How can you get paid for who you are, not just what you do? Today’s guest, Terry Rice, is teaching us his Golden Link Strategy for creating a steady stream of potential clients, without giving them (or you) “the ick” through cold outreach misfires.

He also shares speaking and marketing tips he pulled from one of his mentors, Daymond John, how he reframes business development activities, why it’s vital to get your offer right before you focus on branding, how he makes time for 12 hours of creating each week (even with four kids), and the sacrifices he made after his business started taking off.

“What am I pretending not to know?” There is tremendous power in asking better questions, whether it comes to ideal day design, creating systems in your business, or teaching someone how to help tame your inboxes.

Today’s conversation with Claire Giovino covers all that ground and more. We talk about what qualities make email so vexing for many business owners, how to reduce fear and friction when delegating replies, and the importance of asking better questions—of yourself and in your business.

"For the first time in a decade, I feel free again." That’s how one of my earliest blogging friends, longtime community leader David Spinks, was feeling when I caught up with him in-person in the middle of his yearlong sabbatical, after selling his community-based business.

David and I discuss best practices for creating and nurturing communities, for engineering serendipity, what it’s like to build and run a conference (and later sell it), and the freedom that comes with taking a deliberate sabbatical.

“The world doesn’t need another expert.” So says today’s guest, Andrew Davis. Experts rely on hacks, tips, tricks, teaching, preaching, and over-promising. Visionary leaders a) tend not to call themselves that and b) focus on the quest for knowledge itself, with enough humility to admit what they don’t know, or the problems they are exploring even while still in process.

In today’s conversation, you’ll learn how to move past commoditized content toward launching a quest that builds trust and brings your audience along for the ride—while embracing digital doppelgängers to help you get there.

“You do not need to cannibalize your healing for content.” Today, I’m in conversation with longtime blog-turned-IRL friend Nic Antoinette, diving deeper into her decision to shut down her Patreon community (taking a $30,000/year haircut to do so), then pivoting to a private paid Substack while she navigated her way through decisions about what might follow.

We discuss the generosity of being honest, the trap of wanting to be special, knowing where to draw the line on how much or how little you share, and much more. Be sure to also check out our earlier Pivot conversation in episode 342: “Whatever Comes Through Me Comes for Me First,” with Nicole Antoinette.

If you have been in business for any amount of time, then you know the feeling when a launch just isn’t working. The sales are crawling, you start doubting yourself, wondering if you created the right thing in the first place, if you built a big enough audience to sell anything at all.

All kinds of additional questions and insecurities follow when sales aren’t flowing: is that the offer that’s off? Your sales page invitation letter? The pricing? Is it you?

It’s so hard not to get a big morale dip in the middle of the sales dip during a launch. So this month’s bonus is on a few strategies that I’ve picked up over the years.

“I only write books for problems I can’t otherwise solve,” Nir Eyal says. “I don’t write my books for my readers; I write my books for myself.”

Driven by curiosity to fix his own problems, Nir’s books have sold over one million copies. Listen to today’s conversation on how he weathered the criticism storm around his first book, Hooked; the one essential skill to being an entrepreneur; how to turn your values into time, and turn time into traction; and if you’re an aspiring author, why the fear of not being qualified should not be one of your fears.

Abundance was my word of 2019.

I’d love to tell you I meant abundance in the broadest possible sense, appreciating the bounty already in my life, financial and otherwise.

But mostly, my theme was about money.