#80: Ask Amy

It's time for another edition of Ask Amy!
Every now and then, no matter how good your business system is, you reach a moment where everything kind of splinters. I'm having one of those moments this week, trying to reassemble my podcasting setup after moving it into a bigger home studio.
While I'm glad to have this bigger space devoted to my podcast, I don't have the acoustics worked out yet--which means I'm a little bit stalled in terms of production. Little issues like this can really bother me, if I let them!
I'm sure you've experienced this, too. Think with me about an area in your business where you feel stuck because something else has to happen before you move forward. Maybe something’s not working properly and you have to figure it out first. Or maybe you’re just not comfortable moving forward and you’re not sure why.
All of today's questions deal with different things, but they all center around this core issue of obstacles holding back the progress of our business.
Let's take a look!
Question #1: How early do you contact affiliates if you want them to work with you to promote your course? While I'm no expert in affiliate partnerships, I have worked with a small, carefully selected affiliate base over the last few years.
And one of the ways I select them is whether they're prepared enough with their annual business strategy to join me in planning at least three months ahead.
As my free download for this week, I'm doing a mini-training video of my new WordPress affiliate membership site. It's a great solution if you're pulling together all the materials for your affiliates. Not only does it help you get organized, but you can just show it to a programmer and tell them you want “this."
EPISODE FREEBIE Get a Behind the Scenes Tour of Amy's Affiliate Area FREE DOWNLOAD
Question #2: Remembering back to the first product you created, what would you tell us now that you wish you would have done differently back then? I definitely wish I would have spent a little bit more time on developing a concept around my product suite. When you have a really solid product suite, you're able to help people in your niche that are at different phases in it.
Without this, you end up pushing away potential clients to other people. They ask you "What should I do in this phase?" and because you don't have a product around it, you point them elsewhere.
That's fine if it happens just occasionally, but when you get asked this a LOT (like I do with, say, creating online courses), your opportunity bells will start ringing like crazy and it starts to make you think "Why don't I offer a product for that?"
Question #3: What do you do when you see another site steal your content and sell it? Um...throw something at the monitor? Just kidding. This has happened to me a lot, though. In fact, it happens with every new program I release.
One of the first things I do is remind myself that the "client" who would find my program on a shady site that is clearly not mine and go ahead and buy it is NOT a client I would want to work with. At the end of the day, it’s not about the money, it’s about the quality of people we’re attracting to our businesses.
There is, of course, a lot more I could say about this...and do! Click here to listen to the full podcast to hear all my thoughts on this issue.
Question #4: As an entrepreneur, how do you stay focused on what is at hand and not get distracted with wanting to start new projects, create new things, try a new form of social media? How do you stay focused? First and foremost, I use Scrum. If you haven't heard of it, it's a system of project management that I explain in detail in Episode #75.
Of course, the success of this system depends on the things you can't get away from. Consistency. Deadlines. Accountability. All things I have varying degrees of success with!
But the biggest lesson I've learned with this is that I don't need to reinvent the wheel. I should model systems or approaches that I see working well for others. I don’t need to try every new tool that comes out. Bottom line, I just need to continue to do what works right for my business.
Like, for instance, my Wordpress membership affiliate site! Click the link below to get the training video now.
EPISODE FREEBIE Get a Behind the Scenes Tour of Amy's Affiliate Area FREE DOWNLOAD
Final Thoughts A lot of times, those feelings of being held back or stuck are rooted in bigger fears or a lack of confidence we have in our business or message.
The truth is that a lot of the time, if I go ahead and move forward anyway, I'll mess it up once, figure out what went wrong, and now know what to do. I'll also have overcome the fear of failure because guess what? I failed and it didn't ruin my life!
I would rather be making those little mistakes along the way but still be moving forward. When you get the confidence to not really care about those little mistakes, you will usually fix them, keep moving forward and BOOM--you are way ahead of yourself, way more than you thought you would be!