The Fizzle Show

As indie entrepreneurs we live and die by the execution of our ideas. Without the right focus and motivation, discipline alone won’t save you. I find it’s very common for creatives and business builders to feel they lack discipline. We think if we had more discipline then we’d be making more progress on our idea. I don’t agree. You don’t lack discipline, you lack motivation. You lack the internal drive, the clarity and focus of desire, that would make being disciplined almost easy. As I said before, us indie biz people live and die off the ideas we execute. Not the ideas we capture in our Moleskine notebooks, but the ideas we execute. And if you’ve got issue with motivation (or discipline, if you insist), then you’ve got big problems with execution. But here’s what I believe: you deserve to bring your idea to life. You deserve it. You’re not sitting on your ass doing NOTHING; you’re doing things to make it happen… it just sometimes feels like, you know, you don’t do enough, you couldn’t do enough, you’re not enough and you’re never enough. Again, that’s all false. You just haven’t learned how to turn on motivation and channel it at whatever project you want. Show Notes: http://fizzleshow.co/237

Burning out and blowing up costs us all way too much in our businesses. “Just power through it” is terrible advice because it’s a recipe for burnout, for blowing up. Nobody gets to storming out of the office yelling “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!” without powering through a whole lotta bullsh*t for a while. So, in this podcast and article we want to help us all learn a new way to handle moments when there’s too much on our plates. We are all going to have too much on our plates at some point. The question is, will you put in a little preventative maintenance and work smarter instead of harder? There’s a podcast episode here I really think you should listen to because it’s full of wisdom and details about this that, frankly, once you hear it you’ll never forget it. Below are some notes about this conversation that you’ll be able to come back to again and again. Here’s that podcast episode. You can listen to it here or in your favorite podcast player (recommended because then you can listen while you do the dishes, or better yet, go on a walk). Show Notes: http://fizzleshow.co/236

We spoke to one of the most prolific and successful course makers we know, Vanessa Van Edwards, about how we can all improve our online courses. For any of you course makers out there these insights are going to help you make much more successful courses — both for you and your customers. Online courses are being created like crazy these days because the market for e-learning has exploded in the past decade. Now average people like you and I can use tools that come built-in to phones, tablets and laptops to create training that people are desperate for. However, the massive popularity and ease of access to tools means there’s a ton of competition out there. Today you can’t just make a course that sells, you have to make a course that students complete and rave about. What we need to do is make every one of our students a walking testimonial for our course. Show Notes: http://fizzleshow.co/235

“Lots of people tell you what you "should" want as a creative or as an entrepreneur. Shut out the noise for a hot second and decide what success looks and feels like for yourself.” Holy sh*t there’s this entrepreneur named Stephanie Halligan that you have to hear about, she’s… a badass. “I spent a long time trying to sell and monetize my list on Art to Self and it kept feeling shittier and shittier. I had to ask myself what I actually wanted my art to feel like and how I wanted to make money from it. The answer was NOT $30 e-courses and email funnels.” There’s a lot of people out there who want to tell you exactly what to do with your dreams. Today we hear from someone who actually had the tenacity to listen to her Self and create her own way. Stephanie Halligan started Art to Self on Jan 1, 2015. She proceeded to make a comic and short essay every day for TWO YEARS! If you do creative work of any kind, if you want to find a way to make your creativity create financial flexibility for you, you have got to hear her story… and you’ve got to let her insights transform how you look at your work. There’s a whole podcast episode below but let me share a couple of the big hits from this conversation. (Do you have a podcast app you could subscribe to the Fizzle Show with? Do you know how that works?) Show Notes: http://fizzleshow.co/234

As indie entrepreneurs, sometimes all it takes is a little travel break to remind us why we started our business in the first place. Travel is amazing for inspiration and perspective. As indie entrepreneurs it would be terrible to make a business that doesn’t allow you to travel. Just think about that! You put all this work in to get your business WORKING. Topic we care about… check. Validated unique selling proposition… check. Growth channel setup… check. Minimum viable product tested… check. … (BTW, all those stages above are taken from our small business roadmap training. If you’re somewhere in that process, it’s definitely worth checking into.) You do ALL that work just to create yourself into a prison you can never take a break from!? That’d be terrible! But it happens all the time. And it can happen to any of us if we’re not careful. So, in this quick article (and, more importantly, the super thorough podcast episode that goes with it) that’s what I want to help you figure out: How can we setup a modern indie business so we can travel and live with flexibility? Show Notes: http://fizzleshow.co/233

As an indie entrepreneur, if you want to make sales and build a thriving business you need to overcome the hurdle between free and paid. When we say “free” we mean the stuff you do for free… the content, the social media stuff, the free guides you create as lead magnets. That free stuff is the first step in seeing if people like what you have to offer. It’s an important step. But getting those people from interested in free things to purchasing paid things… there’s a huge hurdle between the two. And a lot of people get stuck on that hurdle. Many modern entrepreneurs hit this hurdle… some never fully get over it. Don’t let that happen to you. There’s no reason to let that happen to you. Show notes: FizzleShow.co/232

One of the things we hear most often is that people want CLARITY in order to get started. They feel overwhelmed and murky, like they would totally get started if only they knew what to DO! Maybe you feel like you need answers before you begin, because you have to get this right. Today, we are flipping that. I know you think you need CLARITY in order to take ACTION. But today, we're out to prove that CLARITY comes from ACTION. Perhaps the very best part is that you don't have to buy anything to start doing this. Not from us, not from any other marketing wizards on the internet (and please don't trust anyone who tells you otherwise.) As you're going to hear in today's real life stories, you just need an internet connection and some conversation in order to make seriously meaningful progress.

Business ideas almost never work right out of the gate. Nevertheless, entrepreneurs put a ton of pressure on themselves to make their idea work. The truth is, every business goes through natural shifts over time. It’s true. If you’re building a business, expect to make shifts and tweaks over time… because from our experience it seems that’s just what entrepreneurs do. We’ve seen this hundreds of times with Fizzle members. Entrepreneurs come up with an idea, and then they tweak, twist, pivot and adjust over time to see what will work. We all want a business that’s growing. And we all — every one of us who’s doing the work — knows what it’s like to feel stagnant, motionless for too long. If you want a growing business, you’re going to need to know how to make little tweaks over time. Show Notes: http://fizzleshow.co/230

Hey, we all need to be growing our email lists. Email is still the centerpiece of modern online businesses. But it’s challenging to do so. People bounce away from our pages Our message gets lost in the clutter of our website Our call to action falls flat Well, a well-known best practice in online business is to offer a freebie or “opt-in incentive” to visitors as an invitation to join your email list. What most of us online have found is HOLY CRAP THIS REALLY WORKS!!1! A freebie can be an insanely effective tactic for growing your email list. IN THIS POST YOU’LL LEARN: How effective a good freebie will be for you What makes a GOOD freebie What’s working for others (9 examples) How to design the right freebie for your business Read more: FizzleShow.co/229

As an independent entrepreneur, your business lives or dies on the progress you make week in, week out. Let’s talk about some EFFECTIVE ways to stay focused on things that matter. Avoiding distractions is utterly essential to your success, but that little device in your pocket… yea, that one… the one with the screen and the apps and the notifications… that thing is hungry, and all it eats is YOUR ATTENTION. When you’re scrolling through a Facebook feed or half-a-dozen videos deep into an unanticipated YouTube binge, do you know what’s happening? Well, I’ll tell you what’s NOT happening: your business ain’t growing and your projects AREN’T getting done. So, here’s the deal… … we’re not recommending a puritanical approach to business where modern technology is abandoned. The internet is undeniably powerful for building massively successful online businesses, included our own. But we must make sure we are using the tool, not the other way around.

<p>The whole “sales” thing has been a little bit wrecked by used car salesmen, Glengarry Glen Ross and old dudes in suits in weird hotel ballrooms.</p> In the online business world, there’s a lot more fun shiny stuff to talk about than real deal selling. Sometimes we inadvertently make content creation the sun around which our entire businesses orbit, as if churning out enough content powers our business. But as a Fizzler, Harriet, admitted in a recent email, she created 300 videos and never made more than $5,000 a year in her business until she dealt with some deeper sales fear. So today, we’re facing this head on: sales is the sun, or the engine of our businesses. Without sales, you’ve got a glorified hobby.

As entrepreneurs we’re always finding new things to educate and give us a little motivation. Because, I mean, we’ve got to strategize and sh*t, you know!? And strategizing takes effort. And then after the strategy, we gotta do ALL THE WORK. You know what I mean? That can take a lot out of a gal. So, on the show today we’re talking about 10 links that are helping us so far this summer, 2017. You’ll find books, ideas, products and services linked to below. And more importantly, in the podcast episode you’ll hear WHY these things might be so important to your work. Enjoy! Show Notes: http://fizzleshow.co/226

<p>As an independent, a full time indie-entrepreneur, a maker of things that sell, a creator of my own wealth, a designer of my own creativity over time, I feel a strong call to do more things my way for the results I want. Which, for many of us, seems to beg this question: **can you give more of yourself over to being a creator?** Often times I hear it referred to as *“pursuing completely”* — like, how completely are you pursuing your thing? I think this plays solidly into that dream of being an artist who abandons herself to her work. Like, many of us really, if we’re honest, feel like we should have that kind of abandon, conviction, sold-out-ness to the thing we’re pursuing. Right? **BUT, what if pursuing that thing is putting other things in our life in jeopardy? ** What if we want to pursue our blogging more *completely*, BUT our blogging isn’t contributing to our financial needs yet. We want to give blogging more time because maybe that’s what’s necessary for us to even get to a place where we can generate revenue, BUT, spending more time there may take away from the job that IS earning us revenue, or our family or other relationships that might be good for us to keep in tact as well. **So, today we are going to talk about this:** how much are you pursuing your thing *AND* how much *SHOULD ANY OF US* pursue our thing? Should we leap with abandon and trust the universe and the intention of our hearts to construct the solution in real time? Or does being cautious really give us a better chance at success? Read More: <a href="http://fizzleshow.co/225">http://fizzleshow.co/225</a></p>

<p>How can we decrease the volume of fear in our head and increase our feeling of confidence? Because, for many of us, if we can do that, won’t our work have a better chance of succeeding? “I got this!” That’s the feeling we want. “I *got* this. I can do it.” You know what I think of when I think about confidence? I think about the difference between “this *MIGHT* work” and “this might *NOT* work.” Which way does the voice in your head normally sound like? For many of us it’s WAY more common to resonate with “this might NOT work.” Truth is, for many of us, it’s difficult to feel positive, optimistic or confident about a creative idea or project. **Does your head sound like that?** Well, you’re in for a treat because you’re about to hear things you need to hear about confidence, how to grow it and how to change that dialogue in your head. **Because you need confidence to take the right kind of risks,** and success for us independents relies on us taking the right kind of risks with the right kind of energy and outlook. So, first of all lets talk about what I call the “Necessary Delusion” of being an entrepreneur. READ MORE: <a href="http://fizzleshow.co/224">http://fizzleshow.co/224</a></p>

<p>No matter what kind of business you’re thinking of starting, you have got to solve a REAL problem with a REAL solution. We tear apart this idea in depth with Dan and Tom from [Studio Neat], makers of fine, modern physical products. They’ve just launched a brand new (and very unique) [notebook on Kickstarter], and it hit it’s goal in just a few hours. So, naturally, we wanted to ask them about what they’ve learned about business in their several years creating successful products from scratch. Here’s three pieces of advice from them good for *all* of us, no matter the kind of business we’re running: More at <a href="http://fizzleshow.co/223">http://fizzleshow.co/223</a></p>