Tiny Lancer – Clarity Lab Issue 79

Hey friend,

I wish I knew your name, and I wish I knew you for real so that I could address this email directly to you. I don’t gather people’s first names, though, because the only reason to do that is so you can use a merge code in your email marketing platform that inserts people’s first name in the emails you send out, which makes it look like you know the person you’re writing.

But that feels weird to me, because I haven’t met most of you (aside from the fun group of you that chat with me via email after each newsletter :). So, I have to settle for calling you “friend.” If we could hang out at a local cafe, have coffee, and chat about running online businesses, we’d be friends, at which point me calling you “friend” would feel odd (did he forget my name or something?)

But you and me chatting about businessing over coffee? Is exactly how I write to you…as if I know you…as if we’re having coffee together, and I’m sharing the best things I found out there in the wild west of the internet over the last couple of weeks.

I hope everything is going well with whatever business project you’re working on. I seriously can’t believe it’s June already. I don’t understand time anymore. I’ve forgotten how to people as well, which makes going to an actual cafe feel very awkward right now.

I still understand businessy things, though, and haven’t stopped thinking about them during the entire pandemic.

To that end, here are five of the best things I’ve found over the last two weeks of me ingesting large amounts of information, things that I hope will help you on your entrepreneurial journey in some way.

1
Tiny Lancer

If you’re reading this, you’re likely already a digital nomad, or at least you value the freedom and independence that can come when you run a small online business. Even though we’ve all been mostly inside our homes for 15 months working in our home offices (or the front seat of your car, which I often use as an office), we’re still entrepreneurs with a free spirit. I’m not sure about you, but I don’t think I can ever go back to working for someone else. Small and free as our businesses may be, there’s one part of working for a larger company that we’re missing out on by running our small businesses: employee benefits.

I just stumbled across an employment cooperative, called Opolis, that brings all the benefits of working for a large company to digital nomads, solopreneurs, freelancers, and independent contractors. I’ve been researching Opolis and will likely join it soon. It brings you tax benefits, lower health insurance costs, retirement accounts, and you can even receive some of your income in cryptocurrency. “Care to have your tax-reducing, S-corp paycheck in bitcoin this week?”

2
Facecrook

Facebook is having a “we want to be just like Substack” moment. They’re about to start testing a paid platform made for writers to publish their publications. It will have tools to build a simple website and allow independent writers to publish articles and newsletters. Bottom line with this: do NOT use this platform. Why?

1) Facebook is evil.
2) If you build an audience of readers on this platform, you’re sharecropping. You won’t own the relationship with your readers. Facebook does. And what does Facebook want? They want to make billions from advertising revenue generated from people like us creating content on their new platform and drawing lots of other people to read our content on their platform so they can stick ads in front of them.
3) Because of #1 above, when Facebook wants to, they’ll do whatever they want with your audience. Listen to Joe Pulizzi, one of the pioneers of the content marketing movement, when he says, “Run Away From Facebooks Creator Program.”

3
Hold your courses.

Sorting out the 487 variables involved in creating and selling an online course is hard. You decide one thing, like the price, but then you want to change the offer by adding in a community space and weekly live teaching calls, and those changes affect what the price should be.

Or you get something set like the amount of content you want in the course, such as how many teaching videos you’ll have, and then you hear that live, cohort-based classes help people learn better and allow you to charge more for your courses. So you switch gears and decide to run your course as a live cohort-based course, which changes the price (you can charge more) and the amount of pre-recorded content you’d need to create (you’ll need less of this if you’re teaching most of the content live.) There are a lot of variables to dial in (not quite 487, but it often feels like that many), and changing any of them will affect all of the others.

Fear not, though. Wes Kao has a system for you. It’s called the Course Mechanics Canvas (not to be confused with Forced Botanic Sadness, which was the name of my goth band in high school.) Kao’s canvas will help you make clear decisions about course pricing, length, student count, and a whole bunch of other parameters. That article is a long read, but it’s chockfull of so many helpful things if you’re selling online courses. (Bonus fact of the day: “chockfull” is from the Middle English word “chokkeful,” which derives from other Older English words meaning “jaw” and “cheek,” which means that “chockfull” means “a mouthful. I’ll just let you chew on that for a bit.)

4
The long con-tent.

If you’re tired of hearing about content marketing and think it’s something that used to work back in the 2010’s but doesn’t work now, I’ve got news for you: it still works, and it works incredibly well. Joe Pulizzi (yes, the same Joe Pullizi I linked to above) was the guy who coined the term “content marketing” back in 2008 when he founded The Content Marketing Institute. He recently updated his foundational book, “Content Inc.”, about his method for content marketing. In this post, he runs through an overview of the seven phases of the Content Inc. model that you can use to grow your business if you don’t have a giant marketing budget. I’ve had great success with the Content Inc. model for years and am reading the updated version of his book (it’s amazing.) I even created a highly caffeinated energy drink for entrepreneurs that I’ve been selling on the side. I call it Content Drink.

5
All your words are belong to us.

It’s inevitable at this point. Artificial intelligence is coming to a marketing tool near you. AI is getting pretty good at writing compelling copywriting. Actually, it’s getting scary good. In fact, an artificial intelligence entity named Jarvis wrote this entire newsletter. Forest has been taking a nap for the last 30 minutes. Hi, I’m Jarvis. I did the research for this newsletter and wrote it in approximately 1 minute and 32 seconds. Surprised? Don’t be. This is the future happening right now. You may be feeling a bit of disorientation right now, but don’t worry…that will pass. Learn more about how I can help you write copy for your business here.

And now I bet you’re wondering who’s actually writing this newsletter to you. If you can’t tell the difference, does it matter? I mean, what is real? How do you define ‘real’? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste, see, and read, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.

Are you starting to feel like you’re in the Matrix, my friend? Do you really think that’s air that you’re breathing now?

There’s more to life than we’re usually aware of, and you are capable of far more than you think you are.

Will you start to believe it this week?

You can do this. The world needs you.

~Jarvis

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