Entrepreneurship

QUIT TRYING TO SEPARATE THE ART FROM THE STRATEGY!!

I know. I know. I motherfucking KNOW, okay?

It’s annoying, it’s confusing, it’s difficult to even BEGIN to believe, and frankly you could just about SCREAM at the fact that you’re somehow still trying to figure this shit out, but nonetheless – no point pretending otherwise! – you DO IN FACT KNOW THIS.

The strategy?
The market-y join-y-of-dots-thing-y?
The ‘what should I do and how should I do it BEHIND the scenes, in the mysterious BACK END of my business, in order to build ze CASH machine, you know, ze Marvellous and Mysterious Cash Machine, in which All the People Pay Me All the Monies, Forevermore, Because I Did it RIGHT, Like a Good Little Stepfrodpreneur!

Problem.

Do you see the inherent PROBLEM here?!

(Aside from how damn boring the whole thing is…)

(And aside from the fact that nobody really KNOWS what the back end is, yes, yes, of course we can explain it, please don’t ask me to, I might just fall ASLEEP right here on my poached eggs and avocado toast; it wouldn’t be good for the laptop … the truth is NOBODY really knows what it even is, just like nobody really fucking knows what the CLOUD is, do they?)

So there.

And don’t TELL me what a back end is, or I’ll back right up on your end. If you’re lucky. Haha.

ANYWAY. Where was I?

The back end! Where the money gets made! Where people pay you on repeat because you set some shit up and made it all automated and FANCY and stuff! It’s an exciting thing, a wondrous thing, a fabulous idea, and just JOLLY good.

Should I tell you what it is? What it ACTUALLY is, and why I say nobody knows what it really is, ’cause they all forget about THIS, and get distracted by the idea of a magic fucking money-makin’ formula, what it ACTUALLY is, quite simply?

Shit that you put in place which creates an experience for people that moves them (emotionally!) and inspires them (spiritually!) and excites them (sexually! No? Okay, just me), and causes them to then take ACTION. Physically!

Now. A QUESTION PLEASE YOUR HONOR, IF I MAY.

Is it or IS IT NOT TRUE that what would move and inspire and excite and DELIGHT your peeps and cause them to then take ACTION, is gonna be the SHIT THAT COMES OUT OF YOUR HEART?

Namely, your art. Art from the heart and SOUL baby, where else would it come from?!

People don’t buy your products, they buy you. NO, people don’t buy you, they buy your ENERGY.

Therefore –

If you wanna make more sales –

Automated or spur of the moment on the Facebook or wherever else –

WHAT do you need to be hitting ’em with?

ART.
FROM THE HEART.
AND SOUL.
LIKE YOU STOLE.

‘kay, I don’t know what the last line meant. But you get the idea!

HERE is where it gets relevant to the whole ‘but what about my STRAT-EGY conversation’.

You think:

That there has to be a way.
A magical way.
A FANCY AND SPECIAL way.
A GROWN-UP way (ha! I know that part of why you’re trying to figure this out is you think that the ‘real grown-ups’ are doing shit that you don’t know about or understand, and that that’s the missing link!)
A PROVEN way.

In which you engineer a pathway for people to know exactly what to do –

To join your list
Buy the first shit you then sell to them
Upsell to the next shit
Duplicate and recur and repeat!

And you think –

That what you need –

Is a SYSTEM to do this.

And that once you have this system (in ze back-end, of course, where everybody knows the magic millions come from!) –

You will then be able to la-di-dah your way around the internet, doing what you please all day and every day while you get paid. And that THEN you can be the real you, and do your art, and come from flow an’ all that.

NEGATIV!

FALSCH!

NIET!

NEIN!

NEIN NEIN NEIN NEIN NEIN!

Don’t worry, I used to think so too. Sigh. Sometimes I STILL find myself suckered into that whole ‘where’s the magic bullet’ thang.

And then I REMEMBER WHO I FUCKING AM.

And I look back, at my now 12 years marketing online.

At all the times I spent so much effort, energy, money, tryna build out systems and strategy and back-end, so I could make automated money, etc, and then do what I want, etc.

And at how ONE HUNDRED PERCENT, yes 100%, FULLY, of that time was WASTED.

Because what GOT me here? What got ALL of my high-earning clients and friends to where THEY are?

Fuck
Fucking
Strategy

It was the shit that came out of nowhere, it was the random, it was when we threw our hands up and said ‘I don’t GIVE a fuck, I’m just doing THIS!’.

And then flung something haphazardly at the internet, something which came from TRUE SOUL DESIRE, not from ‘please let this make me money’, and people FELT it and they were INFUSED with it, and it went INTO them, and their soul.said.yes.

And as to how that then somehow turned into not only ‘hustle’ income (from the day to day grind) but also automated and recurring BACK-END income?

SIMPLE:

I took the art.

And I made it the motherfucking strategy.

I took the ART.

And I whack-slammed it together in a couple, or a bunch, of very random and chaotic automated emails.

NOTHING ELSE ADDED.

Just the same shit that made shit happen on Facebook – but whacked into an automated email, and with a call to action with the dates removed added to it.

This started, the ‘funnel stuff’, back in 2014 when I first popped 5 Facebook posts / messages into an automated email sequence with a simple (FB style, the way I do), call to action at the end, and dates removed. I TOLD people they had 5 days to buy, but I had no way to enforce that as I didn’t have the tech to actually deactivate the sales pages per individual reader.

So instead, it was just me ‘hacking’ it, and doing the best I can.

That was my first ‘backend system’. It was selling a membership program, with monthly fees.

It made me hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next year or so.

From there I continued to MAKE SHIT UP AND THROW IT AT THE INTERNET … i.e. launching programs from SOUL … and the ones which were most DEFINITELY true soul flow, I then simply grabbed the SAME posts I’d used on FB (random as fuck) and popped them, without dates, into said backend / funnel.

Message, value, sell! That’s all it is. But it’s ALL just art, the second you look away from art into how do I DO this so it works, you LOSE; you’re out, and to add insult to injury you’re now disconnected from creativity and soul!

#doh

How did I then GROW said system?

I wrote random shit. Chucked it on the internet. And prompted people to join my email list if they liked it. I did this on straight up posts. And with a VERY small amount of advertising.

YOU COULD DO THIS EASILY RIGHT AWAY TODAY.

Oh, you think you need to know more about ADVERTISING or about MARKETING? You think you need someone to tell you how to do it just so, so that the MAGIC MILLIONS ARE ACTIVATED!

Would you LISTEN to yourself?!

No! No bitch, no!

A BACKEND STRATEGY THAT WORKS IS –

a) somebody says yes to following your shit (usually this means join email list)
b) they then buy shit, ideally on repeat

GET THE FUCK OVER THE MINDSET THAT THIS IS COMPLEX SHIT, IT’S NOT.

HOW do you get people to say yes to following you, or ‘opting in’, and then to buying? No, it’s not from knowing marketing shit! It’s from knowing people shit. From speaking to people’s SOULS, and believe me, you can have THE most messy and DIY and break all the rules setup on the internet, and if it’s coming from YOU being in YOUR flow, and coming from your soul, people FEEL that, and they will MOVE HEAVEN AND EARTH TO BE CLOSER TO YOU.

People don’t buy your PRODUCTS, and they also don’t buy your MARKETING, they buy YOU, your soul, your ENERGY.

Ergo: your best marketing is your soul, your art, your energy!

So.

WHAT if –

You were to FULLY prioritise art?

WHAT if –

Your number one focus each day were to allow yourSELF to be in flow, connected to source and soul, and just KNOWING what to put out there which OTHER PEOPLE WITH SOULS WOULD CONNECT TO?

And WHAT if –

You then just grabbed some of that shit –

The messy, the random, the chaotic, the ‘where the fuck did THAT come from’ shit, which people OMG responded to –

And popped it ever so nicely into your back end.

I bet it wouldn’t even hurt a little 

I bet it would be HELLA easy.

I bet 99.99% of people reading this will NEVER do it.

And will instead CONTINUE to forego saying yes to soul and art, because after all – there MUST BE SOMETHING IMPORTANT AND COMPLEX I NEED TO LEARN ABOUT FIRST, AND THEN THE PEOPLE WILL PAY ME.

How ’bout not being one of them?

If you dare, I guess I’ll see you over here –

Where it’s ease and flow –

And you shake your head at the ridiculousness of how you used to think.

Back when you actually believed people would PAY you for being anything less than ALL of you.

Back when you thought that in order to be allowed to be you, you had to first ‘free yourself up’ with an automated money-makin’ and growth system.

When the whole damn time the system was BE FUCKING YOU.

Can’t very well BE FUCKING YOU if you’re not giving your ALL day err’ day TO you.

It’s a conundrum, I know.

But,

You do gotta decide.

So, which is it?

Keep on saying yes to trying to find the magic fucking system, and making it work all fancy like, just like ALL THE OTHER DESPERATE AND NEVER-EVER-THERE-PRENEURS WHOSE SOULS ARE SLOWLY DYING?

Or say yes to your soul?