Tips and Tricks for Making Money with Interviews

This post is about two things:

1) Life sometimes gets in the way, and
2) Perfect is my enemy – and the enemy of everyone who creates content for sale.

I try to plan out each day, hour by hour. Working for yourself is the most awesome feeling, but I realized very quickly after I quit my job as a cop that having that freedom meant tasks will always take as long as the time you allot to them. Give yourself two hours to do something and I guarantee it will take exactly two hours, if not a few minutes more. Give yourself until the end of the day to complete a task, and a full day is exactly what it will take.

But the best planning in the world will inevitably be annihilated by life – a sick 11-year old daughter home from school (as was the case for me today), a laptop crash, or a member who requires more attention than usual. So my first message to you is: relax. Don’t beat yourself up. Your tasks will get done. It’s all part of the process of owning your own business.

On the other hand, today was the day we were to launch our first information product outside of our industry membership sites. InterviewIncome.com is going to be a hell of a class. We’re going to be teaching you step-by-step how we generate hundreds of thousands of dollars a year selling memberships and content using interviews as a base for everything we create. Our first group will be starting the course on Monday, April 5 – two weeks later than I had originally planned. (Sign up details for the inaugural class will be out later this week.)

All of our membership sites have systems and procedures in place to make sure content gets created and added on a regular basis. One of the issues we ran into when we first started the sites was that we continuously edited, re-edited and re-touched the audio from the interviews. We also continuously tweaked and re-arranged the transcripts. I wanted them perfect. And it took forever to add a single interview and go through all of the steps to promote the content to the world and to the members. The last 10% of the tweaking was taking 90% of the time we put into the content. It was agonizing.

When we realized we could relax and not “forever-fiddle” with the content to perfection, surprise, surprise – nobody cared. In fact when we asked, no one could even tell the difference. That final 10% that we spent 90% of our time on was totally lost on the people who we thought cared the most. In the end, they just wanted the meat. They didn’t care that it was presented perfectly. They were right.

These days, our membership sites are literally content creation machines. We have steps and processes in place that cover everything from what to create to how to create it and what to do with it once it’s finished. We’re going to teach it all.

But I’m finding myself frequently falling into the “perfection trap” with Interview Income. Probably because we know we’re creating this for other content creators. And while it will always be a work in progress, today was a good day to remind ourselves that this content is great stuff. It makes money for us every day and can be duplicated across any industry or topic. It may not be perfect in delivery, but the folks who sign up are going to learn exactly how to create a business from nothing, like we did.

You may think this is a thinly veiled pitch for the product. It’s not. Although, if you happen to be more curious about it now, well, gosh, OK.

But what it really is, is a call to quit diddling with your content and just get it out there. You know who you are. It’s easy to keep tweaking and editing and messing with it to get that last 10% perfect. NO ONE CARES. They won’t notice and what you’re really doing is just delaying your next step up the ladder to content creation nirvana.

So, while you can give yourself a pass for a delay because life gets in the way, you don’t get a pass for perfection.

creating content, starting a membership site, taking action editing interviews