In my last two books, I wrote about how I write books, create podcasts, and make videos. I looked at some of the hardware and software tools that I use. In the book that I will self-publish at the end of September 2017, I will be talking about a particular product called www.teachable.com. Teachable is one of the platforms that an educator can use to build and distribute courses to students across the world. An educator with entrepreneurial tendencies is an edupreneur, and I am one of them. The internet has enabled us to do many things. I never imagined I could run my school online. Now I don’t have to imagine it; I am doing it. Before the internet enabled me to open my online school, I had to put up with management in a school setting, and private tuitions with a limit on the number of students that I can tutor at any one time. Now I can reach thousands of students whose
goal is to learn and do well in their exams.
Entrepreneurs must identify a product or service which they can create and sell. You can dream all you want and romanticise entrepreneurship, but if you’re not selling anything, then you’re not an entrepreneur. We say that you have entrepreneurial tendencies. If you try to sell the idea of entrepreneurship, you end up losing credibility because people want to see you do what you are telling them to do. I quickly realised that I was talking about the need to write books yet I had only written an e-book almost two years prior and nothing else after that. So I decided to write more books. The problem I could foresee was that I was going to struggle with the time to write the books. I had to come up with a plan. Besides writing books, I also wanted to write blog posts, produce podcasts and create videos. I came up with a brilliant plan: to blog every day and repurpose the articles into podcasts, videos, and books. Then I would publish the books as e-books, the paperback versions, and as audiobooks. And who knows, I can repurpose some of the text material into short films. I want to do some of the things that I have complained about in the past. Watching African movies was a pain, so I want to correct the shortcomings that I have observed.
If you want to sell something you have to make it first. So I decided to write books and sell them. If you can’t write you can sell what others have written through Amazon and eBay or other e-commerce platforms. If you want to sell a physics course, you have to create it first. You can set up and upload videos to YouTube or other video distribution platforms, or you can create a course and upload it to teachable.com or other course distribution platforms. Once you have uploaded the course, you can look for students to sign up for your class and charge them for it. Now the question is: where will I find the time to blog, podcast, vlog, and write books! It’s straightforward; I will blog about how I’m setting up and creating the course. I will then repurpose the blog post content into a podcast, a video blog, and a book. I can turn into a short film.
Social media platforms allow me to tell stories about all these things that I’m doing in very creative ways. It is where the people’s attention is because of the current state of the internet. If I don’t tell my stories on social media platforms, then those stories don’t exist in the minds of the potential customers. If I don’t tell stories, then people will listen to those who are telling them stories. Social media is a great marketing platform. It is better to market your products than to pay a lot of money for advertising. Although advertising works, it is now giving less value for money due to rising influencer marketing on social media platforms such as www.instagram.com where an influencer can post a picture of themselves doing your teachable.com course and boost your sales for the course. I am sure that Will.I.Am has made more young people curious about coding since he started doing it.
This blog post will be part of the book which I will self-publish at the end of the month. Ideally, I need a couple of days at the end of the month to publish my book so to be safe; I will blog for the first 25 days of each month. That gives me enough time to edit and do a good job. I have underestimated the time that it takes to publish the book using the Kindle Direct Publishing platform. I need time to design the cover of the book and ensure that everything is as great as I can make it. But I also have to remember that the consumer decides on quality. Quality is also something which comes with experience from doing the same things on a daily basis. If you focus on what you’re good at, you become better at it, and eventually, you become the best in your area of expertise. Think of anyone who has done well at sport or movies and you will find that they’ve been playing or acting all their lives. Some start as early as at six years of age.
There are things we’ve all been doing since we were quite young: including writing and talking. So we can all do blogging and podcasting. The training is natural. The content is not a problem, blog, and podcast about what you’re already doing. An engineer may blog and podcast about engineering. That way you provide value to people and they are more likely to hire you. My friend Tsodzo and I had a plan some years ago. I set up a computer repair company with my brothers and cousins. I could fix computers to a certain extent, but Tsodzo knew more about fixing computers than I do. In fact, Tsodzo and I had been in the electronics club in school together. So I suggested that we advertise in the local Chronicle newspaper that we offer free advice on computer issues over the phone. We put Tsodzo’s mobile phone number, and we started getting some calls. Half the people who called us asked my friend to go and fix the computers. That way, we were able to get business by just offering to help. These days, you can do this same, by proposing to help people using social media.
How can you help people today? Think about the things you specialise in and how talking about them can help other people and subsequently drive customers towards your products and services. Remember that word of mouth is still king, even in social media.
