057: 10-7-4: The Best “Mind-Hack” to Generate Unlimited Ideas and Master Your Content Creation

Robert Plank 0:00 Robert Plank Show, Episode 5710 74 the best mind hack to generate unlimited ideas and master your content creation. Welcome back to the Robert Plank show, or maybe this is your first time ever listening. I'm Robert Plank. We're talking today and every episode of this podcast about internet marketing, making money online and making money from home, and one of the best ways you can make money is to actually generate content, content, meaning you solve people's problems. Think about that. If someone's looking to play guitar, what do they do? They go look on Facebook, they go make Google searches, they end up on maybe your blog, maybe your blog contains YouTube videos that you found or that you created. Maybe your blog has what's called an opt in form, so they can then join your email list and get some kind of free gift, some kind of free five page report with pictures that you created. Then once they're on your list, then they get a email sequence, an email sequence. I guess they get a message from you every day for seven days, and then after that, maybe you tone it down to once a week, sharing the things you have for sale, sharing your unique insights and tips and advice when it comes to playing the guitar. And they click over and they end up on what's called a sales letter. They end up on a long web page that describes this guitar. Course, you're now selling all the things in it, all the things will get out of it. All things will be able to do with this training you have. And at the bottom, well, then there's a button to buy. We recommend PayPal for such a thing, for such a button, where you take credit card payments, and then someone, once they pay money, maybe they pay you $100 $97 or $7 they then get to a checkout page or a thank you page or a download page. It's called a bunch of things, but it just means that once they paid you money, well now they get that thing that they bought from you, and that thing can be access to a membership site where you then have more videos you created within an exact step by step sequence on how to master the guitar. So you did all these different content creation things, right? You had a sales letter where you described the thing you're selling. You had a blog where you had different bits and pieces of advice and all these little things that didn't quite fit into your paid product. You have that paid product inside a membership site with videos. Maybe you had those videos transcribed and put it into a PDF report, but that's all content, and that's all things that solve people's problems. So when we're talking about creating content and writing, what really frustrates me is that people talk about as if it's some kind of like art form, as if, well, I just kind of sit down and I take out my fountain pen, I just kind of wave it around and I I come up with some beautiful pros and some beautiful things to talk about. And I mean, that never worked for me. I don't know if it ever worked for you, but whenever I had to do that, for example, in school, when I had to write essays and term papers and things like that, it was just not fun for me at all. I would always hit writer's block, or I'd always have the dreaded blank page. And the solution, I don't want to say the cure, but the answer to that blank page is to actually have a system. And I know that a lot of people are afraid when I say that. Well, I have a system for you to create a sales letter to sell your products, and that's at speed, copy.com, I have a system for you to create a book that you can sell on amazon.com, but you can have a physical book and a digital book, and that system is that make a product.com I think a lot of people are afraid that if they use a plug and play template or a system, that they will create something that's not unique, that's just kind of bland and not original, and kind of is like everyone else. I'm here to tell you that it's quite the opposite. And the best thing about actually using, and I'll tell you a couple of templates and systems in today's call in today's training, but a lot of the, I mean, the best thing about using a system is that you actually get the dang thing completed. Okay? And I mean, I don't know how well you know me, but you by using systems for writing, I've been able to write a big, long blog post on my blog at least once a month for, I think, seven years now, maybe longer, I've been able to send out just about a quick email every day, or almost every day, or an average of every day, to my email subscribers. I've been able to dictate out an entire book in an afternoon, I've been able to dictate out literally 100 articles, which you could say is 100 blog posts, or 100 guest blog posts, or things like that, but 100 400 plus word articles in a single day. Now, how did I do that? Let's just say that it comes down to two, three components. Okay, there's the system component, which is like the structure, like the prompts or things that you have, or how different things fit into into your content. Another part is time management, how you block out your time, which isn't just just the usual time management advice. And then the final one is motivation, because what we're talking about today are mind hacks to give you ideas and give you and I. Allow you to create content, and the motivation part is probably the toughest thing to get a handle on. And I used to think that, well, I've got to wait until I'm in just the right mood, or I've got to drink 10 Red Bulls and drink half a glass of wine or something to get right in the exact mindset. But you don't have to. And in fact, if you go ahead and answer a simple question that's usually enough to to get you to do it, or if there's money involved, for example, well, you might say, well, I don't want to write a blog post. I don't want to write 400 words. What if I told you that I'd pay you $10,000 to write a single 400 word article? Maybe you just got a little excited just at the thought of, whoa. All I have to do is sit down, and maybe, if you're slow, maybe a 400 article takes you an hour, especially if you're a hunt and peck typist, $10,000 well, great. If that takes me a day or a week, I'll do it. Well, what if it was now $1,000 you probably would still do it, even if you're if you even if your business is going great. $1,000 is $1,000 right? Put that against your mortgage, put that aside for a travel funds, put that in your kids, college or whatever, $1,000 for typing out maybe two thirds of a page, awesome. Well, what if I said $100 what if I said $50 well, there's some point where now you won't do it right, like you won't do it for, say, $5 because now, well, you'd rather you'd like to work for $1,000 an hour, but you don't want to work for $5 an hour. And I mean, the point of me saying all this other than that kind of teaches you with money is that at some point, there's there's, it's worth whatever it takes to create that article. And if you can figure out a few ways to speed up the creation of that, for example, if you just took a couple of like, maybe a typing class, or just watched a couple of typing videos on YouTube to learn, like, the correct finger placement, and you've doubled your typing speed, well, great. Now you've just doubled your income. Now you've doubled your hourly rate. As far as typing, if you can figure out a way to overcome writer's block or pluck out an idea whenever you want it. Well, then great, now you've increased your income. So the system part is really important. And I mean systems, for example, if we are creating an article, creating a 400 word article or blog post or something, what we want to do is create and structure in the form of a title, three points, and then a summary, and then a call to action. And then we actually, actually what we want to do is say a title, an intro, three points, summary and a call to action. Okay? And so when we say, Well, you got to have a 400 word article, that's some big, huge thing. And what are you going to do? You're going to open up your Word document. There's going to be a blank page. You're going to type in five words and say, whoo, only 395 bottles of beer left on the wall, cool five more words, 390 words, and that's a sucky place to be. And if you're not excited and pumped up and in a rush in your writing, then, well, what's going to happen is, first of all, you're going to overthink it. You're going to write half a sentence and say that sentence is stupid and delete it before he even had a chance to finish that sentence. The good news about writing and things like that, is that, well, let's say you're a human being, okay, and you have conversations every day of your life. That's what you're used to doing. And if you are on the telephone, and if you were explaining to someone had the steps that you need to start playing the guitar, if you need to buy a guitar, if you need to buy a pic, if you need to buy, I don't know, like amp is that? Is that a thing you've played with guitar? I don't know if you need to buy sheet music, but you could talk to someone on the phone and list the steps for them, person to person. So there is a way that you can actually speak and communicate, and when you're talking, it's probably in simple, direct, easy to understand language. You don't have to use $10 words or college level words just to get your point across, and in fact, most of the time outside of academia, you don't want to do that. You don't want to talk in super fancy words. If you want to publish the next war and peace, well then great, go ahead and agonize for a month over one single cents. But if what we're doing is this thing called Content Marketing, which means publish a couple of blog posts a day, or if what we're talking about is recording a sales video or making a sales letter, you're going to lose people if you super fancy language. So we want to actually have a prompt. So when we're talking about making an article, we have our title, we have our intro, we have a three bullet points, we have a summary. May have a call to action. And so instead of having to think in terms of, got to write this 400 word article, what if each of those sections was just 50 words, right? You had a 50 word intro, a 50 word thing about Part One, a 50 word thing about part two. Can you write 50 words? I mean, could you write, you know, three or four sentences, and that's even stretching it about whatever topic you're talking about. Well, that would be pretty easy. So So one of the systems that we like to use, and and this is included in make a product, is the article creation system. So if you're,

Robert Plank 9:54 if you're teaching someone about how to start off playing guitar, well then if you break it down into these pieces. So. Recently, it's way easier to eat that elephant one bite at a time. Another important component of this is to turn all everything into a question. And here's why it's really tough to look at that blank page and eke out a sentence and eke out a sentence and he got another sentence, and at the end you say, Oh, I'm tired. I'm never doing that again. But what if you had a piece of paper, and you had a simple question, okay? And, and maybe the question you would put in someone is, what are the three things that everyone needs to have, or what are the three things I need to have when playing the guitar? So this is worded as if I'm asking you personally a question, and there's just a little bit of space underneath that, and you could type the answer to that question, and then underneath that, there was a another question that said, Okay, what's the first thing I need to buy before anything else when it comes to learning the or being a guitar player? And you'd say, well, of course, you need the guitar if you had nothing else, at least you have that acoustic guitar, that electric guitar, or whatever, but you wouldn't have any other you know, you wouldn't have the extra sound you wanted, and you wouldn't have the sheet music, but at least you'd have the guitar, and you can talk about, okay, get a guitar, get an acoustic or an electric guitar, and get this brand, and get this size. Well, cool. You know what you just did? You already wrote two paragraphs. That's kind of a scary word there, but you wrote almost half of your 400 word article. You've written about 100 words just by answering some simple questions. So we had that we sent the title, the intro, point one, point 2.3, summary and call to action. So what if each of those was just phrased as a question, instead of having an article that's titled guitar basics, starting off with the guitar, what if the title of the article or the blog post you were creating was, how does someone start playing guitar? Question mark, okay, well, now it's just gonna flow out of you. That's I mean, and that's probably the best mind hack of them all is phrasing the things you want to write as questions, and you just go ahead and answer that question. I even gone to the point sometimes, if I was really stuck writing an article is I would open up a chat box. I would open up a back in the day it was it was like trillion, and I CQ, and nowadays it'd probably be Skype, and I'd open up Skype on my computer and Skype on my iPad with the keyboard, and maybe on my iPad, I would just type in the first question, and guess what? It pop up on my screen, and I'll just go and I'll type in that in the instant message box the answer. Why do I do that? Because it's fun to answer instant messages, right? It's fun to post and reply to people on Facebook. You get that little dopamine hit when it goes boom and the little screen pops up and the sound plays. That's a lot more fun than typing in a Word document. So what do you do? Well, that's that's a really easy thing you could do there is just respond to those chat messages once it's done, you know what? You're allowed to just select that, copy right out, paste it in your Word document and delete the questions, and then cool. Now you've hacked your brain into being excited and to following that system. So systems are really helpful, because especially when we're creating a sales letter, and especially when we're finding sales letters, the whole point of a sales letter will have any kind of writing, but especially a sales letter is to grab and hold people's attention. And so the best thing we can do in a sales letter is if we notice that we have a weak headline or some weak bullet points, or some weak transitions from headlines to bullet points or reach transitions from one part to another. Because ideally, what we want to happen when someone comes on a web page that we want someone to go and click and buy from a web page like that could be make a product.com if you want to go there, that's a sales letter. That's a direct response web page. What we want people to do is start at the top and then keep reading further and further and further down and digest what we have in front of them. And if at any point they're just like, I can't I can't wait. I gotta buy, they can jump down and buy. But that's what we want. We don't want someone to read half of it and quit. We don't want someone to read some of it and scroll up and scroll down. We want them to start at the top and either read every part of it or get to the point where they just say, I gotta have an out, jump down and buy. So the most important question you can ask in creating a sales letter is the question of, so what? Right? And if you say, I'll, I'll teach you how to play guitar. Well now, and that's that current headline on your sales letter, then you can just go and open up a Word document, paste that headline in and write the question. So what question mark underneath that? I'll teach you guitar Well, so what? Okay, now I have to answer the question, so what? And the answer the question, so what is I'll show you in just 12 minutes how to how to play songs on the guitar and impress your friends. Well, so what? All right, now the answer to the question, so. Could be. Forget, forget hiring a local guitar coach, or wasting money on different, you know, videos and or trying to do it yourself. I wanted to show you the exact way that I've done it, and I've shown hundreds of students to pick up guitar, play any song and impress your friends, so you see how now we've got a juicier headline with more things that people actually care about, as opposed to just saying, play guitar. Now we're getting into the speed of it, the emotions of it, the big results of it that you wouldn't have had if you hadn't done this mind hack, this mind trick. And asked yourself, so what email marketing? I don't want to get too much in the email marketing, but the point of creating a list and sending out emails to your list and all that kind of stuff is that somebody is on your list. Someone is one of your email subscribers, and they get an email from you, they see the subject line, they see what, and the subject line gets them to then open the email, the email then that's opened, then gets them to click over to your site, and then hopefully your sales copy on that site then does the job of selling them. But like, we can't try to make this whole sale, or try and make this all happen at once. It's little baby steps. The subject line gets them to open the email you sent to them, and then the email gets them to click. So the best thing I figured out, as far as emails is the phrase I don't know, all right, and let me explain, is we want, we want to arouse some curiosity. We don't want to be too off the wall, but we want someone to be curious enough to then click from an email over to a web page. And the best thing is that whatever we ask them, questions are always great, but if we ask them or say something to them, the answer should be, I don't know. So here's what I mean, since we seem to be talking about being a guitar instructor today, what if you sent an email to your email subscribers who are interested in playing in the guitar. And if you send an email saying, Are you missing out on these three, these three simple guitar tricks, question mark? Well, I don't know. Now I want to go and click over and do this, but if you then said something like watching you play guitar, well, I mean, I might click on on an email saying that you want me to watch you play guitars, because I might be interested in that, but it's not going to arouse my curiosity as much as are you are, first of all, are you missing out? Because now I'm talking about you, I'm not talking about me, but now I honestly don't know if I have this thing or I don't have this thing. Now I have to go and click and see. So as we're getting this call ramped up, the big thing is that it's easier to edit crap than air. Okay, and if you're ever agonizing about I've got to write a book. I don't know what to put in, I've got to make a blog post. What's more important is to to write the way that you actually talk, and if you are dictating out your book or things like that, which is what we recommend, and make a product, that's even better, because now the transcript, after you get it cleaned up, and the transcript is you speak something out, and then someone else listens to it and types it up it and it comes out the exact way you wanted to say it. And in most cases, the way you wanted to say it the first time is just about the right way. You don't have to do any kind of over editing. You do have to clean up a transcript a little tiny bit, because the way you talk, you have ums and ahs and transitions and repeat words and things like that. But it's more important to have something down and on the page and then go back and tweak it and edit it a little tiny bit, because if you keep on trying to edit while you write, you're going to fall under the strap of writing half a sentence, deleting it. Writing half a sentence, deleting it. Next thing you know, three hours have passed, and you could have written 10 articles, but you can't even get one knocked out of there.

Robert Plank 19:01 As we said, three components of content creation is to have a system, have a good time management and have good motivation. So when I and the so I've had days where I've spoken out 50 articles on a single day, and I had one day where I spoke out 100 articles. Now, why did I do that? Because at the time, article marketing was huge. If you could knock out 100 articles and you can post one article a day on article directories, you would have tons and tons of traffic. Unfortunately, nowadays, article directories have kind of fallen onto the wayside, but the good news is that you're still rewarded by posting an article a day to your blog, and then you can go and get it dictated, and then now you have a podcast episode, and you can share it on social media and do all these other crazy things, so you're still rewarded by having good content. But as always, there's lots of competition, and you need to put out a lot of things. You need to be prolific. Just having one single Kindle book might not do. Anymore. Now you might need to have five or 10 Kindle books, but that's okay, because you can have some short Kindle books and you can and you know, having a blog and just having two posts on it isn't going to do it for your long term. It's a great start. But if you have that blog around for five years, you don't want to have the most recent posts on that blog to be a year old or five years old. You want to stay up to date. So it helps me a lot to be able to rearrange the raw materials and just get it out there and change it up. So the day that I recorded 100 articles in a day, I'll tell you what I did. I outlined it out, and I said, Okay, well, first there's no way I can think of 100 things to talk about in my business, but I can, first of all break that 100 articles down into 10 categories, Hmm, now we're getting somewhere. So I can say, well, one aspect of my business is membership sites. One aspect is webinars. One aspect could be blogging, okay, and if you're a guitar instructor, then you can say, well, one aspect is the equipment. One aspect is Beginner Guitar advice. One aspect is advanced guitar advice. One aspect might be, if you are starting a band, how to get your band booked for shows. One category could be having a solo act. One category could be how to record a guitar album, things like that. So it's, it's tough to think of 100 things, but we can think of 10 categories, and then we can think of 10 prompts. Call them 10 questions for each of those 10 categories. So if one of my categories is webinars, then I can have one of the questions be, what's the best webinar provider? Another one could be, how do I run my first webinar? Another one could be, how do I record a webinar? So we can easily think, it's tough to think of 100 things, but it's easily. It's easy to think of 10 categories, and then 10 questions per category, and then now that question becomes the title of an article, and then you break it down, like we talked about in the previous section, right? You have the title is that question. And then you have the intro, which is the question, point one, point 2.3, which each of those things are sub questions you could say about starting your first webinar. And then you sum it all up, so you kind of encapsulate all the things you talked about. And then have the call to action, tell them where to go to buy your course on webinars. 10 articles to talk about. And then what I realized after doing a few of these and timing myself, was that it took me about three to four minutes to record an article, and I would just do them back to back. And so what I ended up with was just to be fast and loose on the time planning. Of it is that it took me about 40 minutes to speak out 10 articles right of three or four minutes, and I would just sit down. I would start it up. I'd read the first question and then go to town and then answer each of the questions one after another. And I would literally record using my headset, which is called a Logitech clear chat headset. I would record using a software tool called Camtasia recorder, and then I would save just the audio portion, and then go and

Robert Plank 23:11 and use a service called oDesk. Now it's called Upwork, and now I use a service called Fiverr to get it been transcribed, turned into words. And then now I have 100 different articles that I have the written format of it, and I have the audio version of it as well, so 40 minute chunks of time. But of course, we need things like breaks and stuff like that. So once again, to keep the planning, the time management simple, I would put an hour block for this. Okay, so I would start the day, and I think I started at like 8am I want to say, and I would just have a block of time, and I would say, well, for 8am to 9am I am going to dictate the A category of articles. And for some reason, at least with my thinking, it helped to to name the categories in letters. So like, the A category would be webinars, B category could be products, C category could be membership sites. Each category of 10 articles that I would be talking about would have a letter, and then within that each each category would have a number. Okay, so I would have say, like the A category about webinars, and article a zero. Since we have 10, we have to use, you know, zero through nine instead of one through nine. A zero is the article about your first webinar. A one is the article about best webinar provider, all the way to a nine. So 8am to 9am would be the A category. So I'd sit down right, right at the top of the hour. Okay? This is exactly scheduled. This is time management, and I would have nothing else going on that day, phone off and all that stuff. But I would dictate out back to back these 10 articles, and then have a 20 minute break. Okay, so what we ended up with at the end was technically 10 hours. But in real time, it was about six hours worth of dictating stuff out for the articles. And you might say, well, I don't have six hours. Well, that's fine, like, just scale this back however you want. Because technically, well, what if, every day when you started and you sat down, you just spoke out 10 articles, and you then, and you have, now you have 10 different three to four minute audio files, and those are, I mean, easily, little podcast episodes for you. And then what you can do is then get them transcribed. And now you have all these little articles and blog posts. Maybe you can even take the best ones and put them all into a book, but it helps a lot more to get the raw materials out and then rearrange the raw materials. And what we're talking about today is this system called 10, dash seven, dash four. And what this is is a way to allow you to cram a lot of stuff into a small space, as opposed to bloating up what you have and trying to fill space. Instead, you have all this greatness, or all these raw diamonds, and you're you need to compact it into little cubby holes, and somehow, just by, just because you have to fit it in this little space, it ends up being better than if you had all this extra freedom to do it right. Because, I mean, every TV show is just about 30 or 60 minutes. Every movie is just about 90 minutes or two hours, and they have to cut out some stuff, some of the extra stuff, and then what's left is just the best part of that movie or that TV show. And what helped me as far as copywriting and writing sales letters, the best piece of advice was this goofy advice that said, I want you to write a web page and I want you to list reasons why people should buy from you, but you're only allowed to type out sentences that are exactly seven words in length. Okay, so you can't type a sentence it's five words or 10 words, exactly seven words. And at first you think, well, that's kind of silly. That's kind of ridiculous, but think about what that does. First of all, it forces you to write in simple language, and it makes you think differently, like you stop thinking about the high school English paper mindset, where you say you've got to write a paper. How long does it have to be a three page paper? Okay, so I'll make sure to pad pages one and two, and then put all the stuff I was gonna put on on there and pay for you. Don't have to do that. Okay? Instead, you're being very careful about your wording. And so many times, if I'm looking at a sales letter of mine, and if it's not selling as good as I want it to, I do two things. I scroll down and I look at, in general, at what point do I lose somebody, right? And maybe it just means I have too big of a paragraph, or I talk about something that's scary, or I go a little bit too long in a certain story, and I cut it out. And then I look at even more of a fine tooth comb, and I look at individual sentences, and they say, well, could I cross out this word and that word in a sentence and it still says the same thing, but only in less words. So having this constraint of having to write things in seven word sentences helped so much, even with the article writing or dictating. What helped me, especially, and let's say, if I was planning out an article right, a 400 word article, like we said, title, intro, three points, summary, call to action if I'm planning out point 1.2, and point three, and I say, All right, well, I need to tell somebody about how to run their first webinar, and the first point is going to be the date and the time and the title. So I need so I'm but I'm still stuck about where to start. Well, let's create three keywords that will, that will get us in motion, right? So this first paragraph, you could say, this first three or four sentences about running your first webinar is about just like the setting it up, the timing of it, okay? And so, like we said, we can have one keyword be the the title of the webinar. One could be the date and one could be the time, all right? And what we want to do is we have these three keywords. We want to do is make sure just that the that first keyword that's going to be in the very first sentence of the whole entire paragraph, and then make sure that the other keywords are are are somewhere in the the next sentence. So we don't want to have all those keywords all in the same sentence. We want to make sure that our first sentence, for sure, has the exact word title. And that's just one of those constraints where, because we have that rule in place, now we're not going to get all creative, we're not going to overthink ourselves. We just kind of start and now we're off to the races. So we have that first title of our webinar, and we say, well, here's how I come up with a title for a webinar. I have a I have a promise or a big result and a short length of time. And then here's an example of a title. Well, cool. Now just out of that, we've now got two or three sentences just about the title of the webinar. You can have a. Sentence and say the date is choosing the date of your webinar is more important than you might think, because maybe your list is a weekender crowd or a weekday crowd. So email your list and ask them what's the best date to run your webinar. The time is also important. And the time is important because of the time zone, because if all of your list is made up of Australian people, as opposed to people living on the east coast of the United States, the time of day is very important. And if your list is, you know, mostly biz op people or freebie seekers, then you're going to want to list your your webinar during the day, during your lunch break. Or if your list is some other kind of person, you want to list your webinar in the air in the early evening, or something like that. So now we just because we actually had a prompt, now we don't, aren't trying to just fill space. And one thing that really helps, especially once again, with sales letters and with email marketing, and a little less so with blogging and with books, but you need to be entertaining the entire time, because basically, you're gonna lose someone's attention every 10 minutes. If you have a book that takes you 60 minutes to read, well, hopefully at every point along the way, every five or 10 minutes, you have a really good golden nugget. And people don't have to wait forever and ever and ever just to have a big payoff. So make sure that you keep someone's attention every 10 minutes, especially when it comes to this longer kind of content, like a book. And guess what? That's why, in a book, we break it down into chapters, and with our mega product system, what we like you to do is to create your the first version of your book, you could say, in just seven chapters, and it's gonna be a pretty small book. It's gonna be a pretty thin book, but that is something where you can actually have it be short enough where you get it done, but it's long enough where you meet the requirements to list on Kindle, which is Amazon's digital platform, and create space, which is Amazon's physical book publishing service, so you have seven chapters, and the way that the time breaks down in make a product is, I believe you end up speaking about eight minutes per chapter. You end up speaking about two minutes for every main point in that chapter. So what you end up is eight minutes times seven chapters. So you have a 56 minute book. So in 56 minutes of talking, you end up with about a just under 10,000 word book, which is probably going to be about maybe 30 or so pages, maybe 40 or 50, if you have bigger print, bigger margins or a photo, but it's easier to edit crap than air. You get somewhat of a book out there, and then you can improve it over time. You can go and make the chapters a little bit meatier. Add in some checklists, add in some other cool, portable talking points and things like that.

Robert Plank 32:55 Let's get to the meat of this. We're talking about 10, dash seven, dash four. Enough of building up. What the heck is it? Here's what it is. It's if you need to think of the seven chapters of your book, it's a lot easier to think of more things we need. Okay, so it's easier to think of 10 things people actually need to know. About guitar, about membership sites. So when I told you earlier about articles, and we said we need 100 articles, I mean, it's okay to have some good articles and some bad articles. We're going for like a spray and pray. I guess you could call it or a shotgun approach. Want to have a bunch of different articles, blog posts out there and see what gets picked up. When we have a book, we want to have our best stuff in there. We have a webinar course, we want to have our best stuff in there. So what we want to do is, if we have, if you want to have a book, I recommend, like I said, seven chapters. So what do you do when you have this thing called a book where you think of 10 questions people would ask when it comes to learning the guitar, and he asks these 10 different questions, and you list them all out, and we want to cross out the worst three, so you might have all these things figured out about electric guitar and acoustic guitar and how to play sheet music and how to play the different chords and the different equipment, but some of those questions, some of those things out of the tent, are going to be stinkers. So what you want to do is, and it might be kind of tough at first, but cross out the three that are the weakest. And so you might just cross out those three completely. Or you might cross out one of them and say, Well, I'm going to cross this out, but I can actually add it to one of the ones I'm going to keep. Or I'm going to cross some one of these out, but I'm going to combine two of them. So so some two of the questions were kind of loser questions, but now that they're combined, they're a lot better. So maybe it could be something like, well, maybe you'd, as far as your knowledge goes, you might not have enough to talk about about just electric guitars. And so you have a question about, well, what's, what do I need to know about electric guitars? And what I need to know about acoustic guitars, but, you know, mostly acoustic guitars. So you can combine the acoustic. And electric chapters. And now that's one cool, media filled chapter, and it's, I mean, it's going to be tough to only say what you want to say in just eight minutes, as opposed to filling time. So 10, seven, four. This means that, okay, so now we're going so we have 10 questions. We narrow them down to the best seven. Those are going to be the seven chapters of our book. And then every time that I lay out one of these seven chapters book, there's a clear dividing point between like the beginner and the advanced portions. And we all want to, we all like the advanced stuff because that's where you're at, but that's not going to have the widest appeal. So in 1074 so what we want to do is rearrange the remaining seven chapters, and put the four most important ones at the front and the three least important ones later on at the end. Because, to be honest, most people won't get to the end of your book, but they will remember, especially the first couple of chapters. So that's what helps when 10, seven, four and coming up with books is think of 10 questions of what people need to know, as far as learning your subject, narrow down to seven, because some of those 10 are going to suck. And then put those rearrange so that the four most important and basic beginner questions are at the front, then you have the remaining three. Now, when it comes to a sales letter, 10, seven, four comes into play, because let's, let's get back to I said, fit what fit your creativity into a box, and you end up with a lot better creativity and you don't have any of the extra crap, any of the extra sparks or runoff or fat or whatever you'd call it, with your writing. So out of all the crazy stuff you could do with the sales letter, I prefer to have four modules, or four components and then three bonuses. So what you do is, if you're selling a course on playing the guitar, well, you think of, what are if I, if I was going to do a 10 week course, what would each module each week consist of, right? And maybe, maybe in the first module, you'd have them buy their guitar equipment. The second one, they play their first song. Maybe in one of the modules, you'd have them record them playing and they they submit it to you, or maybe they meet you on Skype, and you help them to correct them. But you're gonna think of 10 modules that of all these cool things that you have in the guitar. And the reason why you think of 10, even though you're not going to use all 10 is because, well, the first four are going to be great. Then 567, kind of suck. Eights kind of iffy. But nine and 10 are really, really good. So because you stretched your brain a little bit, you thought of 10 modules, 10 videos, 10 pieces. Of your course, you cross some of them out so you're down to seven. And then you rearrange so that you have the four coolest, most important modules, and then the remaining three are now the bonuses in your offer. So then now you have a bonus. That's the critique part of it. And now this way people aren't held up because maybe someone just wants to learn beginning guitar and they aren't quite ready, or they're a little too nervous to submit a video of them playing guitar, so you just save that for the end. You make that an add on bonus, and not the core materials in your course. This comes into play 10 some four in webinars as well, for exactly the same reason, because we don't want to. I mean, if we just think of four things, some of them will be good, some of them will suck. If we think of 10 things, well, then now we have the good and the bad, and we can compress this down to seven things. And when it comes to a webinar, I like to have four, I like to narrow it down even further to four things. And what it ends up happening is that in this hierarchy of sorts, we think of 10 things you want to talk about, we narrow it down into seven strongest ones, and then the four can fit into a step by step system. And maybe this four part system exactly mirrors the offer you going to be selling, exactly mirrors your four part. You know, actual course they want to buy whatever it is, or maybe it just the four step. Maybe these four things are just like the four logical steps from the from getting where they start in the webinar, which is as a guitar newbie. And then you share maybe, like, four breakthroughs when it comes to playing guitar. And then now you say, Well, now that you know these breakthroughs, now you're ready to plug into my system of playing a guitar. So you're gonna have these four most important pieces, and then the remaining three, or just kind of be kind of floating in there, right? So one of them, one of them might might be just something that you mentioned in the beginning. One of them might be something that's present throughout the whole course, like maybe you keep drilling into them that you know, if you just know these couple of chords, then everything else comes into play. Okay? So if one of your points about about learning guitar is just know the chords. Well, then you can say, well, here's this device that sits on your guitar that helps with the chords. Here's you know it. I just started off with just knowing these two chords, and that got me half of the way there. So we might. So we're gonna have four parts that are our step by step system and webinars, and the three we're. Remaining slightly weaker points are just going to be present throughout the entire webinar presentation. If that makes sense, if it doesn't make sense, that's okay. You're not quite advanced there yet. But 10, seven, four means we think of 10 things, narrow it down to seven, and then four are the strongest things that we focus on and how first and then the three remaining ones are the a little more advanced, a little of the things that we hold on to for later.

Robert Plank 40:39 10, seven, four, you need to get excited about these things you create so that you'll finish it. All right, because let's think about this. If you are excited about the content you create, whether we're talking about webinars, podcasts, blog posts, sales, letters, your course, articles, whatever, if you get excited about something, then you'll be excited to finish it. And for some reason, some of these mind hacks, like answering a question, or like setting up a countdown timer so that you time yourself until you finish it. These things get you excited. And if you're excited when you start, you'll be excited to finish as fast as possible. And then you'll since you had so much fun, instead of dreading this writing process, you'll be excited to show it to others. And then once you do show it to others, those other people will be excited. It's also important to put out a lot of stuff. Put out a lot of products and sales, letters and webinars and emails and blog posts and things like that, because you don't know which of your content is actually going to pan out. And what's really frustrating is that most of my simple content is the stuff that's the most popular. Like I said, I used to do a lot of article marketing, and I use a site called easing articles.com and I mean, you should probably have a couple of articles on there, but definitely don't live there. It's not like it used to be 10 years ago. You don't, definitely don't need to post there every single day, but you should post to your own blog at least once a month, and you should be emailing to your own email list at least once a week, if not more. So in this easy article site, I could actually sort by the most popular articles I had the web pages that got the most views and the most clicks back to my site, and it was always the most basic stuff, right? It was things like how to make a headline in a sales letter, or how to do this thing called attention, interest, desire, action in the sales letter. It was always the most basic thing and I had no idea, because I always thought that the things that excited me the most would excite others the most. But it was always just like this. 10% of these things that I had no idea were so popular. So the answer to that problem is, if you put out a lot of stuff and only 10% of it pans out, you still win. Okay, so if, this coming year, if you put out 20 blog posts, and only two of them worked out, and only two of them got you a bunch of sales, well then cool. That's where all your sales came from. Those two blog posts. And then finally, it like, I want you to get to the point where you can just churn out content, you just click the record button and one single take without a podcast, like I'm doing now. And by the way, if you want to create your own podcast, go to podcast crusher.com but when I'm creating, say, a webinar where I'm pitching webinar, it's not scripted, it's live, so I can't stop and start over. And by the way, webinar crusher.com is the way and the place to create your own webinars, for classes and for pitching as well. But you need to get to the this point where you create one, take content, you have an idea, you're excited about it, you do it. It's done. You moved on. And you can get to the point where you have a pool of content. And what's a pool of content? That's where I actually have a stash of a few podcast episodes. I'm always a few episodes ahead of what you actually see, not too far ahead. I'm not talking to you from, you know, years and years in the past, but I have a couple of podcast episodes under my hat, so to speak, so that I'm not in a mad rush literally every week. Because, let's face it, some days and some weeks, we're just not as motivated. But if you have four or five episodes sitting there in the kitty, well then you don't need to think of new stuff all the time. If you have a few blog posts that you're ahead of, or things like that, then you can just put it out when you want to. And it's kind of like you're you're fishing for a new food because you want to, and not just because you're hungry and not. It's not a case of metaphorically, you say, I'm gonna starve if I don't catch a fish today. Now you're a little bit ahead of it, and you have this pool of content, a pool of maybe a few guest blog posts, and if you ever want to impress them, and you grab one of these best ones, put their name on it and say, Here you go. Here's this poster just wrote. Can you publish it on your blog? You have a couple of extra blog posts or podcasts a few weeks ahead of time, so whenever you want to put out a new blog post or podcast, you can just say, Okay, let me go in that special folder. Let me grab it and I at least for me, I feel a lot less panicky if I have this extra pool of content. So how do you mind hacking? Brain into creating lots of content whenever you want and actually being ahead of the schedule. Well, it comes down to having a system, having good time management and having motivation. And 10, seven, four is the best system that I've ever used, as far as creating anything, especially a bunch of articles or a sales letter, because it's easier to edit crap than air. I think of 10 questions someone would want narrow them down to seven, so now you have just the strongest seven things. Rearrange them so that the four that are remaining are at the forefront. Pun intended the four strongest and best things, the best chapters in your book, or whatever you want to call it, and then the back three are the ones that are still important, but not the coolest and most pressing, and deliver the biggest result. So I'm Robert Plank, and let me know how 10, seven, four works out in your own life, in your own business, and by emailing me at Roberts, at Robert plank.com, and while you're there, while you're doing that, can you all shoot over to Robert Plank show.com forward slash iTunes, and give us a five star review that would really help. And finally, if you two want to create your own book or pump out content as fast as you want, if I've shared with you a couple cool things in this podcast, imagine what I could show you if you actually saw this on video. So go to make a product.com to figure out and claim your access to the I think it's one of the best courses we've ever created, because the templates are all built in, and you can literally have the system outline your book or article, speak it out, get it transcribed for a very cheap price, and now you have a written materials and spoken material so you can go and market over and over again. I'm Robert Plank 1074, remember that and have a great day. Bye. Now you.