How To Get More Value Out Of Everything
Do you want to extract more value from everything you buy?
What about gaining more value for every hour of work you do?
The simplest and most efficient way to achieve the two above aims is to use the knowledge you’ve already gained and work you’ve already done to achieve the above.
I’ll tell you what I mean by this in this article.
Re-Master Old Skills
It pays to go back to the basics every so often.
If you’re a copywriter, that might mean refocusing on some little part of your sales pages. Spend a day copying headlines from clickbait websites and video sales letters.
If you’re an affiliate marketer, then you could spend a day going over your old landing pages and seeing what you can do better now you know more. (Or, alternatively check out some of the cool things you accidentally did and didn’t realise.)
Athletes spend years drilling habits, and whilst they move on to more advanced things, the smart ones spend hours a week concentrating on the fundamentals and improving them.
Business is no different – in fact, it’s more so.
Online business is doubly so; everyone knows that in online business, methods get burned out quickly as people pile in to the next great money making scheme. There’s a flip side that nobody talks about though; after the gold rush of new money ends, most of these techniques work with a little tweaking. The only difference now is that the people searching for the gold rush have disappeared.
Billionaires are born out of making money from economic crashes and collapsed bubbles.
Re-Absorb Old Information
How many books have you bought, read once and then never touched again?
You’re leaving money on the table if you do this.
Case in point: I read Maria Veloso’s “How To Write Web Copy That Sells” back when I started writing online for money. It was a good introduction with some basic information. I incorporated it and then expanding, doing increasingly more complicated stuff.
I picked the book up again yesterday, quickly skimmed through it, and realised there are pages upon pages of ideas that I haven’t tried yet. When you’re a beginner, you’ll get the value of going from a beginner to slightly less of a beginner. When you come back to material from an advanced stage, you get a whole new set of lessons.
What was “how to” information in that book is now stuff I know. But the same methods are new to me in that they can act as a checklist for stuff I should be doing.
I don’t need help with writing a product review any more… but that doesn’t mean I can’t find value in having a checklist to make sure I include everything.
Here’s another example; I’ve read Finch’s Guide To Affiliate Marketing about three times now. Every single time I read it I feel like more of a beginner. (Ask anyone who has read it; that book is dense with high quality information and ideas.)
I paid a lot of money for that book (£40) but I’ve owned it for nearly a year or so and I’m not even close to having extracted everything I can from it.
Look At Work You’ve Already Done
Here’s where writers (and other human beings) leave a huge amount of money on the table.
Let’s say you’re a copywriter or content writer and you freelance for a ton of companies. (Who’d imagine it?)
One day, you might write a dozen blog posts for a website in a survival niche. Now, you have to research that niche, come up with some ideas and then write a few thousand words on the subject.
The worst return on that time you can get is if you get paid your $120 for those articles and never think about the survival niche or the topics you wrote about again.
At the very minimum, you should keep all that research and all those words somewhere accessible. If you’re ever hired to write about the same subject again, you’ve cut your research time down to zero.
But you can improve your return for that work significantly (especially if you retain the rights to your work.)
For instance, can you expand/rewrite and put out a book on the subject? What about a website? Maybe you could promote an affiliate offer?
Even if you’ve sold all the rights to those words away forever, the ideas you’ve come up with in your writing, the research you’ve done and the practice you’ve gotten into writing about that subject can be used in multiple ways.
Remember – you’ve already been paid once. The magic with intellectual property is that you can cut, split and recreate the same intellectual property an infinite amount of times and make money on all of them.
Needless to say, this is far easier than finding new subjects to write about and researching opportunities all over again.
Final Thoughts
The gist with all of these ideas is simple:
It’s much more efficient (and easier!) to build on what you’ve already done that it is to start afresh.
To learn something, use it once and forget it is infinitely more wasteful than to keep drilling the same well until you’re sure all that metaphorical oil is gone.
As time passes, you learn and accumulate knowledge and experience. When you return to old materials, you’re not the same person, and you’ll see different things in them, take new lessons from them and be able to use them in different ways.