Today has been apocalyptic, weather-wise. As such, I’ve been getting down to admin business and other boring duties, as well as some more fun ones; I’ve found a niche for the physical products business, and now I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to provide for that niche.
However, that leaves me with a conundrum really; this site is about writing, copywriting and the like, and I haven’t done much of that today. So, what am I going to write?
Random lessons from today’s work.
Don’t Neglect The Boring Business Stuff
Every so often, I’ll spend a day or two doing accounts, planning and making sure admin is all working smoothly.
Frankly, this is a pain and I hate it. On the one hand though, I’ve let this slip before and had to spend a lot more time catching up. On the other hand I should spend a few minutes a day keeping on top of things.
Administrative stuff is important – massively important when it comes to tax time – and it’s also what separates the average artist who never makes money and one who can live as a professional artist.
The Market Always Comes First
Don’t think about what you can sell, think about the market first. What do they need? Who are they? What is out there?
Plenty of people waste time and money creating products that aren’t needed or wanted. Even more people daydream projects that are never going to find a footing because they miss out on a basic, basic thing: Does anyone want to buy the offering?
If you start with identifying a market of issue-stricken people, then you’ll avoid this. It’s also a lot easier to generate ideas once you have a set niche with particular problems that need solving.
You Are Bigger Than Your Brand
Forget the idea that “you are your brand” and all of the associated trappings that come with it. It makes life harder.
Your “brand” is going to change and so are you. If you pigeonhole yourself, then you’ll suffer.
Easy example: this site. I identify mostly as a writer, yet large portions of my time are spent not writing and doing other stuff; like finding business opportunities and building stuff completely outside this site’s jurisdiction.
The annoying thing with this is that it doesn’t fit into the half-dozen categories I have on this site, and so it’s difficult to place those random yet useful topics on the site. (I’d recommend not using your name for an authority site. Keep it as a portfolio space and then build another site.)
Expansion
In the near future, I’ll probably launch a separate site to do with the physical product stuff and ecommerce learnings. I could have done this before with either niche sites or fiction writing; as it stands, all you lovely readers are split pretty evenly with diverging interests, and whilst there’s a lot of overlap, it’s not as complete as I’d like.
Talking about e-commerce will welcome in another crowd, and this site already has a bunch of different categories that I find difficult to juggle.
This is one of the reasons for building niche sites and expanding; eventually, whatever site you build will be too small for whatever it is you’re planning to do with your life.
Final Thoughts
Alright, I’m signing off for the day. This isn’t the longest or most interesting post, but I’ve kept the streak of daily posts alive for quite some time – five hundred and fourteen days, in fact.
Hopefully, there’ll be some little piece of value in most of the posts, which you can find by checking out the archives section.
As far as I know, I’ll be back tomorrow!