Always wondered about the Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss but haven’t had time to read the book? Try downloading the free Audible audiobook version from this link.

Requires Audible player, download at same time.

Enjoy!

When it comes to asking for money for one’s services or goods, some people have no trouble at all, and some find it the most uncomfortable part of business processes.

Lucky you if you were brought up in a culture where self worth is not tied to your bank balance. The Romani peoples (Gypsies) see money something they can make come to them with little more effort than their use of words (marketing anyone?) and use it to forge closer bonds to each other through celebration and festival. Their lifestyle is foreign (duh!) to us non-Gypsies, and their use and pursuit of money can be abhorrent to us. Asking for money for no effort is begging isn’t it?

For most of anglo western society money is seen as part of the person. The starving artist may be producing the most wonderful of creative efforts, but will be looked down upon because they cannot support themselves through “proper” means. Perversely the rich are also viewed with distrust because no average person could get that rich by legal means can they?  We become tied in moral and self-worth knots when we come to the moment where we put a $ sign on our goods, or our time or labor.

I watched a video recently of a person I respect, a person who can name their price for their consultation and teaching services, but when they came to saying the price for their newest enterprise, they hesitated. It may have only been for a nanosecond or two but it was noticeable. This guy is not shy, has tons of cash anyway, yet tripped when it came to naming his price. It was an odd moment.

Lisa, Barb and I have yet to have our final pricing discussion for the Secret Women’s Business Network teaching area, but we will be talking about what this is worth to our clients and NOT about what we feel we are worth (in the secret depths of our minds *wink*).  There is a lot of time and expertise going into the creation of the SWBN and the experience we will be providing will be worth every penny.

This week has so far been a whole heap of “signs” from the universe that I am being silly worrying about product creation. Sure those sign are just my Reticular Activating System (RAS) kicking in and showing me what I want/need to see, but boy does it feel good.

First off was a rash of launches by marketers that lead to a bunch of free stuff being offered as sweeteners to sign up. As discussed in this previous blog post I do not like paying for crap and have been fearful of producing crap myself. So I took the time and read/researched and ripped into some of this free information, and you know what? I can do that!

Next off, seemingly unrelated, by highly relevant to me, was vindication of my writing/analytical skills by my PPC ad campaign Project Super Nova.  After running for 3 days UK vs USA, I decided to test which country was actually buying. Turns out it was the USA. The USA also had a preference of one ad over another. The current figures for that ad are20.89% CTR at position 1.2 @ 33c. I am limiting to a measly $10 a day, but the PPC has certainly bought traffic AND sales up!

Thirdly I have been selected by @SpyJournal as a Geek Girl blogger to interview for a feature on …female geek bloggers. Very flattering and allowed me some reflection time on why I do the things I do.  One of them being that I love to get my “stuff” out there.  Time to get one of my products finished.

Lastly I have been having a fair bit of success on Knewsroom writing articles. I wish I had more time to improve the quality, as $150 a published item is nothing to sneeze at. This has been great fun (but also a time sucker) and got me in the mood to keep going with the product.

Plan is to have it up and on sale by this weekend. I am quite excited!

The other projects are pottering along, guru.com is sending me quotes daily on one of them which also will need to be picked up in earnest next week.

Stay tuned

As yet I have not been game enough to create my own product. There are two reasons for this; one I am slightly fearful that I will produce crap and people will shout at me. The other is that I am like an author that has never read a book, I just don’t buy products.

So to the drawing board!

In the next month i am going to find as many free products as I can to download. Hopefully there is enough rubbish in what I accumulate that the light bulb moment will happen and I will be able to truly say “I can do better than this junk”.

This will probably get me on a heap of spam email lists so i will be creating a fresh gmail account to catch the autoresponders. i will be looking for eBook and video products as software is not something I can see easily coming together at this stage.

Don’t get me wrong, I have plenty of ideas for products. These are things that i would buy if they were available, or would have bought in the past when i was looking for certain instructions or information. Oh and no, it won’t be anything in the “making money online” genre either.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, if you have any advice or suggestions for how to get over the “product block” I have, I would be very grateful to hear from you. Comment away!