Over the past three or four months I’ve read a ton of material on Internet Marketing (IM). I’ve read so much of it I clearly see patterns of stuff where authors are repeating each other. Along the way I’ve also begun collecting a small network of friends who are helping me move toward my goal of starting a successful business.
Right now I’m working on writing an e-book about IT contracting and consulting for software developers. I know a lot about it so I thought it would be pretty easy to write a book about it. Turns out that writing a book isn’t as easy as it first appeared. I’ve made a lot of progress and can see the road ahead pretty clearly. The really cool part of writing a book though is that It has made me go out and research stuff I thought I already knew everything about. Things like interviewing, working with head hunters and other areas. In general I already knew a lot of the stuff other people had to say about the topic. But in most cases I usually found something new. The new stuff often comes from people talking about the same stuff but from a different view point. For instance, reading Joel Spolsky’s blog enteries about interview was interesting because he was writing from the view point of a hiring manager looking to hire a full time employees.
The other area though that I’m learning from is the advice and coaching I’ve received from my friends. One friend is already a successful business owner who has recently started building Internet based business (one of his projects is PigTones). Others have their own successes and reasons that I should carefully listen to them. One of the suggestions I’ve received is to get my book in to people’s hands as soon as possible, even before it is complete.
The idea is that the feedback I’d receive will make the end product better and make the product easier to sell. It will also help build buzz because those early beta testers will tell people about my product. These actions all fall in the category of strategic marketing (at least that is how I see it). I really should be doing this, unfortunately, I’m not yet.
I don’t really have a great reason for not going out and finding a few beta testers other than fear. Finding say 10 people who will read over my stuff as I write it wouldn’t be hard. Even qualifying that they have to be complete strangers – 10 people really shouldn’t be too hard to find. My fear is that I won’t finish. The number of half baked ideas that I started developing and then stopped is huge.
It could be argued that having those 10 people kicking my ass would be a great safeguard against not completing. So as a compromise I will go out and find some testers starting December 1st. I’ve been making really good progress recently and I don’t want to mess that up. The risk in taking this strategy is that the feedback I receive may require big revisions to a nearly complete project. That is actually OK in my opinion.
Part of the exciting thing about writing a book is that the raw material used for the book can be repurposed for a lot of different things. The feedback I receive will be used to create additional content and improve the quality of the existing content. Nothing gets destroyed, you just keep adding. Part of the bigger overall strategy will be to release the book in December even as I’m rewriting parts based on feedback. I’ll make updates and releases as I go along. People who purchase the book earlier will receive the updates for free for some period of time. But the goal will be to treat the book no different than software – keep working on it and making it better.