts! That doesn’t even seem like gambling at this point!
With 20 races per day, my mind quickly ran wild. Could this be better than casinos?!
Again, I care for a total stranger. I care for anything he has to say.
Why? Because he offers something I don’t have. Knowledge. Value.
Trading Places
20 years later, I have switched places. Instead of looking for value, I seek to give back value.
Because I know it’s the only thing that will make people care.
So now I embark on a journey to find what kind of value I can give. What kind of valuable offer can I make?
And I began reading a book about how to get people to know of my offer this week.
Well, it’s 2023, so people aren’t reading books. They are listening to them!
Audiobook of the Week
Normally, I would include here a nugget of knowledge I got from a podcast this week. Instead, I’ll tell you about a new audiobook I began listening to.
Sidenote: I’ll use the word “read” from now on, despite talking of an audiobook.
I began reading $100M Leads by Alex Hormozi a few days ago. I’m used to listening to Audiobooks during my daily 80-minute walks and taking notes on my phone.
Why this book?
I never considered myself a salesperson. I am a sales newbie. In fact, I hated sales.
Yet, as I got older, I realized everything is sales.
I enjoyed reading his first book recently, $100M Offers. It’s about finding an offer to make to people that they feel stupid to say no. In other words, an offer with tremendous value. It's like offering a way to make ten million dollars or lose 20 kilos. Tomorrow. Without getting up from your bed.
An extreme example often gets the message faster.
So, it made sense to read this, too, as a follow-up.
But this book is not about sales. It’s about Leads!
So, I learned what a Lead is (ok, that wasn't new) and, more particularly, an Engaged Lead. Having read about making valuable offers, this time I learned about the Lead Magnet: a small offer driving Engaged Leads to your Core Offer.
Say my main offer is a $1,999 course about making money in blackjack/sports trading/playing poker. A Lead Magnet is five 10-minute videos I send you to your inbox for free if you sign up for my letters.
Like the video I watched of the guy trading horse racing betting odds!
My core offer (course) and my lead magnet offer the one thing you should care about: Value!
And as Alex says:
If you trust me with your time, you’ll likely trust me with your money later!
And you have already trusted me with your time since you are reading this letter! You are my Engaged Lead! ❤️
As I have just finished the 4th of the 20 chapters, it’s too soon to share my verdict on the book. Yet, I’m reviewing this book on X (former Twitter) as I’m going through it, making my reading notes public.
Apparently, I’m following the current trends of learning in public and building in public.
Here’s a comprehensive review of the book I’ve read after starting mine, in case you are interested.
YouTube of the Week
Let me tell you a secret: Solo filmmaking is tough.
I'm not speaking of talking head videos where you grab a camera and record yourself. These are easy.
All you need is presentation skills for a good talking head video.
Ok, maybe good lighting also! Teleprompters help, as well.
For people like myself who lack these and feel uncomfortable in front of a camera, they need to fill in the details with b-roll shots. With beautiful cinematography and nice pictures while telling a story.
My head quickly fills up with thousands of thoughts and workarounds to overcome problems and come up with the next shots during filming. Compared to beating casinos, counting cards, and trading sports odds, filming myself feels like rocket science.
I was very happy to bump into Suyorukun’s channel. I found the following video incredibly relatable. You can taste the pure joy I’ve felt when filming a rare scene, as he did at the 7th-minute mark.
Once again, I found his videos valuable. Therefore, it felt natural for me to subscribe to his channel and become an Engaged Lead!
More honorable mentions this week:
- Everything Changing - Life Update | Ali Abdaal. I can relate a lot to the discussion of what you would do if money weren’t a problem.
- Behind the Scenes: How We Made a Cycling Documentary | Of Two Lands. It turns out language can add friction in any scenario. This relates to my never-ending quest to find answers when creating multilingual content.
- Along the Way | Shortstashe. From time to time, YouTube’s algorithm surprises me with a doc film that hits differently.
Deal of the Week
Do you know what kind of value I appreciate the most? The value of time.
It's when I no longer have to spend time on boring things but still need to work. Think of a website's cookie policy, privacy control, user consent databases, and terms and conditions. Those annoying windows that pop up every time you visit a new site.
Annoying but necessary. As a web publisher, we must always have those turned on.
However, I don't have the time to read and understand GDPR, CCPA, LGPD and numerous other acronyms just for my websites to comply with international law that gets updated every now and then. I'm busy with other stuff. That's why I chose Iubenda to take care of all that for me.
If you have a website, get a 10% discount on your first year at Iubenda here.
Next Week Plans
If you bet I’ll spend the following days coming up with what kind of value I can include in my content, you’re wrong.
No, I’ve thought about that enough already.
Overthinking who my audience is. Who I’m speaking to. Why would anyone follow me?
I‘m done with changing my bio on my social media profiles.
Am I a work-from-home guy? A Greek guy documenting life? A gambling guy? A solopreneur?
What am I? And what value do I offer?
That’s for you to decide. I’ll just focus on creating. Creating free lead magnets in the hope you find value in my writing and videos. The core offer can wait. Save your $1,999.
