Where should you focus? Here are my top 10 list of high impact tasks for authors

Welcome to the Author Audience show, the podcast that helps you reach more people with your message. Create a book, connect with your audience, change lives. Here's your host, Shelly Hitz.

Hi, this is Shelly Hitz. I'm an author coach@authoraudienceacademy.com and I'm on a mission to help you reach more people with your message. It's your time to shine and I'm excited in this video to share with you the 10 high impact tasks for authors that I believe you should be focusing on. Many authors ask me, Shelley, what should I be doing? Like, where should I be spending my time? And in this training, I'm going to be sharing with you the top 10 tasks I believe every author should focus on. So let's dive in. So let's start with number one. Number one, I believe is prayer. So this is something I think, you know, many times we just gloss over and you know, I am a Christ follower. A lot of my tribe, my lifers, you guys are Christians as well, are Christ followers. So I just wanted to, to emphasize again that there is such an importance in prayer. My husband and I just did a godly gain segment recently all about this. And so you can go back and watch that. But just the power when you're plugging in to prayer. The second high impact task I believe that you should be focusing on as an author is strategy. Now, one thing I notice a lot of authors doing is neglecting the strategy. They tend to just dive right in to doing doing doing. A lot of times it's the bright shiny object syndrome. And so what I recommend that you do is set a 90 day breakthrough goal. I know so many of you have a hard time focusing and you get a million different book ideas and I'm the same way. But I want you to really, really focus on, focus on that 90 day breakthrough goal. Now, if you're an author audience academy member, I have a training for you on this and it's in Plan it Day. So if you're an author audience academy member, just check that out. Go into the members area, click on the icon that says plan it day. And so just a little bit of time spent in strategy will really yield a ton of results. When you are focused, when you are laser focused and you can complete tasks, you can get things done, you can finish things, you start getting momentum, you start seeing things happen and you start getting results. But let's go on to high impact task number three. It's basically creating new offers. And when you're creating new offers, you're basically.

Finishing books and or products, you're crossing that finish line. It's not just about writing because I have a lot of authors that I know they're writing all the time. But the thing is they're not finishing books, they're not finishing products, they're not creating the new offer. And if you don't publish, if you don't put that product out there for sale, then you're not going to be able to have the impact or the income that you really want. So creating new offers. And that includes writing. It does, it includes writing. But I also want you to be really focused on finishing. I want you to be a finisher and not just start things. I want you to cross that finish line. I, I think there was a quote and I'm sure I've posted on social media before, but that a lot of stress doesn't necessarily come from having too much to do, but from having so many unfinished tasks on our plate. Ooh. Number two strategy. When you have the focus, when you have your 90 day breakthrough goal, when you know what you're focusing on this quarter, this is third quarter now, we just hit it last week or this week. When you have the strategy in place, when you set that up, then you know, these are the offers that I'm going to be creating and you're not just going off on rabbit trails. Does that make sense? I hope so. Number four, writing and sending emails to your subscriber list. And I am using freemind. I love mind mapping by the way. That's what I'm using right now and I'm using it with the obs, free software and Facebook Live. Pretty cool, right? So the fourth thing is writing and sending emails to your subscriber list. I just did that this morning. I sat down. You know what, I didn't feel like it. I didn't want to write an email, I didn't want to click send. You know, I didn't feel like it. But I know that is a high impact task for me as an author, as a business owner. And so I sat down in my chair and I did it. And so notice I didn't just say building an email subscriber list because that is important. But I really want you to focus on nurturing your email subscriber list, sending those emails, sending, writing them out, making them personality driven, telling stories and then linking back at times to your books and your offers. And that's a complete other training that I could go into. But that's the fourth task. The fifth is to use what is currently working? So I'm always saying test track and tweak. So when you are doing your marketing tasks, when you're growing a publishing and book business or you're writing books, you want to use what's currently working. Currently, right now, it is July of 2016, Facebook Live is highlighting and featuring live video in their feeds. And so if you're not using live video on Facebook yet, I've asked you this question the last couple trainings. Why not? It is what is working right now on social media? What is working for you right now? Right now, something that's really working well for me are webinars. And so I need to be focusing on that and doing more webinars. But what is working right now? And one thing you can look at is you can look at your statistics, not get obsessed with them, not look at them every single minute of every single day. Look at what's working for you and do more of that. And if you want to get more information on Facebook Live, I have a completely free training@shellyhits.com live video. It walks you step by step through how to get started. Number six is setting up your author platform. So having an author platform in place is a high impact task in my opinion. And many authors put this off, put this off, put this off. And I have a very specific strategy I teach. It's called the author automation strategy. And so I am now recommending all of my members in Author Audience Academy start with that system. It's a simple it and forget it system. Once you have that part of your author platform in place, then you can start focusing on the other things. And so that is number six. Number seven is writing your book description and your sales pages. How many of you love writing book descriptions? You're writers, but do you love writing your book description? Most authors I talk to do not truly love writing their book descriptions or sales pages. This is what's called copywriting. And so it's different than actual, you know, the writing we do. And you know what, that is typically what I hear from authors. And yet it's one of your highest impact tasks you can do for selling more books is to work on what learning how to write, to sell. Learning how to write that book description in a way that draws your readers in to click the buy now button. And many of us avoid it. And so I don't want you to be necessarily like doing things that you hate all day. But I mean, do you really want to sell more books? Do you want to get more results? Do you want to have more impact and reach more people. If so, these are the types of things, things that we really need to be focusing on. I have really spent a lot of time and money investing in coaching this year to learn more about copywriting. And I will eventually be sharing more of that with you, probably.

Hint, hint, hint, probably in a live conference next year. I'm not 100% sure. I'm not going to say that that's for sure. But I'm thinking that the topic of my very first live conference, Author Aud Live here in Colorado next summer will be on how to write to sell. And we'll actually get stuff done. I'll actually be walking around helping you brainstorming and we will do this together. But we've got to be willing to learn and to do it. Or you can always hire someone else if it's just something you don't want to do. Number eight is webinars. So along with your books, if you at least have some smaller priced products, I really think you should consider doing webinars. Webinars have been the number one way that I have sold memberships into Author Audience Academy. There's so many different ways that you can use webinars. It's not always the best way to just focus on selling a book, but if you have some additional products, which is what I recommend that you have, then definitely I recommend webinars.

Number nine is setting up Facebook ads. And this is again, if you have higher priced products. So I'm not a huge advocate of setting up Facebook ads to drive to just sell your books. If you're selling a $2.99 book on Kindle and you're paying for Facebook ads, it's going to be really hard to get your return on investment. But if you have a program that's $97 or like I have a membership and it's $59 a month, then you can easily recoup or regain your investment back. And there is a learning process. And I'm going to be teaching this eventually in my academy, probably next year, just in more depth. But I really want you just to think about that. And then finally, number 10 is investing in continued learning, both with your time and your money. So you may have more time than money right now. And so for you, you can invest in a lot of free trainings and you can figure it out. You can figure it out yourself. But the best shortcut is to invest in coaching or into products that can really just shortcut that time and that learning curve for you and I have options for you to continue learning with me in both ways. So I have free trainings and those free trainings are available@shellyhits.com free. And then my authoraudienceacademy.com is my paid program where you can get author coaching with me. And then I have my writing retreat. This will be my very first in person writing retreat. If you want to just get your book done and you want to have time with me, I am really good working with people face to face. I have a few more spots open for women. It's for Christian women, so you can check that out if you're interested. Coloradowritingretreat.com so those are my 10 high impact tasks that I recommend that you focus on. And the biggest thing is setting up your strategy. If you don't have that strategy in place, then everything else is just going to be haphazard. It's just going to be hit or miss. You're going to be easily swayed with the bright shiny objects until you really set that strategy in place. So if you're an Author Audience Academy member and you have not gone through Plan It Day yet, it's my entire training that I help you set up that 90 day breakthrough goal, do that, go through that first, set up that goal and then you can start working on the other things. I decided today to do this training screen share only using my mind map and they're really fun. This was just something different. And you know, I'm sitting here with a ponytail and in my workout clothes and I just didn't feel like doing a live video showing my face today. So that's why I thought, oh, this is cool. I'm going to do a mind map today. So this is another way you can use the OBS software with Facebook Live. You can use it with a mind map. And I'm actually going to be heading over to my private Facebook group for Author Audience Academy and I'm going to do this similar thing for my live Q and A and accountability that I'm going to have for members only. Yeah. So any software has learning curve. It just depends on how technically oriented you are. It didn't really take me that long. I watched a few videos and I got adjusted to it pretty quickly. I have. Let's see. I think it's in my 30 day writing challenge. Write more, write better dot com. I have a training on how to use mind maps and I have 30 mind map templates that you get. I'm pretty sure it's part of that training and then if you're an author audience, academy member, you already have access to that. So just go into the writing challenge, the 30 day writing challenge, and look for, for the lesson on mind maps, I have an entire training on that. My business coach, Kim Roach, she always tells me, shelley, you need to focus, focus on your high, your big rocks, I think she calls them, or whatever I just called them, high impact tasks. And she says, webinars, Facebook ads, emailing your list, those types of things. But I thought, what is it for authors? Because it's a little bit different for online business versus authors. And I've been thinking about this actually for months. Like, what are the highest impact tasks? Like if you only focus on these things, if you only focus on these top 10 things, you could really see a ton, a ton of momentum. And what I try to do every day is I try to identify my top high impact tasks. Maybe there's three, three that I want to focus on for the day. Maybe there's just one. If you just focus on those first, like let's say you need to update your book description and you've been putting it off because you don't like it. You know, I think someone said they actually hate it. So if you've been putting that off, what if you did it first? What if you did that first and you got it out of the way, you put your best energy, or if you know your best energy is in the beginning of the day, or if you know your best energy is the end of the day, you have that high impact task scheduled for your best energy. You make sure you get those tasks done no matter what. And then if you want to go on Facebook and interact with people and do some other things on social media or whatever, you can, because you've already gotten your high impact task done. But what happens so many times is we end up doing all of these little things. We end up doing all these little tasks and we think we're making progress, we think we're doing things. And you might even be perpetually editing your writing, you know, and just editing, editing, editing. Instead of, you know, moving it to the next step, let's continue going so that you can actually publish so you can finish it, so you can take that next step. But if you spend all your day doing the lower impact tasks, it's going to take you a lot longer to see success. And so one of my biggest things that I've done to really see success in my business is focusing on some key high impact tasks. And that's why I wanted to create this training for you, to really get you thinking. What are the high impact tasks for you? I'm not saying that all of you are going to be doing webinars or setting up Facebook ads. Really. I only think those of you that have higher end programs are going to be focusing on those two things. But everything else, 1 through 7 and then 10, all the rest of those, any author. I think if you focus on those eight tasks, you'll see momentum, you'll see progress. The question is, who is going to do it? This is Shelly Hitz. I am a best selling author of over 40 books. The list keeps growing. I continue to work on books. I'm in the trenches with you and I'm also an author coach@authoraudienceacademy.com I'm on a mission to help you reach more people with your message. And you know what guys, sometimes I have to say hard things. And today I'm telling you the best way to move your book forward to reach more people with your message, to reach your goals is to have focus on your high impact tasks. We can do a million things, but what's going to have the biggest impact? What's going to be the biggest bang for your buck? What's going to be the best way to spend your time? And these are the things that I recommend. So until next time, keep working on those high impact tasks and I'll see you in the next training. Bye Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Author Audience Show. Connect with us online at authoraudience. Com where you'll find all the resources mentioned in today's episode. While you're there, grab Shelley's free video training on how to write and publish your book using her six Step Ascent method. Join us again next week to learn how to reach your audience with your message.