Today we talk about easy-to-make digital products that you can add to your website for additional revenue, what to do when you’re feeling unenthusiastic about your day job, and different ways to encourage word-of-mouth referrals.

What are some digital products you could make in a single evening and add to your site? What products do you currently offer on your site? Is there enough on the low-end of the spectrum of products you offer in terms of cost?

Perhaps you have your flagship service created already that brings in the majority of your income, but it’s good to expand the spectrum of products you offer for that target customer who may have different needs that you could solve with a simple digital product. But you have to know your target demographic well in order to know what they need or want and, therefore, what you should make.

When you hear “share the journey,” what does that mean to you in terms of what content you post?

If you’re the type of person that reverts to not sharing anything, you might only share things that 100% directly related to your career goal, and weeks or even months will go by without you sharing anything during “dry spells”.

What I’ve found, as someone who defaults to not sharing anything, is that I think of “share the journey” as “share only the things that have to do with filmmaking, and nothing else.” But the truth is, if I were to share the slightly unrelated thoughts I’m having, or the projects I’m currently working on, doing so would create multiple entry points for people to get to know me, and then have a chance of following me along to my journey toward making films.

What is holding you back from sharing more? How could you create more entry points for yourself so that you can invite more people along the way?

How do you handle it when your big project is harder to finish than you thought? Whether you’re writing a novel or building a business, the reason most people never accomplish these things, even if they think they *want* to is… they’re really hard to do!

That being the case, go easy on yourself. Sean put it best in the Community conversation for this week’s show:

– ❌ This is so extremely difficult… there must be something wrong with me.
– ✅ This is so extremely difficult… I’m going to become a person who starts *and finishes* extremely difficult things.

If you’re starting to build a community around your work, how do you encourage people to engage without being too prescriptive—without making the participation feel forced or unnatural? Remember that, as the person who started the community, you’re responsible for its voice and its vision; you don’t need to tell people what to do or say, but you are there to guide them. Encourage the conversations you want to have more of. If they’re not happening, start them yourself!

How do you work towards the launch of your big, flagship product, without wasting a lot of time building something no one wants? It might be tempting to start off by building smaller products that funnel potential customers towards your flagship, but you might just be wasting even *more* time building things that you haven’t yet validated. The first epic session of our Presale Profits course (http://PresaleProfits.com) will set you on the right track, teaching you how to find a product idea that solves people’s actual problems, and how to validate that idea in the one way that truly matters: getting paid for your work.

Today we return to two perennial seanwes topics: client work and sabbaticals!

How do you deal with “decision fatigue” when working with clients? You’re called upon to make a lot of decisions when doing client work; not just in the execution of the work itself, but in all the client communication that’s involved. One way to reduce the impact of the fatigue that sets in is to share your burden: even if you’re not *working* with other people, find a group of peers that also do client work and help each other with your struggles.

The other thing you can do to reduce decision fatigue is make fewer decisions by *productizing* your services! Do the same work for multiple clients, instead of entirely new, custom work for each one.

Productizing brings us to the next question: how *do* you productize things other than teaching? Turning teaching into a product is straightforward: teach a class to lots of people, instead of one-on-one, or package it all up and sell it as a course. But lots of other services can be turned into products, if you look at the work you do that’s both valuable, and follows the same process no matter the client.

The first step to turning your service into a product is to have a *written process*, so if you’re facing decision fatigue, start there: write down every step of how you do your work. That might be enough to help reduce the fatigue all by itself!

If you don’t even *like* doing client work, should you push yourself to do it anyway, because it’s the easiest way to make money (compared to building a business selling products or teaching)? When you need to make money, *scarcity mindset* can set in fast, and that’s a sure-fire way to hate what you’re doing. It doesn’t feel good to be in scarcity, to never be sure that you can cover your bills this month.

This is why Sean wrote Overlap (https://seanwes.com/book/)—the reason you need a day job that covers 100% of your bills is to give yourself the freedom to *enjoy* client work—or any other means of building your own business. Yes, enjoying client work is possible! But only when you remove scarcity from the equation. When you don’t have to worry about making money, you can choose only those clients that are just right for you. That’s the key to turning client work into an activity you can actually sustain.

Do you have trouble focusing during your seventh-week sabbatical? I sure do, but focusing isn’t the priority on a sabbatical: *rest* is the priority. You might be expecting yourself to get done during a sabbatical week all the projects you’ve left sitting around in the past six weeks of focused work… but you’re probably underestimating your need to **just rest**. Give yourself a break, and take the pressure off: reduce your expectations of what you’ll get done during your sabbatical. If all you do is rest up for the next sprint, that sabbatical was a success!

Today’s episode of Fired Up Mondays has a very special guest… Sean McCabe?!

That’s right! Sean is back, to tell us what he’s been up to on his sabbatical year, and announce the return of the seanwes podcast…

Not only is Sean hosting this episode with Dan, but we have some great Community questions this week! Get ready for the biggest Fired Up Mondays episode… possibly ever!

How do you use Value-Based Pricing effectively if your value-based price is for a year of work, but you bill in monthly installments? How do you handle the disconnect between the value of the year-long work and the billing structure?

You don’t want your clients to see you as just another monthly expense to be minimized. Focus on the value-based price itself—which will always be a fraction of the value the client is getting from your work. Once they’ve agreed to that price, the monthly (or quarterly, or whatever period you’d like) installments are just a way of helping them manage their cashflow.

How do you balance long-term investment in your business with your short-term well-being?

Taking care of the short-term—what’s right in front of you—has to come first. While it’s good to think about the long game (because most of us don’t do that enough), you can be *too* long-term focused, to the detriment of the short term. It’s no use investing in where your business will be in five years if you go broke or burn out before you ever get there! Get your money right in the short term… and get your lifestyle right, too. Putting yourself in an uncomfortable place because “It’ll all pay off, someday!” may not be a sustainable way for you to live.

How do you set goals when it’s not yet clear what you’re building towards?

Goal-setting becomes much more effective when you’ve found something you’re passionate about, something that will keep you driving forward whether you have goals or not. At that point, your goals can give you direction. But, before you’ve found your passion, “direction” might not be what you need! If you’re not sure what’s driving you yet, give yourself time and space to figure that out. Experiment. Try different things, and *really* try them; pour yourself into something that you think you *might* like, and find out. When you want to keep doing it even through the hard parts, that’s when you know you’ve found something you’re passionate about. That’s when setting goals will actually help you.

How do you balance reading, continuing education, and self-investment with doing the actual work? Setting aside time for learning—whether it’s reading, listening to podcasts, or watching videos—is key, but, of course, so is actually *doing* whatever it is you’re learning about. After all, doing the thing is the goal; learning is just a stepping stone on your way there. Always evaluate two things when investing in learning time:

1. Is the thing you’re learning about actually the thing you should be doing?
2. Are you *doing* enough to make the time you spend learning worthwhile?

If you’re worried about being misunderstood, should you say more, or less? You want to get your point across with clarity, but if you try to address every possible objection or misunderstanding ahead of time, you might just end up doing the opposite. To avoid confusion, be as clear and succinct as possible, and then see if your audience understood what you said. You can always revise from there.

In an ongoing global pandemic, can you still sell nice-to-have, non-critical products? Perhaps more important: *should* you? Just because you’re responding to a desire that the pandemic created (e.g. for mask accessories), that doesn’t make your business unethical. Are you giving people something they want? And are you selling it to them at a fair price, given its nature?

Do you really need a custom domain name for every product you create? It can certainly be an advantage when marketing them! Posting http://presaleprofits.com on social media—or saying “Presale Profits Dot Com” on a podcast—is much more likely to get people to your product than trying to tell them to go to https://seanwes.com/courses/presale-profits/! When you’re just starting out with products, however, a custom domain may not be the first thing you need.

Welcome to Fired Up Mondays! Today we have three questions.

First, should you let returning customers know ahead of time that you’ve raised your prices? Definitely! No one wants to be surprised by an invoice that’s larger than expected. That said, you also shouldn’t *avoid* raising your prices if that’s what your business needs to succeed. After all: if you double your prices and lose less than half your customers… you’re coming out ahead!

How do you balance creating exclusive content for patrons (on a platform like Patreon) with creating content for marketing purposes? That’s a lot of content! Fortunately, the two don’t have to be completely distinct. People value things other than pure exclusivity, so you can leverage things like immediacy (getting *first* access to your content) and personalization (being acknowledged or included in the content) to make sure your patrons are still getting great value even if you repurpose your content for your marketing efforts.

Finally, should you let a family member work in your business, and should you compensate them even if they’re not asking for it? Working with someone you love can be immensely rewarding, but it’s also a tricky situation to navigate! If you do nothing else, communicate, communicate, communicate with them; you don’t want any assumptions on either side about how the business relationship is going to work.

We like to say, “Do more of what works!” But does that mean you should continue selling products when most of your audience is just starting out and isn’t in a position to buy?

In the long term, you can become a trusted advisor to your audience by providing them with free value now… but to stay in business, you have to find the portion of your audience that will pay, and offer them something they’re eager to buy.

If you want to make a lot of money, you have to change your mindset about what “a lot of money” means. This isn’t, however, an invitation to get reckless with your spending. When we say, “If you think $1,000,000 is a lot of money, you might make $100,000,” it doesn’t mean you should spend money like you’re a millionaire; it means that understanding how people think about the value of their money is key to getting paid a lot of it!

It seems like there’s no way to run a business these days without relying heavily on social networks to build and reach an audience. But what do you do when you have ethical concerns about those networks and the companies that own them? There’s no simple answer here: it comes down to your goals for your business, and how your values guide the actions you’re willing to take in pursuit of those goals.