Use Surveys Instead of Luck
Hey, listen up my self-publishing indie authors. It’s time to stop relying on luck to get us to the next level of becoming an authorpreneur. Was is luck that wrote our book for us. No, it wasn’t. It was hard work and strategy that wrote our book for us. And those are the same tools that will help us become profitable authorpreneurs.
Now, I’m not totally disregarding luck, everyone. But, I think I have a different definition than most people do when it comes to luck. I’ve always believed that we create our own luck. And I’m sure most authorpreneurs would agree with me that we do indeed create our luck.
So, what is this different paradigm of luck that I’m talking about, and how do we create it for ourselves? Well, it’s really quite simple. The real definition of luck is preparation meeting opportunity. Yup. It’s when our hard work or our preparation prepares us enough for future opportunities. When those doors of opportunity do eventually swing open, we are then capable enough to step through them and get the job done. That’s the new paradigm of luck. And that’s how we create it ourselves.
So, how do we put this new paradigm of luck into practice? Well, there are many ways. But, for today’s lesson, let’s start with all of us no longer sitting back and waiting for someone else to deliver luck to our front doorsteps. That isn’t going to happen. Instead, let’s create our own luck by putting forth some effort in creating surveys.
Surveys will help us find out where our people are who want our products and services. They will also help us figure out how to best give our market what they want as well. When we do the prep work to create surveys, surveys will help prepare us for future success and book sales.
Now, there are all sorts of ways of doing surveys. And there are also all sorts of ways of encouraging people to engage with our surveys. Beware, some of the big influencers may use money incentives in their surveys to get people to fill them out. Money is usually a pretty effective way to get people to act upon something. But be very careful here with using money.
We don’t want to throw our money away. Some of these deep-pocket people are throwing money at it because they have the financial resources to do it, but what they are doing is not very resourceful. Throwing money at surveys doesn’t help us grow as authorpreneurs. And I imagine most of us probably don’t have the money to throw at it, anyway.
Furthermore, tying money to people filling out our surveys will most likely give us the wrong kind of people participating. And the information we gain from these wrong people probably won’t help us very much in selling more books. So, if we go that route, we could be throwing away good money. And as authorpreneurs, that’s the last thing we want to do, right?
Instead, we want to create some kind of reward that strengths our brand and enrichens what we do. By tying the reward to our products and services and not just money, we have a better chance of getting the right kind of people to engage with us. Yes, we may have less engagement, but we’ll have the right type of participation from our niche. And that’s what we really want.
Remember, we just need 1000 raving fans to help us go big. That’s all we need. So let’s try to avoid the vast, expensive list of unengaged people who take up a lot of our money and time with very little return. Leave that to the big boys out there who aren’t as resourceful as us.
I’ve spent some time in graduate school working with surveys with my thesis. Surveys can be tricky. While politicians use surveys all the time to try to manipulate the data, we’re not too worried about that here. But, what we are concerned about is getting the right data.
We have to ask the right questions. And we have to do it in a way that encourages people to open up. Thus, we need open-ended questions where people explain what they mean and want. Having a survey with all closed-ended questions is deficient in what we really want to accomplish in building our authorpreneurship business.
Now, I know I’ve said that it is okay to go small here. But we don’t want to go too small. Let’s try to get 100 responders. Again, this should be good news. We don’t need thousands of responders, just a hundred. However, don’t smile too big yet. Even getting 100 of the right responders won’t be easy.
We may have to purchase some ads to get 100 of the right responders. But, I guess we have to do what we have to do, right? One hundred people should be enough to help us have real confidence in the feedback we’re getting.
Hey, the more honest communication we have with our audience, the better it is for all of us. Surveys help us get some of these honest communication going and helps us build our relationships within our niche. It also helps us build our brand and knowledge of what direction we should be going in next. In the end, this will help us develop our authorpreneurship business and help us make more money selling our books and services.
Lastly, many surveys are free to administer. So, with that said, what are you waiting for?
*Check out the free video lesson on this chapter!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6mXKQLNWzo&list=PL_-39bUXJitwL8cHUpiZ5mO0-JJuaPOVl&index=57