I have two brilliant friends who have thriving service-based businesses that they market almost entirely online. They both dream of creating and launching digital products like an ebook or ecourse but neither of them have, each for different reasons.

Rachel is a go-getting self-promoter. She guest posts regularly and has a thriving Facebook presence. She works in short, intense bursts and loves selling her services. But she just can’t seem make the time to sit down and create something to sell to the many people who need her expertise.

Tristan loves creating, in his own words he could create a product a week. While he is active on social media and blogs regularly, he feels most comfortable having tailored, one-on-one sales conversations. The idea of selling a product feels cheesy and inauthentic, too cookie cutter.

Which type are you?

Most people that I’ve worked with find themselves in Rachel’s camp or Tristan’s. For instance, my friend Aine and I are split along a similar axis. I could network and promote until the cows came home, and Aine excels at spending entire days writing one book after another. The trick is to find balance because we need both the introspective, intensely creative time and a strong self-promotion muscle.

If you’re a Rachel: You are operating with the belief that to create something will necessarily be hard and time consuming. You may go stir crazy sitting for hours at your desk. Here are some ideas for the Rachels of the world:

• Use audio or video. They less time to refine and produce than an ebook. For example, host a virtual summit of people with complementary expertises and interview them.
• Use transcription to write. Start with recordings of teleclasses or sessions with clients (change identifying details to protect privacy in the final edit).
• Get a sounding board. It’s important for this social type to be in conversation about her ideas. Enlist a buddy to be a brainstorming and accountability partner through the creation process.
• Shrink the project. More isn’t always better, as hard as it is to create something it’s as hard for people to make the time to consume it. Laser-focus your solutions to people’s problems, what is the smallest package you could use to deliver information?
• Define success. It’s hard to make time for a vague “something” that has an indefinite timeline or scope. What is the target dollar amount? How many products would you need to sell at each price point to reach your goal? Look at other products in your niche at each price point and get a feel for how much stuff you actually need to create.

If you’re a Tristan: it’s a matter of overcoming the feeling that sales is pushy.

• Remember people want and need your expertise. I argued with Tristan that so many people need the knowledge he has and can’t afford to work with him on a one-on-one basis. People need his advice and he has an obligation to package it for different price points.
• Sell in your own style. The super-long, hard-sell sales page is quickly becoming extinct and you can create a perfectly fine short one. There are many other ways to get your product in front of people who want and need solutions you can provide — guest posts, a “shop” on your site, as an offer you make to others’ audiences. Get creative and find what feels right.
• Build a team of affiliates. Affiliates are the secret-weapon of the reluctant marketer, Tristan could empower his affiliates to market on his behalf.
• Find a partner. The right JV can be a wonderful thing and I want to do a lot more of them. Find someone whose audience overlaps with yours, whose services and expertise are complementary and whose work and professional style you admire. Even if both of you are Tristans, it’s a relief and motivator to have a sounding board and someone to share the work with.

For the past decade, my career has been largely in print publishing in some way or another. I’ve worked at a daily newspaper, monthly and weekly magazines. Having moved to online content publishing, there’s one thing I dearly miss — a good, old-fashioned deadline. If you have to get an entire newspaper to a printing press at midnight, it gets done.

Nowadays (when was the last time you heard someone say ‘nowadays’?) the Internet sits there with its gaping maw, willing to take anything you throw at it and publish it to the entire world instantly.

This often creates two undesirable results:

1. Bad content – unedited, poorly thought out, rambling, boring just thrown up onto the screen at a click of a button.
2. Content Procrastination and Paralysis (CPP)

With regard to #2, how long have you been thinking that you’d like to publish your own eBook? Or how long have you been sitting on that newsletter or blog post? Exactly.  The deadline for Internet content is every minute of every day. It is entirely up to us, and CPP sets in because we always think we’ll have more time, tomorrow.

The Cure for Content Procrastination & Paralysis

I have for the last six months, assumed that eventually I would write an ebook, whenever I was finished with my current clients’ projects. Well, surprise surprise, it didn’t write itself! It’s slightly embarrassing as someone who helps clients develop ebooks that I was slacking on my own projects! Then last week, Gary Barnes, a business coach I’m privileged to work with, asked me to pick a date that my ebook (in outline form) could be done and ready to ship. I gulped. I picked a date two weeks away. The combination of a hard deadline and someone holding me accountable has lit the proverbial fire under my ass!

So on February 16^th, the world will meet my new eBook:

Creating eBooks that Create Fans: The Sticky eBooks Kickstart Kit

If you’d like to be on the launch list and receive the first two chapters for free, please join my email list.

Now, how you can get your own eBook out of your brain and into the world!

5 Steps to Getting It Done

1. Pick a date that feels terrifying. If you pick a date three months from now, you’ll wait until the last week to get started. It’s human nature — we let the urgent crowd out the important. By picking a scary-soon deadline, your eBook (or any content project) becomes urgent and important and gets it on the top of your to do list.
2. Pick a reward. Don’t resist this! You think that finishing the project will be a reward in itself (and it will feel good) but for each milestone along the way plan to treat yourself. When I’m done with this eBook, I’m booking a plane ticket for a trip to California that I’ve been saying I’d take for a long time. Even smaller rewards and breaks along the way can get you over the temptation of little distractions.
3. Pick an accountability system. You know yourself best, is it enough to announce it on your blog? Tell a trusted friend who will check on your progress? Ask friends in a forum you’re part of to help keep you on track with regular check-ins? I find this is when hiring a coach is especially valuable.
4. Pick times to focus. I am writing first thing in the morning after I get up, before I get sucked into replying to email or reading blogs, et cetera. If possible, disconnect your Internet. Get a program like WriteRoom (for Mac) that obscures everything else on your computer. Lock out the kids and cats; don’t answer your phone. Even if it’s just half an hour you’ll get a lot done.
5. Jump in! Something else to watch for is “analysis paralysis” — worrying so much about how to do something that you don’t actually do it. The hardest part of the whole thing is starting. Just do it and it will sort itself out as you go. You can always edit, rearrange, change things. Just get moving with the words onto the page and you’ve won half the battle already.

Want instant accountability? Leave a comment here with your due date and let me know if you want follow up from me.