8 sales mistakes I made (part 2)

🪜 Welcome to Profit Ladder! The mission here is to help current & aspiring founders win back time & freedom by productizing your expertise into offers you build once and sell forever.

(Read time today: 7 minutes)

I just launched Profit Ladder PRO, my premium newsletter subscription.

Here’s what one premium member said:

Hey founder 👋🏼

Welcome to Profit Ladder!

Last week, I shared the first five selling mistakes I made as an entrepreneur.

Today, you’re getting the major lessons I learned from mistakes 6, 7, and 8.

Ready to jump in and level up your ability to sell the stuff you create?

6. You’re not repeating yourself enough

A few weeks back, I created a guide. It has one job: To help aspiring Founder-Creators figure out the right idea to productize first. It gets you from 0 to 1.

I chose that narrow scope because it’s the top problem 75% of new subscribers share when signing up for the newsletter.

That’s ample evidence to signal that the problem is an important one that affects many.

After I launched the guide, I started to let people know about it by:

• creating a newsletter reward to help subscribers get it

• including CTAs to it in my personal email signature

• adding it to the nav of my Profit Ladder website

• dedicating a newsletter edition to announcing it

• adding it to my LinkedIn bio featured section

• adding it to past online newsletters editions

• posting about it a few times on LinkedIn

• adding it to my LinkedIn newsletter

After a few waves of people discovering it, I stopped promoting it.

Why? My first reaction is to tell you that, because it was free, I assumed it would naturally spread. More accurately, I hoped to promote it once and have it go viral. Right! 😆 😭

If I’m being honest, I really stopped promoting it because I was worried everyone was sick of hearing about it.

This mistake I made is actually a subconscious bias we all fall victim to. It’s called the Spotlight Effect. We assume the rest of the world is intently focused on us. In reality, they’re too preoccupied on themselves to worry about us.

A week after I stopped promoting the guide, my ultimate #1 engager — a true fan of my work — reached out. He recommended that I create a guide to help people, like him, stuck at the starting gate: “People that need to understand the first couple steps of productizing.”

I asked him, “Did you happen to see the guide I launched?”

“Nope,” he said.

This is a guy who reads 100% of these newsletters and follows my posts on LinkedIn. We also regularly share DMs in the Profit Ladder Discord community.

But it wasn’t just him. Several others top engagers I followed up with also “missed that announcement,” as one person put it.

THAT announcement?! Try ten announcements!

The lesson

Here you are, worrying about repeating yourself too much and too often. In truth, 99% of your audience wasn’t paying attention. Not the first time. Probably not the 10th time, either.

Repeat yourself. Repeat yourself. Get over yourself. And then repeat yourself some more.

Last thing: Repeat yourself doesn’t mean to say that same words in the same order, week after week. Commit to the message. Experiment with the format.

OK, moving on to mistake #7…