Michael Wilding

Category: Story

  • $111,000,000 in 6 months

    $111,000,000 in 6 months

    If you’re into football then you probably know who Lionel Messi is. I’m not into football, but my attention was peaked when I heard he’d earned $111 million dollars in 2018 so far!

    That’s $596,774 per day.

    Which is a pretty obscene amount of money for a footballer to earn IMHO.

    In 2017 he signed a contract that pays him $80 million per year.

    Then he makes $27 million per year in endorsements.

    He has a lifetime deal with Adidas.

    Barcelona consider him so valuable that if he ever leaves, the club buying him will need to pay $835 million.

    Two things…

    1) I doubt I will ever be that wealthy, nor do I ever need to be.

    2) If you get this email to your inbox then my email reputation has recovered from when I killed it last year, because there are enough dollar signs to light up every spam filter going 😀

    Ciao,

    Michael

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    How To Shift From Learning To Doing

    Entrepreneurs have to survive a tightrope balancing act when it comes to their own education.

    No group of humans is hungrier for new knowledge and practical wisdom. The best entrepreneurs know how much they don’t know. They constantly seek to close that gap.

    The serious, earnest entrepreneur assembles a personal MBA curriculum for themselves. Endless books. Courses. Events. It never ends.

    Continue reading…

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    3 Ways to Become an Industry Influencer in Your First Year

    Here’s why becoming an industry influencer is one of the most impactful things you can do for your small business and your career.

    Establishing yourself as an industry influencer can do wonders, especially during your first year in business. It’s important to come out the gate strong to transform industry peers into loyal fans and followers.

    That’s exactly what I did after I launched my public relations and digital marketing business Flackable in 2014. I knew that an impactful online presence was necessary to grow a business, so made it a priority, particularly focusing on gaining prominence in my own industry.

    And by becoming an industry influencer with the following three steps, I established credibility in my niche market, formed valuable relationships and earned respect and recognition as a thought leader–and you can, too.

    Continue reading…

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    A Guide to Content Strategy and Brand Storytelling

    My guest for this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Kyle Gray, founder of The Story Engine. He and I discuss insights from his book, The Story Engine: A Busy Entrepreneur’s Guide to Content Strategy and Brand Storytelling Without Spending All Day Writing.

    Gray has helped dozens of startups and small businesses succeed in content marketing. He writes content that educates entrepreneurs on how to grow their businesses with content marketing, manage remote teams and scale up their businesses.

    Gray got his start as the content manager for WP Curve and helped grow the blog from a single contributor to a multi-person team of guest writers with documented systems and strategies. He helped the startup grow to nearly 1 million in annual recurring revenue.

    Listen to the podcast here…

  • Two smoking barrels

    Two smoking barrels

    Once again I’ve gone a bit quiet, this time because whilst about to move my mother-in-law up to her new home last weekend, my grandfather was suddenly taken very ill and I had to rush him into hospital.

    Which means that I’m now juggling running a couple of businesses, going to the hospital at least twice per day, Max, moving my mother-in-law in and trying to relax.

    Relax?!

    Yeah, well there’s plenty of time to do that later 😉

    For now, I wanted to talk about nested loops.

    I wrote about it in Business Ignition not long ago, and I thought it was something I should bring up in this newsletter.

    (plus, later this month, I’m going to show you how to get Business Ignition for just $7!)

    So what the heck is a nested loop?

    It’s defined as:

    “A nested loop join is a naive algorithm that joins two sets by using two nested loops.”

    Eh!

    That’s what I thought when I read that.

    Let me give you my explanation, which is the only one I understand.

    Essentially, when you write a story you use loops to get people to keep reading/watching.

    These loops are questions in the story that you open so your audience will want to stay with the story until they’re answered.

    It’s the hallmark of good storytelling.

    Think of every good TV series you watch, they all finish with a question to make sure you come back next episode.

    Nested loops are where you open lots of questions, but only answer a few of them.

    This means at anyone time your audience have lots of questions they want to be answered.

    The perfect example of this is Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels.

    Throughout the movie lots of loops (questions) are opened, but very few are answered.

    You keep watching because you want to know what’s going to happen to all these questions.

    And then… at the end… they’re very cleverly all closed in one go.

    In fact, I think it’s one of the most magnificent endings of any movie.

    So your homework today, should you choose to accept it, is to go and watch Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels.

    Pay close attention to all the new loops being opened throughout the story, and then how and when they’re closed.

    It’s an example of storytelling at it’s finest, which is exactly what you must do if you want to be a good marketer.

    Michael

  • The Art Of Using Storytelling To Sell

    The Art Of Using Storytelling To Sell

    For the last few days I’ve been writing the August edition of Business Ignition, and it’s all about using the art of storytelling in your marketing.

    And I’m so friggin excited by it I could cry.

    You see if you want to sell anything, and I literally mean anything, then you need to be able to tell stories.

    I don’t care if you sell mud, you’\ll be able to sell whole lot more of it if you do it using storytelling!

    Inside the magazine I will be sharing:

    * How to find endless content ideas
    * How to master the art of storytelling
    * The essential elements of a story
    * How to keep your readers beggin for more
    * When to sell your product
    * Making sure you don’t over-complicate things

    Because here’s the trooth… selling is easy, but everybody tries to make it hard.

    Why do they try to make it hard?

    Because there’s a whole billion dollar industry out there which is based around teaching folk how to sell.

    If everybody realised how easy it actually was to sell, then whole buncha people wouldn’t be making any money.

    But I like to say things as they are.

    And the trooth is… it’s pretty damn easy to sell.

    Here are the steps:

    1) Get an audience
    2) Ask the audience what causes them the most pain
    3) Make a product that solves that pain
    4) Write them great stories every day
    5) Sell your product in every story

    Full stop.

    The first three steps are as easy as they sound. Build an audience and ask them the question.

    People don’t like asking their audience questions. It’s weird. Don’t freak out about it, just do it. It brings you closer to them and you can get the answers you need to make your product.

    Master the art of storytelling.

    Which is what I’m teaching in this month’s Business Ignition. It’s closed to new members, but I will be opening up 11 spaces at the beginning of August.\

    Here’s where you need to put your name down if you want a chance of being one of the eleven.

    https://michaelwilding.com/business-ignition

    Then tell stories to your audience every day.

    Have a great weekend.

    Michael

  • Yours truly has been interviewed (and reveals something nobody likes to talk about)

    Yours truly has been interviewed (and reveals something nobody likes to talk about)

    Before Christmas, I was honoured to have been asked to an interview by Anthony Tilley.

    Anthony, for those of you who may not know, is the king of Solo Ads and list building.

    Over the last year, he’s decided to take his business in a new direction, and help people become solopreneurs.

    He’s been doing this through his Solopreneur podcast. The show is a mix of chat and business advice for both new and established home based business people.

    My interview was the third one in the podcast series, and you can check it out at:

    http://thesolopreneurshow.com/michaelwilding/

    You’ll have to excuse my slightly unruly look. Max, my son, had just been born, he’d been in and out of hospital, and I’d had a serious lack of sleep.

    However, you don’t need to be looking good to share things that can help other people to six figure businesses 😉

    Now, while you can see most of the podcast at http://thesolopreneurshow.com/michaelwilding/

    The really good bits have been hidden inside Anthony’s private Facebook group. I strongly recommend that you hit the button to join his Facebook group, watch the edited version on his site while you wait for approval to the group, and then watch the uncut version in the Facebook group.

    You’re going to love it 🙂

    Here’s the link again.

    http://thesolopreneurshow.com/michaelwilding/

    Michael

  • I nearly died in the jungle

    I nearly died in the jungle

    It’s now been a few years since I nearly died in a jungle.

    True story. I’m not making it up.

    Here’s what happened…

    I was on the first stage of a new trip. My plan was to collect tribal histories, the histories that are dying out.

    As the western world encroaches on tribes still living in remote areas, the young people from those societies want to leave and join the west.

    The history of these societies are handed down through spoken word. The elders tell stories to the younger generations, they then pass this down to their children.

    It’s how it’s been for thousands of years.

    And having spent some time with these people, I can tell you that they are the single best storytellers I’ve ever met in my life.

    All the new-fangled analysis and sciences behind storytelling, they don’t come close to the storytelling done by the elders of these tribes.

    Why?

    Because it’s part of their culture and their life.

    There is no TV, there is no internet, there are no books. If you want to escape the world, then it has to be done through storytelling, which means you need to be damn good at it.

    But I’m getting off track…

    I’d begun the first leg of my journey with a friend called Mark.

    We were looking to meet the Lacandones, the closest surviving relations to the ancient Mayans, and from there we wanted to get to their hunting grounds.

    Why?

    Because nobody else had ever done it.

    That’s as good a reason as any right 😉

    We met at Heathrow, got on the plane to Mexico, spent some time in Mexico City, and then headed down south to the Chiapas region.

    A few days, some hitchhiking, and some walking later… we got to the village we were aiming for.

    I may have missed the part where we found their village, we found it on Google Earth, great for finding places that are isolated on the edge of jungles.

    You’re probably wondering what this story’s got to do with marketing.

    And you’re gonna have to wait until tomorrow to find out…

    Because it’s all to do with what happened when I nearly died.

    Michael

    P.S. If you want to be able to have life experiences like this, and still make money while you’re doing it, then you need the ultimate online business blueprint.

    https://michaelwilding.com/business-ignition/

    Nuff said.