Commercial Creators — ‘Know Your Alpha’ Before You Chase A New Idea
Why it’s critical to understand your ‘alpha’ before you begin a business
Whether you write, paint, code, or teach, you’ve got to know your alpha. Your alpha is your endgame — the way you want to transform your life from the life you live now to the life you want to have.
The alpha is critical. Mission-critical.
If we can’t envision the life we want, we have no way to work backwards and dissect the daily work required to get there. This isn’t law of attraction nonsense. We’re talking about the power of your subconscious mind.
If you don’t put the right directions in the GPS the car can’t reach it’s final destination — no matter how hard you work every day.
What you want will determine:
- The type of business you design
- The type of customers you wish to serve
- The types of products, books, courses, or services you sell
- How you want to live
- Your working environment
- Whether you can fly solo or if you’ll require employees
- How much you need to earn to sustain the life you want
- How hard you’re willing to work
- Whether you’re an introvert or extrovert (and plan your sales process accordingly)
There’s a lot that goes into the soup.
However, many creators skip this critical step. The think of a business idea and start it. Before they know their alpha. Before they know what the endgame looks like. Before they chose a business model to help create the life they want.
Your alpha is the North Star.
As you progress along your entrepreneurial journey there will be hundreds of small moments to veer you off course.
Those who think the business idea is a goal will have to North Star to guide them.
Those who know their alpha will always have a way to course-correct — to aim the car in the right direction, no matter how many flat tires and bathroom breaks we take along the way.
What does your alpha look like?
If you want a location-independent lifestyle later, don’t try to open a location dependent business now. If the idea of face-to-face selling makes you puke your shoes, don’t design a business around face-to-face selling.
If the idea of typing all day is not appealing, then don’t design your lead-gen process around content creation.
Don’t have money for ads? Don’t make a business that requires ads to thrive.
Want an office full of people? Make sure you serve a big-enough niche to support that kind of growth in the future. Are there only 5,000 available customers world-wide? Pick a different niche.
Play the tape.
This is a technique professional athletes use to do their jobs on the field better than we can.
Play the perfect alpha in your mind. What does it look like? How do you feel when you live that life? Where do you live? Who’s with you? Who isn’t? When you play the tape you can fool your mind into believing you’ve already got what you want.
Your daily behaviors will change.
Your style of work will change.
Your ability to take calculated risk and make bigger moves, will change.
When you uncover what you want for yourself at the end — not a life of doing nothing and retiring in a hammock, but how you want your ultimate working life to look — this is the work we must do before we start.
Own your traffic
If you don’t own your traffic you don’t own your business. If your business relies on someone else’s traffic for customers, the business that own the platform is in charge of your alpha.
When you own your traffic you control your destiny.
The way we control our traffic is through direct marketing. Email will probably be your choice vehicle.
When you own your traffic you have the ability to whether the storm. Not only will you be a great position to develop a long-term relationship with your customers, but they will help you build the business you seek with your alpha.
When you own the traffic, the traffic will help you get what you seek.
With email, you can sell your writing while you sleep, automatically. So you can have more time to do the work you love — and you don’t have to worry about your bills so much.
We’re waiting for you.
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August Birch (AKA the Book Mechanic) is both a fiction and non-fiction author from Michigan, USA. As a self-appointed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indies how to create work that sells and how to sell more of that work once it’s created. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing, August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.