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How Nick Earned $3,049 (And Got a JOB OFFER) Within Days of Publishing His Ultimate Guide

By Primoz Bozic Leave a Comment

Here’s a question I get a lot…

“Can I actually make money with an Ultimate Guide?”

The answer is yes. HELL YES.

Today I’m thrilled to introduce you to Ultimate Guide System graduate Nick, who used his Ultimate Guide to bring in 4 consulting clients (worth $3,094) AND a job offer within days of publishing his Ultimate Guide.

Meet Nick Wolny:

Nick is known for two things:

  1. Eating peanut butter & scrambled eggs for breakfast during the Ultimate Guide System live calls
  2. He’s establishing himself as the go-to expert in Facebook Advertising and Digital Marketing for local fitness and yoga businesses

A few months ago, Nick was still working as a general business coach for fitness businesses. He saw some initial success with his business idea as he got the first few clients through his network, but then the things slowed down.

He exhausted his network and knew that he needed to build an audience.

He knew that in order to do that, he would need to stand out and find a more specific niche. He decided to pivot to digital marketing consulting, as he saw a gap in the market when he worked with his first few clients.

As he did that, he had a huge imposter syndrome when he thought about writing about digital marketing, as he felt like he was competing with companies like Digital Marketer. Those people had 10+ years of experience, while he acquired his skills just over a year ago. Why would anyone listen to him?

Still, he put himself out there. He started writing. He tried to create truly remarkable content.

And that’s where he got stuck.

He knew he needed to create remarkable content to cut through the noise, but didn’t know HOW to do it.

He didn’t know how to create remarkable, meaty content that people would find insanely valuable and want to work with him after reading it.

“The content i created wasn’t research driven, and wasn’t rigorous (which makes the difference in content). I tried to be too charming in my writing. I tried to wriggle my way into creating valuable content by making people laugh. But the content I created wasn’t deep and valuable. It was charming surface level content, and that was it. There was no meat in my content.

My email subscribers responded to my emails with responses like “LOL”, and not with detailed emails about how they’d implement my strategies in their businesses. I wasn’t attracting clients that wanted to do the work. I attracted readers that wanted to be entertained.

Every time I tried to write a post longer than 1,500 words, I failed. I couldn’t deliver a long, valuable piece of content. I didn’t know how to do it, what to talk about or how to structure it. There were so many tripwires where I got stuck and never finished my writing. From coming up with a title, to validating the idea with my market, to creating a table of contents… I was never able to finish my pieces.”

That’s when Nick joined Ultimate Guide System. In fact, he was the first person to sign up for it.

“I wanted a system that would help me get email subscribers that didn’t feel like sh*t”

“I noticed how I behaved through Ramit Sethi’s Ultimate Guides. Whenever I saw one, I stopped everything I was doing and read them. I wanted to get every single bonus with the guide. I wanted to read everything. There’s just something magnetic about Ultimate Guides. I wanted to do that for my audience too.

I wanted a system that would help me get email subscribers that didn’t feel like shit. I didn’t want to do things like 5 day challenges or messenger bots. I wanted to focus on ONE QUALITY way of getting email subscribers. I knew writing an Ultimate Guide would force me to focus on one thing that works. It would put guard rails around what I’m doing, and allow me to go really deep on a topic.

I really just wanted to say “hey, I’m Nick, I’m going to offer this super valuable thing to these people who think just like me, and see what happens”.”

Nick ended up successfully writing his first Ultimate Guide with Ultimate Guide System:

The Complete Beginner’s Guide To Monetizing Facebook Live For Your Fitness Or Yoga Business

Just a few weeks into the program, as he was doing the research with his Ultimate Guide, Nick not only got one, but TWO paying clients:

Nick sharing his wins in the UGS community

Nick’s first client with his Ultimate Guide

This essentially paid for the whole course within WEEKS of joining it.

So how did it happen?

“Two people reached out to me when they saw me do the market research validation on my Facebook wall. We sat down, talked about what they needed, and they signed up with me as consulting clients. I made my full investment for the course back within weeks of joining it.”

Once he published his guide, he got 2 more consulting clients from it that reached out to him:

A potential client reaching out to Nick after he published his Ultimate Guide

Nick’s $1,500 3-month retainer client

This brought the total revenues from his guide to $3,094 within a few days of publishing his first guide.

But here’s the best part of Nick’s story.

Shortly after publishing his guide, a CEO of a company reached out to him to offer him a job interview for a marketing director position because of his guide:

Since then, Nick has made it to the 5th round of interviews over the past 5 weeks, and he might very well be getting a new job because of his Ultimate Guide. Even I never expected that something like that would happen through an Ultimate Guide. That’s absolutely insane.

“People now perceive me as an expert. They want to work with me because I know what they need, even if they don’t.”

Here’s what Nick loved the most about his new clients:

“With all of my 4 clients, they came to me and said “I’m not sure what I need, but I’m ready to pay – just name the price.” This was super interesting to me and SO AWESOME, because I was never good at sales, pitching or cold calling.

I didn’t need to “sell” these people, they were already sold. For them to come to me and for that to happen multiple times, and to say “I’m not sure what I need but I want to pay you because you know what I need”, that’s incredible. It feels like people perceive me as an expert. They want to work with someone who will know what they need, even if they don’t, and that person is now me.”

“More and more cool things are happening to me because of my guide”

“After I published my guide, Leadpages reached out to me and wanted to interview me about my guide. They’re planning on featuring me as an expert in their next Ultimate Guide that’s coming out later this week.

Another cool thing that happened was that some of my idols and heroes from the online business world that I followed for a while signed up to my email list. Now I know I really gotta bring it. I need to keep my email list engaged, and I’m expected to bring my A-game.”

No more “LOL!” email responses!

And guess what? He’s no longer getting “LOL!” email responses, but actual detailed emails with questions from his potential clients instead:

“Now it’s EASY for me to consistently create remarkable content”

Remember how Nick struggled with creating remarkable content?

Well, over the past few months, he:

  • Successfully published his first 13,000+ word Ultimate Guide
  • Wrote 3 Huffington Post articles that were between 1,500-2,000 words long
  • Is 6,000+ words into writing his second Ultimate Guide

Nick’s new Huffington Post articles

“Now I’m confident from start to finish what creating remarkable content looks like. One of the biggest confidence markers is that I wrote my Ultimate Guide in the time frame of the course. Now I know that writing a new blog post won’t last for 6 months or 10 months.

I’ve written 3 pieces for Huffington Post in the last month. I’m building a digital footprint and writing regularly. I reached out to a few gyms, wrote about them in Huffington Post, which allowed me to connect with the local gyms, they’re sending me contacts, and creating buzz for me.

I’ve had the opportunity to post on Huffington Post since September, but never did it. Now I’m creating 2k word rigorous blog posts ON THE SIDE, and it’s not a big deal to do it.”

“I’m coming from a position of power, not force”

“I’m increasingly confident about building my business with power, not force. I’m not saying hurry the fuck on my list and i’ll take your money like a lot of people in my industry do. You want to join my list because we have a similar mindset, and I’ll show you a quality approach to digital marketing for your business.

In the marketing space there is an abundance of join now, buy now. For me, less is more. I know there’s people out there that are looking for solid information, without being sold to like crazy. I want to help those people.”

Nick’s future: from $3,000 online courses to becoming a Forbes contributor

“I eventually want to create a high end group program, with a live call approach like in Ultimate Guide System, with a community for a period of time, where I work together with fitness business owners on their marketing. I know that to have a 6-month semi-personalized experience at $3,000 is a steal for them.

I also want to become a Forbes contributor that talks about the intersection of fitness and capitalism. A lot of people are tapped into how people want to feel and look. It’s a multi billion dollar business. There’s a business conversation to be had around that, and also exercising together, working out together, talking about community, and the transformation that comes with it.

Fitness is leadership, needs to be talked about, and in a platform like Forbes, people will take it seriously. Now I’m working on building my digital footprint to be able to get there.

Now I’m more savvy than before. I want to get media attention about my work, not about me. I don’t want to be quoted in Time, I want to write an article for Time. I don’t want to be mentioned in media to put a logo on my site. I want to write a killer guest post that people will actually find valuable.”

3 Changes that Nick made to his online business with Ultimate Guide System

Let’s talk about some things that worked really well for Nick, that you too can use to grow your own online business.

1. He gets feedback on his writing early

“One of the big things I learned from Ultimate Guide System is to get feedback on my work early. It’s so powerful.
In the course I asked for feedback on everything. My title, my table of contents, my writing. Even when it wasn’t great yet. It helped me get things right and move forward.

Now I always ask for feedback if I’m not behaving the way I want to behave. I know that if I wrote just 500 words in 3 days that some feels off, and I need to go talk to someone about it to figure out what’s going on.”

This is a great habit of high performing entrepreneurs. They get feedback on their writing earlier rather than later, which helps them move forward whenever they see they might be getting stuck, and keep the momentum going.

2. He writes daily (for the last 70+ days)

“When I started Ultimate Guide System I did this thing where I would write 1,000 words/day each day to finish my guide on time. I streamed it on Facebook Live from a coffee shop every morning.

I’m still doing it to this day, for 70 days, and I’m going to do it for a year. I have this Facebook page where I go live every day. This is where the rigor comes in. I do it every day. I’m doing this, I’m here. Even if I feel like shit and I’m on my couch, I’ll write for at least 15 minutes.”

“When I do it for a year, I’m going to document my experience and share it, and how it changed my business. I already know there’ll be 50 ways in which I could talk about it. How my attitude changed. What changed in my business.

And I know I’ll be able to create more remarkable content and Ultimate Guides consistently this way.”

You don’t have to write for a year, write 1,000 words/day or stream yourself to the world like Nick – but there’s a lesson to be learned here.

If you commit to writing every single day (at least during the week) before you go to work, even if you write just a little bit, writing can become a habit, and creating remarkable content consistently gets easier.

The more uninterrupted time you block off for writing, the more writing you’ll get done.

3. He committed to attending every call and completing the course on time

“When I joined Ultimate Guide System I said to myself I would come to every call and make sure I finish my guide on time. I made it to all but one call. I asked for feedback whenever I could. And I finished the course on time. It took a lot of time, and more than just 3 hours a week, but Primoz told me that right off the bat when I asked him how long it would take. So I was ready.

I loved the live format of the course. I feel like it’s really the best structure out there, to have a lot of concentrated work in the beginning and then support for a long period of time. There’s just SO much value in having the opportunity to work with someone live. But you have to do the work. You have to come to calls, ask questions in slack, get feedback and move forward. And if you do that, it just works.”

This is something that I noticed with my students. The more calls they attended / watched, and the more active they were in the Slack (our chat community), the more they got out of the course and the faster they wrote their guides.

If you really dedicate the time to go through the course as planned, and use the community and all resources available to help you out, you WILL have an Ultimate Guide written by the end of it.

Writing an Ultimate Guide on your own is hard unless you’re the type of person that can write 10,000 words like nothing by themselves, and having a community to support you and to turn to for help is a big piece of consistently creating incredible content.

Here’s what Nick said about Ultimate Guide System:

“Ultimate Guide System was the BEST online course I’ve ever been in. I feel like a schmuck for stealing from Primoz.”

“I’ve learned so many things in Ultimate Guide System. How to methodically define and validate a piece of content before you start writing. I’ve written things that didn’t go anywhere because I missed that step in the past. Now I’m more clear than ever that the first step is the most important.

I now have really strong tools that I can use and leverage to write really remarkable content. It’s getting harder and harder to do it as more people come into the space, but I’m confident I can stand out from them and continue to grow my business.

It was cool to have a list of places in the course where people historically got stuck, so I could pay attention to it and avoid it. Primoz always told us “this is where my 1on1 clients got stuck, this is what might happen, this is how you avoid it”. He was always keeping an eye out for us.

It was great to have a community of 30+ people, writing their guides, each in a slightly different way. Some of them spent more time designing these gorgeous guides. Others like me just wanted to keep moving. Now I know that there’s no one way to create remarkable content, you need to find your own way. This course was really different than any other course out there.

It’s a joke, it’s so cheap. Compared to other things I spent this kind of money on, I feel like a schmuck for being in this course. I got exactly what I wanted out of the course. My guide wasn’t even published and I already made back my investment. And I know that this is just the beginning for me.”

I hope you’ve enjoyed Nick’s story, and I have more stories of our students coming your way in the future, plus exclusive resources that will make writing your first Ultimate Guide easier than ever before.

To make sure you receive those exclusive resources (I’ll only share them with my email subscribers), and be the first to know when Ultimate Guide System opens again, download your free copy of the Ultimate Guide Checklist.

You can use it to get started with writing your Ultimate Guide, and learn all about how you too can use Ultimate Guides to get your online business off the ground (or take it to the next level).

Download your free copy of the Ultimate Guide Checklist.

Source: 1daybanner.com

How Top Experts, Companies and Entrepreneurs Grow Their Businesses With Ultimate Guides

By Primoz Bozic Leave a Comment

A few weeks ago, Ramit Sethi released his new e-book called “Your Move: The Underdog’s Guide to Building a Business.”

Since he published it, the book has become a huge success.

Tens of thousands of people have bought the book. It hit the #1 best seller in many categories on Amazon. It got hundreds of raving reviews:

It even hit the #1 place of non-fiction books on Wall Street Journal:

I’ve read the book an it’s phenomenal. It’s easily the best e-book you’ll ever find for $3.65 online. If you haven’t done so yet, make sure you pick up your copy!

So what do I love about the e-book most?

Surprisingly, it’s not that my story is mentioned in it (even though that’s REALLY cool).

What I love about it the most is that it’s not just an e-book… It’s an undercover Ultimate Guide that’s marketed as an e-book.

It’s not called an Ultimate Guide, but an “Underdog’s Guide”, but that’s ok – not all Ultimate Guides actually have “Ultimate Guide” in the name.

You have Ultimate Guides that are called “Beginner’s Guides”, “Essential Guides”, “Complete Guides”, “Advanced Guides”, “Parent’s Guides”, and so on and so on.

The name doesn’t matter as much as what an Ultimate Guide actually is – the most detailed piece of content on the internet on a specific topic (that usually comes with plenty of stories, examples, and a table of contents).

And that’s exactly what Ramit’s new e-book is. It’s by far the best, most comprehensive and detailed piece of content out there for underdogs who want to build a business.

It’s not a book as there’s no publisher or a physical copy. It also didn’t take Ramit years to create like his first book – it was completed in months instead.

Why did Ramit publish his e-book on Amazon instead of his blog?

It’s interesting that the guide was published on Amazon rather than on the website – and Ramit explained his decision in one of the emails to his readers.

He essentially said that he didn’t just want to rely on Google to drive more traffic to his website and that he wanted to get more readers through Amazon, which was an untapped market for him.

I think that at his stage of the business, with a huge audience that he’s already built, that absolutely makes sense. He can use the existing audience to get the 124 incredible reviews and propel the guide to the #1 spot on Amazon where it will stay for years to come. It also makes sense as he’s already getting a ton of traffic from Google and other sources.

Would I publish an Ultimate Guide on Amazon rather than on your own website when just starting out and don’t have a big audience?

Probably not, at least not exclusively. It’s unlikely you’d be able to replicate Ramit’s results when starting out.

Instead I would start with publishing it on your website, and THEN if your guide becomes a huge success you can think about putting it on Amazon as well, to create another stream of traffic to your website through it.

That’s actually something we’ll look into with some of our Ultimate Guide System students that have written 25,000+ world Ultimate Guides… As they are essentially small books already, and republishing them on Amazon might be a great way to spread the word about them.

That’s the beauty of creating an incredible piece of content like an Ultimate Guide.

Once you write a piece of content that’s 10x better than anything else out there on the topic you’re writing about, you can use it in many different ways to grow your online business:

  • You can publish it on your blog and bring more traffic to your website for years to come
  • You can use a PDF of it as a free gift for your email subscribers, and convert more of your new and existing readers into raving fans
  • You can use an Ultimate Guide to kick off your product launch, establish yourself as the go-to expert on the topic you’re talking about, add massive value to your existing readers and boost your launch revenues

Or, you can even republish it on Amazon, create an audiobook out of it… There’re endless options in which you can use an Ultimate Guide to grow your online business.

A lot of online business experts know how powerful Ultimate Guides are, which is why many of them create them.

For example, Ramit has written Ultimate Guides about social skills, starting an online business, finding a profitable business idea, creating remarkable content, personal finance and others:

And as he says himself, “this is hands-down the most popular content on his website”.

Ramit isn’t the only online business expert that understands the value of Ultimate Guides.

Selena Soo has written an Ultimate Guide to Meeting People at Events which she used to kick off her INFLUENCE product launch:

Her guide got featured in Business Insider (3 times!), Inc magazine, Huffington Post and I Will Teach You to be Rich which helped her reach hundreds of thousands of new readers and bring in thousands of high quality email subscribers.

Selena shared her whole story of:

  • Why and how she created her Ultimate Guide
  • How she used it to bring in thousands of high quality email subscribers
  • Why she things Ultimate Guides are one of the best ways to start an online business

In this interview we did together:

You can watch the whole interview here.

Another example of an expert using an Ultimate Guide to grow their online business is Bushra Azshar from The Persuasion Revolution.

Bushra rapidly built a 7-figure online business over the last few years, and recently created her Ultimate Guide to Persuasion:

She’s using her Ultimate Guide all over her website to capture more email subscribers (and blow them away once they sign up for it), and sell more of her Mass Persuasion Method program.

If you ever even remotely looked into SEO to grow your online business, you’ve probably heard about Neil Patel.

Neil is considered one of the top SEO experts out there (and he consistently gets well over 100,000 visits to his website), and that’s not an accident.

Neil has created his own library of 12 Ultimate Guides on his Quick Sprout blog that established him as the go-to expert on SEO and more or less everything related to it:

Whenever I want to look something up regarding SEO, his guides are the first place I look at. And whenever someone asks me about SEO, his guides are the first thing I point them to.

Neil was actually the person that made writing detailed guides popular back in 2014. In the past he wrote about why created 10+ Ultimate Guides and how he got 361,494+ visitors and 8,421 email opt-ins with one Ultimate Guide.

He also wrote this EPIC data-driven post about why 3,000+ word blog posts get more traffic than shorter ones. If you want to learn more about WHY Ultimate Guides rank really high on Google and take off, I’d definitely read that post.

Now I might not necessarily agree with everything that Neil shares about sharing Ultimate Guides. I don’t think you should blow $5k-$20k on a design of an Ultimate Guide when just starting out. I don’t think you should ask people to share your guides before you’ve built a solid relationship with them (and even then it might come off as needy).

I know that creating Ultimate Guides is about a lot more than just numbers and SEO, although that is a part of it (we talk more about how to create incredible Ultimate Guides in Ultimate Guide System that’s opening soon).

The point is – Ultimate Guides work. And they work REALLY well. How often do you see someone say that they got 361,494 visitors or 8,421 email subscribers from ONE post on their website? Pretty much never.

So far we’ve only talked about online business experts that create Ultimate Guides. But they aren’t the only people creating them and reaping the benefits of them.

Software companies use Ultimate Guides to sell more of their software.

Leadpages (one of the leading companies that offers landing pages whose software I personally use as well) recently wrote the Ultimate Guide to Landing Pages:

I absolutely love their guide and there’s many innovative techniques they used to create it that we break down in the Ultimate Guide System.

Their Ultimate Guide is ranking as the #1 result on Google for “Landing pages guide” and makes it to the first page of google for searches like “landing pages” or “how to create landing pages”:

In such a competitive field as landing pages, that’s pretty awesome. I’ve also heard that Leadpages is working on their next Ultimate Guide already, which just goes to show how valuable Ultimate Guides can be, even for software companies.

Another software company that uses Ultimate Guides to bring in more sales for their business is called Zapier. If you haven’t heard of it yet, Zapier helps you connect different apps (like gmail and Evernote) and automate your every day tasks to make your life a lot easier and save you a ton of time.

Zapier has written tens of different Ultimate guides, covering topics from using Google Sheets to Customer Support to eCommerce:

And of course, many of these rank as the #1 result on google for their topic:

What Zapier is doing here is super smart. They’re taking different audiences (like the customer support people) and different tools (like Google Sheets) that Zapier works well with, and writing the best pieces of content on the internet around them.

As the readers read their Ultimate Guides, they constantly see different case studies, ways in which Zapier makes their work easier, and so on – and they see signing up to Zapier as the next step after reading the guide. Brilliant.

Now you might be wondering… What if I’m not an online business expert or a big software company? Can I still use Ultimate Guides to grow my online business?

I’m so glad you asked. The answer is HELL YES. In fact, Ultimate Guides are ESPECIALLY useful for you if you’re not an established expert in your niche as they are the best way to become one.

So let’s look at some examples of how new business owners just like you used Ultimate Guides to make a name out of themselves and kick-started their online businesses.

First, there’s Peter Nguyen from Essential Man. Peter used to work as a leather jacket designer and wanted to build an online business around helping successful men dress better (or, as he would say it, look really f*cking good).

He wrote Ultimate Guides about things like buying a leather jacket, a beginner’s style guide, a summer style guide and others to jump start his online business:

The result? Peter built a following of thousands of email subscribers, doubled his traffic with Ultimate Guides, and created a consistent stream of sales for his Essential Wardrobe online course.

A few years ago, nobody knew about Peter. Now even Ramit Sethi is linking to his website when his students ask him what to wear to his events!

How powerful is that? How would YOU feel if an expert like Ramit endorsed your website?

I actually love Peter’s story so much that I asked him how he writes 1-2 of his Ultimate Guides / months, and he’ll be sharing all of his systems, strategies and results with you guys very soon – so stay tuned!

Then we have Ultimate Guide System student Nick who is rapidly establishing as the go-to expert on Facebook advertising for fitness & yoga studies with his Ultimate Guides.

He just published his Complete Beginner’s Guide to Monetizing Facebook Live For Your Fitness or Yoga Business:

Nick has been absolutely crushing it with his Ultimate Guide.

When he was just doing the research for his guide within the first few weeks of joining Ultimate Guide System, he scored two 1-on-1 coaching clients:

But when he released his guide, opportunities just started flying his way.

First, a major software company saw his Ultimate Guide and wanted to feature him as an expert in their upcoming Ultimate Guide:

First, he got a POTENTIAL JOB OFFER because of his Ultimate Guide:

How crazy is THAT?

And it was just the tip of the iceberg.

Shortly, Nick told me that a few of his 7-figure heroes opted into his email list:

And another person reached out to Nick for 1-on-1 consulting:

And did I mention that this guide was Nick’s FIRST post on his website? He got all of those opportunities WITHOUT having a following beforehand. And now he’s already working on his second Ultimate Guide.

I’ll write more about Nick’s story and how he developed his Ultimate Guide over the next few days too – so you’ll be able to hear all the juicy details of it.

Next up we have another Ultimate Guide System student Diana, who helps online entrepreneurs create and manage profitable online communities.

She just published her Ultimate Guide to Building a Profitable Online Community From Scratch:

Diana’s guide is one of the best and most detailed guides I’ve ever read. She worked her ass putting it together, and it shows.

Like Nick, this is Diana’s first post on her new website, and she already got 40 email subscribers within the first week (and she’s just getting started with spreading the word about it).

Selena Soo loved Diana’s guide so much that she shared it with her audience:

She’s getting raving emails from her email subscribers about her guide:

And even the top experts in the industry are now reaching out to her to get feedback on their communities.

Before she worked on her Ultimate Guide, not many people considered the go-to expert on creating profitable online communities – but over the next few months and years they definitely will.

And as you might have guessed, I’ll also be sharing Diana’s story (plus a few other stories) of how she wrote her guide with you over the next few days.

There’s also other Ultimate Guides that my readers and clients have written that you can check out, about a variety of different topics:

  • Allon wrote The Ultimate Guide to High Performance
  • Frank wrote The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants
  • Matej wrote The Ultimate Guide about How to Find More Time and Energy to Start an Online Business
  • Camille wrote The Ultimate Guide to Getting a Date Without Going Online
  • Leslie wrote The Asian Inspired Ultimate Guide to NATURALLY Losing 30 Pounds For Busy, Ambitious Workaholics

Some of these guides helped my readers get hundreds of email subscribers, others helped them get new paying clients, and all of them helped them get a consistent stream of new high quality readers to their websites.

And we have plenty of new Ultimate Guides in the works – from guides about traveling, to songwriting, to teaching your kids about money.

As you can see, a lot of people see that there’s a huge opportunity in creating Ultimate Guides.

From top experts to software companies to driven entrepreneurs who want to make a name out of themselves and get their online businesses off the ground.

So WHY do they do it?

There’re many ways in which you can use Ultimate Guides to grow your online business (I cover 9 of them in my Ultimate Guide Checklist, and I’ll share more of them in the near future).

But the MOST important reason for creating Ultimate Guides is simple.

Ultimate Guides are the best and fastest way to establish yourself as the go-to expert in your niche.

If you write an Ultimate Guide for your audience that’s 10x better than any other resource out there on the same topic, then your Ultimate Guide becomes the go-to resource for anyone who wants to learn more about the topic.

And when you create something that’s 10x better than anything else out there, people notice that. They’ll notice you. They’ll read whatever you write for them. They’ll help you spread the word about it. They’ll want to talk to you, connect with you and work with you.

Ultimate Guides are your opportunity to stand out in a crowded market (like Peter did in the style world), transition into a new niche (like Diana did – she was in a completely different niche before), or even get your online business off the ground (like Nick did).

Once you create content that’s 10x better than anything else out there, you’ll automatically be different than anyone else.

You won’t need to worry about a crowded market, you’ll actually be able to use it to your advantage and bring in all the people that are interested in your topic.

It’s hard to do that with regular blog posts or an occasional guest post. There’s far too many of those out there nowadays, and it feels like everyone can have a blog nowadays given how easy it is to start one.

But I bet that very few people are creating REALLY good content like Ultimate Guides in your niche, and this is your opportunity to make a name out of yourself and become an industry leader.

As you do that, the rest will come:

  • You’ll have more and more website visitors (like Peter who doubled his traffic by writing less blog posts and more Ultimate Guides)
  • You’ll be able to grow your email list (like Neil who got 8,421 email subscribers from one guide)
  • You’ll be able to get your first few paying clients (like Nick who got 3 paying clients and a job offer with his guide)

And the best part? You’ll be able to grow your online business with Ultimate Guides over and over again.

Remember how Ramit, Neil, Peter and Zapier wrote multiple (often 10+) Ultimate Guides to continue growing their online businesses?

You can do the exact same thing.

You don’t have to worry about regular blog posts, guest posting, Facebook ads, SEO, Facebook challenges, and other tactics to grow your online business.

You can pursue them if you want to of course… But you know you won’t NEED them to grow your online business.

You can just create more Ultimate Guides down the line, and you’ll KNOW that with each Ultimate Guide you publish, your business will grow more and more – for years to come.

And the thing is, while anyone can write blog posts or use Facebook ads for their business, not anyone can, wants to, or is willing to write Ultimate Guides.

The barrier to entry with them is way higher, as they require weeks (and sometimes months) of work to complete.

There will always only be a few people in each industry who are willing to put in the work to make them come to life, and reap the benefits of them. And you can be one of those people.

Get started with creating your first Ultimate Guide TODAY

If you want to start working on your first Ultimate Guide, I invite you to check out my FREE 13,000+ word Ultimate Guide Checklist to get started.

It’s by far the BEST, most comprehensive and detailed FREE resource you’ll find online on creating Ultimate Guides.

Here’s what you’ll learn in it:

  • The biggest mistakes people make when creating Ultimate Guides (and how to avoid them)
  • 9 Ways in which you can use Ultimate Guides to grow your online business (whether you’re an established business owner or just starting out)
  • My never-before-seen checklist for creating Ultimate Guides (with real life examples and secrets I’ve discovered over 5+ years of creating them)

…and a lot more.

I’ll also be releasing another awesome resource to my email subscribers shortly that will make writing Ultimate Guides easier than ever before – and to make sure you get an email with it too, make sure you get your free copy of the Ultimate Guide Checklist.

-Primoz

 

The #1 Strategy for Growing Your Online Business (and Succeeding in Life)

By Primoz Bozic 5 Comments

There’s no “secret” to building a successful online business.

You need to consistently hustle and put in a lot of hard work.

You need to build the right relationships.

You need to find a great business idea.

You need to dream BIG.

You need to work with the right clients.

And more.

But EVEN if you do all of this, your business might not grow as fast as you would want it to grow.

You won’t see the breakthroughs that you see other people have.

You might feel like all of your hard work just isn’t paying off.

If you feel that way, I have good news for you.

There’s no secret to skyrocketing your online business… But there is a fast-track for it.

There’s one thing that you can do that will make EVERYTHING 10x easier.

There’s one thing that you can do to stand out from all other businesses in your industry.

There’s one thing that you can do to grow your online business way quicker than everyone else and become the person that everyone looks up to and wants to talk to.

– Also learn: How To Become An Internet Retailer With Drop Ship Lifestyle.

It’s something that only a fraction of people do.

But it’s also something that ANYONE can do.

And it’s something that a lot of the people in the business world that you admire are already doing.

The “star students”. The “rising stars”. The “future influencers”. They do it.

And even the top influencers in your niche do it ALL the time.

By using this technique, you can:

  • Attract a following of thousands of raving fans who will want to read, share and buy anything you create for them
  • Build relationships with top influencers in your niche
  • Establish yourself as a go-to expert in your niche practically overnight

I know this because I’ve done it myself.

I used this technique to…

  • Build relationships with people like Ramit Sethi, Selena Soo and Derek Halpern
  • Get a position with Ramit Sethi’s company where I worked for 2 years
  • Get published in publications like Business Insider, Entrepreneur.com and Yahoo Finance
  • Spread the word about my business to well over 700,000 people
  • Go from an an idea to a $36,318 product launch in 3 months

And more.

Now let me warn you.

This isn’t a quick fix. This isn’t a magical solution. You won’t be able to do it if you don’t put in the necessary hard work.

But if you are willing to work for it, it works.

In fact, it works every. Single. Time.

Ready to learn what it is?

The fast-track to skyrocketing your online business is going “above and beyond” in everything you do.

By “everything you do”, I mean…

  • You need to go above and beyond for your audience.
  • You need to go above and beyond in connecting with influencers.
  • You need to go above and beyond for yourself.

It’s literally that simple.

Going “above and beyond” in everything you do will allow you to stand out from everyone else.

And when you stand out from everyone else out there, people will notice it.

They’ll talk about it. They’ll want to connect with you, learn from you, and work with you.

You’ll be able to grow your email list faster than you ever imagined. You’ll be able to connect with people that you just admired from a far. You’ll have more people waiting in line to work with you than you can actually take on.

The question is: HOW do you actually go above and beyond in everything you do?

In a way, it’s really simple.

You do the things that have never been done before.

You do the work that other people aren’t willing to do.

You put 10x more effort into everything you do than anyone else.

But that’s kind of vague, right?

Well, let’s get into more details.

I’m going to show you 3 specific examples of how I go above and beyond for my students, to build my business relationships, and for myself.

Then I’ll show you how exactly YOU can get started with going above and beyond as well.

Ready to dive in?

Let’s do it!

3 ways in which I go above and beyond for my AUDIENCE

Going above and beyond for your audience might is the MOST important thing about skyrocketing your online business.

This means going above for your free readers, students of your online courses, attendees of your events, listeners of your podcast, or your 1on1 coaching / consulting / freelance clients.

If you ever want to help or work with someone, my mentality is always to go above and beyond in helping them.

Let’s look at a few examples of how I do this (and how you can do it too).

EXAMPLE #1: I write EPIC posts and Ultimate Guides, rather than regular blog posts

You know that I never really write “regular” blog posts that are 500 or 1,000 words long.

Whenever I write something, I try to make it EPIC.

Whether it’s a blog post, an email to my readers, an online course or an Ultimate Guide, I always try to make it the BEST piece of content on the internet about a certain subject.

I always include plenty of personal stories, specific examples, scripts, examples from the industry, screenshots and other things that make it easy for my readers to put my advice into action and grow their online businesses.

It usually takes a lot more work than it would take me to write a regular blog post about the topic. It might take me days, weeks, or even months to create an incredible piece of content.

But all of that hard work is totally worth it.

For example, I created the Ultimate Guide Checklist in February with the goal to establish myself as the go-to expert on creating Ultimate Guides.

When I created it, I decided I would create the BEST piece of content on the internet on creating Ultimate Guides, that would be 10x better than anything else out there.

I didn’t just create a simple 1-page checklist with the exact steps to create an Ultimate Guide.

I talked about 9 different ways in which you can use Ultimate Guides to grow your online business:

I covered each of the ways in great detail and included case studies from my own business, as well as other businesses to give my readers plenty of ideas for putting the advice into action:

In the checklist, I also covered the biggest mistakes with creating Ultimate Guides and how to avoid them:

I talked about some of the mistakes I personally made with creating past Ultimate Guides (and how I would fix them today):

And of course I also included the actual checklist for creating your first Ultimate Guide, as well as specific strategies and tactics that you can use to go through each of the steps:

I spent 2 weeks putting the whole e-book together, and it ended up being 13,000+ words long. Nobody else has written a piece of content that was as detailed and as comprehensive as this e-book about creating Ultimate Guides, and people noticed.

20+ people shared my guide:

Some of my readers wrote really nice things about it:

And even top experts in my industry began referring to me as the “go-to expert on creating Ultimate Guides”:

Since publishing the guide in late February, I’ve already collected 500+ email subscribers just through this guide through different places where it’s available on my website.

None of these things would have happened if I would have just created a simple blog post about creating Ultimate Guides.

My email list wouldn’t have grown as much.

I wouldn’t become known as the go-to expert on creating Ultimate Guides practically overnight.

And I wouldn’t have had a $36,381 product launch of Ultimate Guide System in March:

Creating incredible content like Ultimate Guides is one of the best ways to establish yourself as a go-to expert in your niche, attract a lot of people to your website, get them to talk about you, and ultimately buy your products.

And it’s a perfect example of going FAR above and beyond for your audience and adding more value to them than anyone else out there.

If you want to learn more about creating Ultimate Guides, definitely check out the Ultimate Guide Checklist (it’s free). You’ll love it.

EXAMPLE #2: I created the BEST course on creating Ultimate Guides, rather than just a regular course.

A big mistake I’ve made in the past was that when I created an online course, I just made it “good enough”.

I created courses like Success Systems, which was my first online course about productivity systems.

It was a good course, and many of the students who went through it told me they loved it.

Still, it wasn’t a course that everyone would be talking about and promoting FOR me.

It never had a super engaged community.

I also didn’t feel like it was the best course on the internet on the topic, so I never went out of my way to publicly promote it.

It was a “good enough” course to get started with my online business… But it wasn’t a course that would really put me on the map.

With Ultimate Guide System, things are completely different.

I’ve had countless people publicly rave about how good the course is:

And even my students have already given me crazy testimonials about it without ever asking for them (like “Ultimate Guide System is kicking other $997 courses I’ve taken in the face”):

It was the course that REALLY put me on the map in the online business world.

It was also the first course I was really proud of, that I can wholeheartedly say is by FAR the best course on creating Ultimate Guides out there, and that I’m always happy to talk to people about.

So how did all of this happen?

It all started with a decision and a commitment to not just create an online course about creating Ultimate Guides, but to create the BEST online course on creating Ultimate Guides.

In my mind, I wanted to create a course that…

  • Really covers EVERY step of creating Ultimate Guides in great detail
  • Consistently brings my students more happy clients
  • My students actually follow through

I wanted to make sure that the techniques in the course actually worked for my students, and not just for me.

I didn’t want there to be any holes in the course where students would get stuck and not be able to follow through.

I wanted to make this course 10x better than anything anyone else would ever be able to create.

That was my dream. And once I committed to doing whatever it takes to make it happen, the dream quickly became a reality.

To make it happen, I put in A LOT of work.

  • I revisited all of my 100,000+ words of past Ultimate Guides and broke down what really worked for each of them
  • I talked to experts, friends and pretty much everyone who has successfully created an Ultimate Guide to figure out how they did it
  • I exchanged hundreds of emails with my readers and did tens of hours of Skype calls to figure out what people struggle with when it comes to Ultimate Guides
  • I took on 5 1-on-1 coaching clients for Ultimate Guides to work closely together with them on creating them
  • Overall I spent well over 3 months doing the research and putting the program together before ever releasing it

I did all of that BEFORE ever launching my course for the first time.

Even though I knew I would make the course even better in the future, I wanted it to become the BEST course on creating Ultimate Guides with the first launch already.

When you’re designing an online course or a program yourself, you have a choice to make.

Either you can create “just an online course” that will make you some money, that you can launch every once in a while and run a nice side business…

Or you can create an INCREDIBLE course that will be 10x better than anything else out there.

A course that really puts your students first. That helps with every possible problem they might have. That helps them solve problems that nobody else is solving for them.

It doesn’t even have to be a HUGE online course like I created.

You can create a smaller course that covers a smaller topic, like…

  • A beginner WordPress course for online entrepreneurs
  • An online course on Facebook Ads for fitness entrepreneurs
  • A step-by-step parenting course for new parents

And even if you create a smaller course on a smaller topic, you can look at what’s already out there, do the work and make the course 10x better than anything else out there.

This way, you can create a course that will absolutely blow people away, that people will love and talk about for years to come.

Example #3: I built an online course that 50%+ of the students will actually finish

A lot of online courses these days have an extremely low follow through rate.

They might sell a lot of copies, and they might even have great advice in them…

But with many online courses, only a few % of students actually follow through, and a fraction of them become case studies.

When I designed Ultimate Guide System, I said things would be different.

I didn’t want to create just another course that people would take, then forget about.

I thought about how to create a course where it would be harder NOT to follow through than to follow through with it.

I thought what would make it EASY for my students to follow through with the course.

I thought about what I can do to make it IMPOSSIBLE for them to fail.

Here are just some of the ways in which I went above and beyond for my students in Ultimate Guide System:

  • I made the program a 1-year program, rather than a standard 8-week program. I want to fully support my students in creating their first, second and third Ultimate Guide.
  • I’m ALWAYS there for my students. I either find a solution to their problem or point them to someone that can do it for them.
  • I offered EVERY student that’s in the process of writing their guide to jump on a 1on1 call with me to help them finish their guide

Here’s what the program “roadmap” looks like:

In short, I’m putting the success of my students first and I’m doing everything I can make sure they’re successful with my program.

I have their back.

Most people don’t do this.

They create a video course without any live support.

I hosted 14 weekly live 90-minute calls where we not only talked about how to create Ultimate Guides, but also gave them direct feedback on every step of creating their guides. And they have 9 more months of live calls they can attend to do just that.

They create a community that they pop into once in a while.

I make sure that every student gets their questions answered in the community / parts of their guide reviewed, so they can move forward with it.

They create a course that has holes in it that don’t really work as advertised.

I’m already working on the 2.0 version of Ultimate Guide System that will make the course 10x better and easier to go through (more on that in the last example of this email).

I wouldn’t NEED to do any of these things.

I could launch a course without all of these components. It might still be a good course. The information would still be there.

But I know that if I did that, most people would never follow through with it.

And that’s just not a game I want to play. I don’t want to run a business where 3% of my paying clients are successful. I want to run a business where 50%+ of my clients are successful, if not more.

That’s another way in which I go above and beyond for my students in Ultimate Guide System, that you too can apply to your own business.

Think about how YOU can make sure your paying clients are successful.

How can you run your online courses differently?

How can you work with your coaching clients differently?

How can you go above and beyond for everyone you work with?

If you have some ideas, write them down now, before we move on to the next step.

3 ways in which I go above and beyond in CONNECTING WITH INFLUENCERS

Creating incredible content is the first and most important part of running your online business.

If you don’t create incredible content that’s 10x better than everyone else in your industry, you’ll never become an industry leader.

If you do create incredible content, other industry leaders will notice you, want to talk to you and work with you…

IF you know how to approach them in the right way and spend time building authentic relationships with them.

And once you have those relationships, they can be like putting gasoline to the fire.

They can help you spread the word about your business and brand like nothing else.

They can bring opportunities your way that you never imagined.

They can even be the thing that turns a business that’s doing OK to a business that’s growing faster than you ever imagined.

Building authentic relationships with industry leaders has been crucial to my business success.

Having mentors like Ramit Sethi, Derek Halpern and Selena Soo by my side allowed me to learn how they run their businesses, soak in the information from them like a sponge, and get business breakthroughs I would never get on my own.

Hanging out with Ramit Sethi and Derek Halpern in NYC
Hanging out with Selena Soo at her business anniversary party in NYC

So what was the “secret” to building those relationships?

Well, you guessed it – it was constantly going above and beyond for them.

Let’s look over some examples.

EXAMPLE #1: How I started building a relationship with Selena Soo

I first heard about Selena when she was a fellow beta student of Ramit Sethi’s Zero to Launch course.

At that point, she was already running a very successful online business, and Ramit would help her take her business to the next level.

For a long time, I followed and admired Selena from a far, because I didn’t quite know how to connect with her or add value to her.

It was more than a year later when I finally made the first step of building a relationship with her – and at that time I wasn’t even thinking about building a relationship with her. I just saw an opportunity to help her out, and I did.

At the time, I was already working as the Accelerator coach for Ramit Sethi, and I was a bit more confident in my abilities to help other business owners with their businesses.

When Selena asked for feedback on one of her product launch emails in a community I was a part of, I was excited to help her out.

She made a thread in the community where she shared one of her emails, and asked the community how she could make the email better.

When I saw the thread, there were already quite a few comments on it.

A lot of other people already gave her some good feedback, but I noticed that a few things:

  • Some of the feedback was good, some of it wasn’t and kind of missed the point of the email. There were potential improvements I noticed about the email that nobody else shared yet.
  • The comments overall were a mess – 10 people were commenting in the Facebook thread, while 10 other people were commenting in the google doc.
  • I knew Selena was busy, and I thought I could save her some time by working through the comments for her and filtering the good stuff from the bad stuff.

To address all of that, I decided to go through all of the comments that were already there, made a mental note of the good ones, and thought about how I could further improve the email.

Then I did the most important thing of all. I didn’t just add 10 additional comments to the google doc.

I thought it would be fun to go ahead and try to rewrite Selena’s email keeping all the possible improvements in mind, and I did just that.

Below her email in the google doc, I wrote a completely new version of the email.

Then I told Selena that I looked through all of the comments, added my own and drafted up an example of what an improved email would look like:

I did this because it was fun. I didn’t look for anything in return. I really just genuinely wanted to help her out.

So what happened?

Well, Selena loved that I helped her out and went above and beyond for her:

And a few months later when I was in NYC and I reached out to her if she wanted to grab lunch, she said yes – and this the beginning of a great friendship that we now have:

Funnily enough, Selena mentioned this story in her INFLUENCE program, and shared it as a great example of going above and beyond and building relationships with influencers.

And years later, she told me: “Primoz, one thing I love about you is that you always go above and beyond for me. That’s what makes you stand out from everyone else”.

Just like I went above and beyond for Selena, you too can go above and beyond for people that you want to connect with.

It’s just so much more effective than just “sending influencers articles they might enjoy” and stuff like that, because it really makes people remember you by being so much different from everyone else.

Now let’s look at some more examples of how you can go above and beyond in your relationships.

EXAMPLE #2: How I built a relationship with Derek Halpern

I first met Derek years ago at a conference called Behaviorcon, where he was a speaker.

Ramit Sethi introduced me to him as “one of his top students, who just takes whatever I throw at him, puts it into action and gets awesome results”.

Derek’s response?

He gave me his personal email and told me to share with him how I implement the advice from his speech.

So I did.

A few months later, I sent him an email about how I used one of his techniques for my product launch and make 19k? in revenues.

Then I sent him another email later where I shared a story about how I used the technique to help my friends start their businesses.

Both of those helped me get noticed by Derek – he even featured me on a sales page on one of his courses.

But the thing that I’m most proud of is something that I did much much later.

In January, I bought Derek’s course called Sales Page That Converts.

I did that because I wanted to create an incredible sales page for Ultimate Guide System.

I went through the course, wrote one of the best sales pages I’ve written to date and successfully brought in $36,318 in revenues.

Not only was I super happy with the results from my launch, I was also completely blown away by Derek’s course.

It was hands down the best course I’ve ever gone through on creating sales pages and it was a complete game changer for my business.

I finally had a framework that I could use over and over again to create mouthwatering sales pages, with every future product I created.

At this stage, I could’ve done one of the 3 things:

  • Not let Derek know about my results with the course, because “he’s too busy and probably doesn’t care” (which is the worst option)
  • Send him an email with the results I got from the course and let him know he can use it as a testimonial (this would be a better option, but I’m sure he gets plenty of those)
  • Do something completely different that would really do his course justice, spread the word about it and help him get more people into his awesome program

Of course I went with the last option.

In the past, I’ve written a super detailed review for Ramit Sethi’s Zero to Launch course, which I knew helped Ramit bring a lot of new students into his Zero to Launch program.

Because I knew that I could write a great course review and because I knew how powerful having an independent review can be for your business, I decided to write a review of Derek’s course too.

Not only that – I decided to write the ULTIMATE review of his course that would be the best, most comprehensive and most detailed review of his course that anyone would ever write.

So I did.

Over the next few days I wrote an 8,019 word review of his course, and I’m confident that this is the best review anyone would ever write.

You can check it out here.

And Derek loved the review (his first reaction was “now I need to figure out how to promote this”):

This was just one of the many ways in which I’ve added value to Derek, and to this day I continue to think about how I can stand out from everyone else and continue to build a relationship with him.

Of course you don’t need to spend days writing reviews like this to add value to influencers (although you could).

I know writing super long reviews isn’t easy for everyone – it’s easy for me.

Whenever you’re trying to add value to an influencer that you want to connect with, think about how you can go above and beyond for them in YOUR OWN WAY.

Are you really great on video? Record a video testimonial for them.

Are you great at giving gifts? Send them an awesome gift.

Are you great at writing long posts? Write a really long post about the lessons you learned from them.

For more ideas on how to go above and beyond and start building relationships with influencers in your niche, check out this amazing article from Selena Soo:

Ok, I have one last example for you, which I know you guys will love.

A lot of you know that I became one of Ramit’s star students, and even ended up working with him for 2+ years in his Accelerator program.

So how did I get there? How did I even get Ramit to notice me in the first place?

I don’t want to give you just ONE example, so I’ll give you a few different examples to help you spark more ideas for how you can go above and beyond in your business relationships.

EXAMPLE #3: 5 things that helped me build a relationship with Ramit Sethi

When I was preparing to meet Ramit Seth in person for the first time (I attended his live event called “The 100k Summit”), I asked one of my mentors, Naveen Dittakavi from NextVacay how I could make a great impression on Ramit.

He told me that I could record a video testimonial and send it to him, as very few people do that. You can learn all about how I did that in my Quick Guide to Surrounding Yourself With Successful People.

So I did. I recorded a video testimonial, and stood out from all the other people that would just create written testimonials for Ramit:

The other piece of advice I got from Naveen (that I also write about here) is to prepare really well for the conference in advance.

I spent a whole MONTH preparing for the conference.

I watched his 8-hour creative live class. I wrote down tens of really good questions. I created notecards with them. I completed every single piece of homework that Ramit gave us before the event.

I ended up being BY FAR the most prepared person at the conference, which made a great impression on Ramit.

I constantly asked well thought out questions – during the breaks, during the Q & A sessions and during the hot seats.

I made sure that Ramit would remember me next time we met.

To this day, I’m surprised how few people do something like this.

Whenever I meet people in person or go to live events, VERY FEW people come prepared for them. And almost no-one comes SUPER prepared.

So if you want to stand out at a conference and make a great impression on the speakers, being the most prepared person in the room is the simplest way to do so.

It’s time consuming (which is why nobody does it), but if you put in the work, you really can’t leave a conference unnoticed.

Let’s go to the third example.

At the 100k Summit, someone took this photo of me and Ramit:

I like to joke that Ramit didn’t like the fact I was wearing the same outfit as I was… But here’s what really happened.

On the last day of the conference, I told Ramit that I would implement everything I learned from it over the next month.

To get a little bit of extra accountability, I asked him to “make a disappointed face that he would make if I told him a month that I didn’t take any of his advice”.

With a disappointed Ramit photo in my pocket, I was ready to completely change my business.

And I did.

Over the next month, I used 3 of Ramit’s techniques to DOUBLE my monthly revenues from my business.

Nobody else at the conference got results like that so quickly, because they weren’t as focused on taking massive action immediately as I was. This again allowed me to stand out from everyone else at the conference and make Ramit remember me.

I met Ramit again at his conference called Behaviorcon.

As he was one of the organizers, he was absolutely swamped during the conference, and I didn’t really want to bother him throughout the event.

On the last day of the conference, I went up to him and casually mentioned that I used his advice from the 100k Summit to double my monthly revenues.

He was so blown away that he pulled me out from the conference room into the hallway and recorded a video on his iPhone to capture my results:

I felt like that was the tipping point where Ramit REALLY noticed me.

A few months later, he invited me to grab lunch with him in San Francisco:

And his team even invited me to become one of the beta testers of the Zero to Launch course because they knew I was an action taker.

I never expected or planned on any of those things to happen.

All I wanted to do is add value to someone who I really admired and go above and beyond for them.

But this goes to show you the awesome opportunities that can happen if you DO consistently go above and beyond.

I have two more examples for you.

After I took Ramit’s Zero to Launch beta course, I wrote a review of Zero to Launch.

Just like with Derek’s review, I wanted to make this the best review of Zero to Launch anyone would ever write.

And then, as time went by, I thought about how I could make the review even better.

After one and a half year of taking Zero to Launch, I went from just having 500 emails subscribers (at the time I wrote the first version of the review) to having 2,000+ email subscribers and my first 5-figure launch.

I took everything that I learned and wrote two detailed updates of the review (that you can read here), which is what nobody else did.

I felt like this would be an awesome opportunity to show people how powerful the course can actually be in the long run for their online business, and it was another way for me to stand out from everyone else and go above and beyond for Ramit.

The last example of how I go above and beyond for Ramit is a bit different, and it’s something that I still do to this day.

I go above and beyond for him by adding massive value to his Zero to Launch community.

Ramit has helped me so much over the years that I love giving back to his Zero to Launch students.

And the way that I stand out from everyone else is by writing the most detailed, comprehensive posts in the community. Nobody else does what I do.

For example, I recently wrote a super detailed post about how Ramit taught me to to choose excellence over mediocrity when I worked with him for 2 years:

Then I wrote a super detailed post about how I went from an idea to a $36,381 product launch in 3 months:

And on the plane during my recent trip to NYC I hosted an “Ask me Anything” in his community where I answered the questions from his students about online business for 4+ hours:

And gave super detailed responses that could very well be blog posts (this is just a PART of one of my responses):

Nobody else does this, so this allows me to stand out from all of his other students.

As you can see, there are many different ways in which you can go above and beyond to build relationships with people you admire.

You’ll also notice that plenty of ways in which I go above and beyond is by writing really long, detailed stuff – whether it’s course reviews or posts in online communities.

That’s because that’s what I’m good at and it works for me.

But the underlying principle here is to always think about how you can be different from everyone else. What can you do that nobody else is willing or is too lazy to do?

Going above and beyond for people you admire consistently is a sure way to start building lasting, authentic relationships with them.

Now you know how to go above and beyond for your audience, as well as in connecting with influencers, which are two crucial skills to help you skyrocket the growth of your online business.

But there’s one more thing that very few people talk about, and might be the hardest thing of all.

Going above and beyond for yourself.

3 ways in which I go above and beyond FOR MYSELF

So what does “going above and beyond for yourself” really mean?

I see it simply as pushing yourself beyond the limits of what you’re capable of right now.

Just like a marathon runner constantly tries to beat the best time in which he can run a marathon, we need to think about how we can constantly improve ourselves and accomplish more than we accomplished before as business owners.

If we don’t do this, we’ll end up coasting and resting on our laurels. We’ll live a good life, but we won’t live an exceptional one. We’ll create a business that makes money, but won’t become industry leaders.

This is the hardest thing of all to do because it doesn’t just require effort or following a script.

It requires being brutally honest with yourself, making an honest assessment about where you can improve, and letting go of some habits that are making you comfortable, but prevent you from unlocking your full potential.

Things like spending too much time on Facebook. Checking emails multiple times a day. Responding to every message you get immediately. And so on and so on.

I want to share with you 3 examples in how I’m going above and beyond for myself and pushing myself beyond what I’m capable of right now, which will help you come up with some ideas on how you can go above and beyond for yourself too.

EXAMPLE #1: I’m writing 100,000 words this month

For the last few months I’ve felt a little bit frustrated with myself.

Specifically, I was frustrated that I was spending more time THINKING about what to do, rather than DOING the things that were really important for growing my business.

I thought about writing 5 different Ultimate Guides, but I didn’t even write one.

I spent months trying to figure out “where to go next in my business” and running small experiments, rather than going all in on establishing myself as the go-to expert on creating Ultimate Guides.

I spent a lot of my time tweaking the copy on my website, and very little time spreading the word about it.

Two weeks ago I finally had enough.

This wasn’t who I wanted to be. I wanted to stop being the worst version of myself and become the best version of myself.

So I picked things that frustrated me, and said to myself I’d get rid of them one by one.

The first thing I wanted to change was to CONSUME less and CREATE more.

I knew that if I just let all of my thoughts out on paper and created some epic blog posts and Ultimate Guides, my business would take off again.

But just “writing more” wasn’t exciting for me. Neither was writing 1,000 words / day. I know I can do that, and it’s not a challenge for me.

I wanted to do something BIG. Something that would really push me over the list of what I think I’m capable of. Something that very few people have done before.

So I decided to take on “The 100k Challenge”.

I committed to writing 100,000 words / month, which is roughly 3,700 words / day if I wrote for 6 out of 7 days a week.

Now THAT’s a challenge that’s exciting for me, and a way to go way above and beyond for myself.

This challenge is the main reason why I’m even writing this post, and if you’re curious I’m just over 40k words out of 100k words after the first two weeks.

I wrote these posts as a part of the challenge:

  • 10 Powerful Lessons From Selena Soo’s Life-Changing Mastermind
  • 100 Happy Clients: The ONLY Goal You Need to Grow Your Online Business This Year
  • 7 Mistakes to Avoid While Writing Your First Ultimate Guide

And there’s a lot more awesome posts coming VERY shortly.

Since I started the challenge, working on my business feels so much different. It feels like I’m actually working on things that matter, rather than just doing “busy work”. And I’m just focusing on ONE thing, rather than trying to grow my business in 10 different ways.

I know that once I finish this challenge, I’ll feel like I have accomplished something I didn’t think was possible for me before – and that even after the challenge I’ll create a lot more awesome content because I’ll already have the right habits put in place to do it.

The side effect of doing this challenge is that it won’t just help me push myself to the limit, it will also be incredibly valuable for my business.

I know I’ll be able to write about the challenge once it’s finished and spread the word about my work. “What I learned from writing 100,000 words in 30 days” is just not something that you hear every day, and I know that a lot of online entrepreneurs will be interested in reading about it and talk about it to other people.

I’ll also be able to help my Ultimate Guide System students create more Ultimate Guides by teaching them how to write more consistently with the lessons I learn from the challenge – plus they’ll be able to say to themselves that if Primoz can write 100,000 words in a month they can write 10,000 words too.

There’s so many good things that come out of doing challenges like this to go above and beyond for yourself – and they make building an online business a ton more fun too.

So think about it. Is there a challenge that you could take on as well to push yourself beyond what you’re capable?

Could you challenge yourself to do something amazing within a month? Or maybe even a week to get started? One of the future things I’ll probably do is have a challenge to write an incredible Ultimate Guide in a week, which is a smaller commitment, but will still push me out of my comfort zone.

Think about it. It doesn’t have to be related to writing. It can be related to doing customer research. Getting clients. Going above and beyond for your existing clients. Getting more publicity for your business.

Do any ideas come to mind? If yes, write them down.

Now let’s look at the next example.

EXAMPLE #2: I’m working with a high performance coach to think bigger, accomplish more, and take my business to the next level

Taking on the 100k Challenge already helped me feel like I’m moving my business forward way faster.

But I didn’t want it to just end there.

I feel like for a long time, I’ve been running my business like a hobby.

Because I consistently went above and beyond for my audience and for the influencers I wanted to build relationships with, my business grew well,

But it didn’t grow as much as I would have wanted it to grow. And I didn’t feel like I was really doing my best to grow it.

I saw myself spending way too much time just randomly browsing through email, Facebook or Instagram. I hate to admit this, but I could spend hours and hours each day just doing that.

I could get away with it because nobody (apart from my girlfriend) could see it, and because of all the work that I already put into my online business.

But deep down, I knew that this is not who I wanted to be.

I don’t want to just run a 6-figure business that allows me to live a comfortable lifestyle.

I don’t want to be someone who just follows the top experts in the industry and follows what they tell him to do.

I want to BECOME one of those experts that other experts follow and ask for advice.

I want to go far beyond building a 6-figure business. I want to take my business to 7 and 8 figures over the next few years.

And not only that. I want to create thousands and thousands of happy clients while doing it, and reach millions of people all over the world with my message.

I want to stop being just a “star student” and become one of the industry leaders of the online business world.

And for that, I need to stop doing what I’m doing. I need to think differently. I need to spend my time differently. I need to act differently.

And I know that I can’t do all of this by myself. I need help from people who already know how to do that.

As soon as I had that realization, I knew EXACTLY who to turn to for help.

You might not have heard of him yet, but over the next few years you will definitely hear a lot about him.

His name is Allon Khakshouri.

Allon used to work as a manager of some of the world’s best tennis players, including Novak Djokovic who has absolutely dominated the tennis scene over the past few years.

Allon’s superpower is turning the top 100 tennis players into top 10, and eventually #1 tennis players.

He knows everything there is to know about high performance and the mentality of the world’s top athletes, and now he’s taking his knowledge to the business world.

He’s focused on working with online business “underdogs” and turning them into absolute superstars, like he did with the tennis players in the past.

He recently wrote The Ultimate Guide to High Performance where he shares some of the best strategies that high performers use to become the best in the world at what they do, and if what he teaches resonates with you, I definitely recommend you to check it out.

I turned to Allon because I know that he can help me get from the top 100 online business expert to top 10, and in the future become the #1 online business expert out there.

I knew that Allon wouldn’t go easy on me, and that he would tell me exactly what I needed to hear to push myself to my limits, even when I didn’t want to hear it.

Here’re a couple of changes that we’ve already made to the way that I run my online business over the past few weeks.

#1: I need to get two “power blocks” of writing time in every day.

This means I go to a coffee shop where I write for 60-90 minutes twice a day – once before and once after my workout.

This was hard for me because I needed to completely clear out my schedule in the mornings, make sure I go to bed by 11pm every day, and actually make it to the coffee shop without any excuses.

During these power blocks, I can only write or not do anything else, which can also be hard sometimes when I feel tired and I really just want to go through some emails.

#2: I only have 90 minutes a day of “online time” a day.

This includes working through all of my emails, being on Facebook, helping my students through my communities, etc.

This was hard for me because I’m used to being on my phone WAY more than that, including the first thing in the morning to “wake up”, on the toilet or in the evening once I’m done with working.

When we started this habit I felt like an addict who just got his drug taken away… It wasn’t a fun few days, but now I can’t imagine going back to my old ways as I get SO much more work done, and I don’t feel the need to check my phone every 2 seconds.

Plus, to my surprise, it doesn’t even take me 90 minutes to work through all of my online work. I’m usually done in 60 minutes or less because I actually spend the online time in a smart way, not mindlessly scrolling.

#3: I need to have 15 minutes of “thinking time” a day.

During this time, I can only think, or take notes of what I’m thinking. I’m not allowed to be on the internet, consume content or anything else.

This concept was weird for me at first. How am I supposed to just think and not do anything?

The Allon told me that I can use this time for planning out parts of my business. So during this time, I started outlining my future emails and blog posts, which made writing them so much easier.

This is another thing I wasn’t doing before, yet it helps me function so much better now.

Now I feel like I’m actually making progress in my business, and the results have been HUGE already.

For example, here’s what I accomplished last week with my new approach:

  • I wrote well over 16,000 words last week
  • I reviewed 3 guest posts for my website, and edited a guest post I will get published on a big website soon
  • I created a launch plan for Ultimate Guide System 2.0.
  • I got 18!!! 1on1 and group client calls done. That’s not a typo.
  • I created a presentation for the second to last week of Ultimate Guide System
  • I reached out to 3 of my mentors and got incredible feedback on my product launch plan
  • I got 10 hours of workouts in in the gym
  • I spent two nights hanging out with friends, went to a BBQ party over the weekend, and had 5 guilt-free date nights with my girlfriend, which is how many I usually have in a MONTH

And I know that all of this is just the beginning.

That’s the second way in which I’m going above and beyond for myself – working with someone who’s the best in the world at what they do.

Now you might be thinking to yourself “well Primoz that’s great for you, but I don’t have the access to this kind of people myself”.

First of all, that’s not entirely true. Now that you know how to go above and beyond in connecting with influencers, you too can build authentic relationships with people like Allon, Derek Halpern, Selena Soo and Ramit Sethi.

It takes a lot of time and effort to do it (usually it takes years to build a really strong relationship), but if you really want to do it, now you know how to make it happen.

The other thing that you can do is use what you DO have already. For example, you could read Allon’s Ultimate Guide. He shares some of his best advice right there in the guide!

You could also hire a coach, join an online course, or read a book, an e-book or an Ultimate Guide to improve your current skill set.

Then all that remains is really being true to yourself, and committing to taking action and making those changes actually happen.

It’s not easy (and it shouldn’t be), but it’s not complicated either.

You think about something that you need to get better. You think about HOW you can get better at it and find the right resource to do it. And then you get over your excuses and get started. It literally is that simple.

Now I challenge you to think about one thing that you KNOW you need to get better at, and think about how you can get started with it TODAY.

You don’t actually need to do it – for now just write it down.

Ok, one last example of how I go above and beyond for myself.

EXAMPLE #3: I’m creating Ultimate Guide System 2.0 only 3 months after launching it for the first time

As I’ve mentioned earlier, I’m committed to making Ultimate Guide System the BEST course on creating Ultimate Guides that anyone will ever create.

Part of that was doing the customer research and working with my 1on1 clients up-front to develop a great system, which I’ve already talked about in this post.

The other part of it is improving the program based on the feedback of my first customers.

You see, most people don’t collect feedback about how to make their online courses better. Many of the ones that do never actually implement the feedback and leave “holes” in their programs where people get stuck and fail to follow through. There’s plenty of online courses out there that only a few % of people finish. And out of the people that do take the feedback, most of them create a 2.0 version of the program after a whole year.

In fact, I’ve never seen anyone do it faster than that.

And yet, here I am, thinking to myself… Why not?

Yeah, there is an argument for having a lot of people go through your program before making changes to it… But if I already tested the program and worked closely together with my students to see how they’re doing with it, and I see ways to make it 10x better, then I don’t WANT more people to go through a program that is NOT 10x better.

So I said to myself that I’ll just create the Ultimate Guide System 2.0 right now.

I thought about different ways that I know I could make the course 10x better. I asked my students what would make the course 10x better for them. I ended up with 5 game-changing features for the program that will take it to a whole other level.

And I know that it’ll be a lot of work to implement… But the best time to do that is NOW. I don’t want to wait another year and “coast”. I want to make this program even better right now, and make even more of my students successful with my program.

This makes me go above and beyond for myself because I’ve never actually done something like this. I never approached any of my online courses with such a commitment to rapidly improve them and make them bulletproof. Especially not in such a short time frame.

But I know this is totally possible to do. All it requires is a decision to do it, to delay some other less important projects, and make it happen right now.

As I said earlier… Why not?

So what can you take away from this example?

Well, if you do have an online course or a coaching program that you’ve been thinking about improving, one way to go above and beyond for yourself is to give yourself a few weeks or a month and actually make it happen.

But even if that’s not what you want to do or if you don’t have a program you’re selling yet, there’s a lesson here for you.

And the lesson lies in the “why not?”.

If there’s something that you’ve been thinking of doing for a while, but never quite got around to it, you could start working on it today and making it happen.

Maybe it’s an epic blog post or an Ultimate Guide you wanted to write. Maybe it’s an online course or a coaching program you wanted to launch. Maybe it’s that first email that you wanted to send to one of the leaders in your industry to start building a relationship with them.

You could start working on one of those things today… I mean why not?

If any things come to mind that you’ve been putting off for a while and you could get started with, write them down. Again, you don’t need to act on them immediately (we’ll get to that in a second), but I do want you to have plenty of ideas in what you could do to go above and beyond for yourself, for influencers in your niche or for your audience. It’s better to have too many ideas than too few.

Now it’s time for some cold hard truth.

In this post, I’ve shared 9 (actually 13, since I shared 5 examples in the chapter about how I built a relationship with Ramit Sethi) examples of how I go above and beyond in everything I do.

And I showed you how going above and beyond can help you grow your online business so much faster as you’ll be able to get more done for your business, make a bigger impact on the lives your audience, and build business relationships that will bring you business opportunities that you’ve never even dreamed of.

Now you know the theory. You also have plenty of ideas and examples for going above and beyond in your own business.

And yet, none of this will help you out UNLESS you do the following two things:

  • Get started with going above and beyond in everything you do (and stop doing things in a half-assed way) today
  • Keep going above and beyond over and over and over again in all the important areas of your business

It’s literally that simple… And that hard.

Going above and beyond over and over again isn’t easy. Because you’ll have times when you procrastinate the big projects that you have in your mind. Because you might be surrounded by people who don’t believe in you or support in you. Because you’ll say to yourself that “this will never work” and never test your ideas out.

The good news is that this happens to ALL of us (and I shared quite a few examples of what I’m working on right now to improve myself).

The difference between the people that never build an online business, people who build a semi-successful online business and the people who build an ultra-successful online business is pretty damn simple:

  • The people who never build a successful online business never actually go above and beyond on anything. They take small steps here and there, but never do anything that really goes above and beyond that people would notice and remember them by.
  • The people who build a semi-successful online business have bright moments where they go above and beyond, which leads to their business breakthroughs. But after they get these breakthroughs, they plateau because they rest on their laurels and aren’t hungry enough to keep going and pushing themselves further and further.
  • The people who build an ultra-successful online business CONSISTENTLY go above and beyond for themselves, for their audience, and in connecting with influencers in their niche. It’s not that they don’t have all the mental blocks and challenges that other people have… They just don’t let the challenges stop them. They know they are meant to do big things in life, and they repeatedly mess up, get back on their feet, and keep going to matter what.

If you want to build an ultra-successful online business and grow it faster than 99% of the other people out there, that’s what it really is all about. Going above and beyond, and doing it consistently day in and day out. The more consistent you can be, the more you go above and beyond, the more you’ll accomplish.

Remember that. Remember that there’s no “secret” to building an online business. You really just need to cut out the stuff that isn’t getting you anywhere and do what you know is important 10x better than anyone else. As long as you do that and stick with it, it’ll be harder for you NOT to be successful than to grow it.

There’s no better time to get started with going above and beyond than today

Okay, enough talk. You’ve read this 9,000+ words into this article, so I know you’re not one of the people who will never have a successful online business.

Most of them dropped off when they saw how long this post is, gave up in the middle of it or sent me an email about “how I should write shorter blog posts”.

Those people will never make it because they don’t have what it takes. If you can’t spend 20 minutes reading a blog post, then how could you possibly have what it takes to build an ultra successful online business?

Now if you have read this whole post, I’m sending you a high five.

You’re already different than most other people. You’re already going above and beyond for yourself.

If you took notes while reading it, even better (most people didn’t). That’s another way in which you’re standing out from everyone else.

Now, there’s just one thing left to do – often the hardest one of all, and what will determine whether you make it in your business, or if it’ll just be a dream that you never made happen.

It’s time to take action.

As you might have noticed, I already went above and beyond for you. I didn’t just write a blog post with the idea of going above and beyond and tell you to magically “do more of it”.

I showed you HOW I do it and how you can do it too. I’ve shared more examples with you than most people do in their paid online courses.

Now if you’re serious about seeing your business grow like wildfire, let’s put this stuff into action.

Here’s what I want you to do:

Pick just ONE of the things that you wrote down while reading this long post. One way in which you can go above and beyond for yourself, your audience or for the influencers you want to connect with.

It doesn’t matter what it’s about. Just pick something you are actually EXCITED to work on.

Did you pick one thing yet?

Good.

Now think about how you can get started with it RIGHT NOW.

What can you do to put the wheels into motion?

What is one small step that you can take that will take this idea from your head and start making it a reality?

Did you write that down?

Good.

Just a few more things to do. Yes, I’m making you work your ass off, because rapidly growing an online business IS hard work.

  1. Leave a comment below this post with (1) your one way of going above and beyond and (2) what you’ll do to put it into motion today.
  2. Let me know that you left a comment by replying to the email in which I sent you this blog post. If you’re not on my email list yet, you can subscribe here.
  3. Get started with putting your one thing into motion NOW. Not in 5 minutes. Not in an hour. Not tomorrow. Make the first step right now, even if it’s an insanely small one.

And that’s it.

I gotta say – I admire you for reading all the way through this post. It took me days to write, and I appreciate you sticking around long enough to actually read the whole thing.

I love working with and helping people like you, because I know that you’ll make it incredibly far in the online business world.

And if you’re ready to change the world and start going above and beyond in everything you do, I have the perfect thing to help you get started.

Remember how I said that the MOST important thing in which you should go above and beyond is for your audience?

And remember how you can get started with that by creating incredible content that’s 10x better than what most people create in your industry, like Ultimate Guides?

Because you read this long post, I know that you want to do something more – and that you have what it takes to create something as big as an Ultimate Guide – that will change your online business forever.

I know that because my Ultimate Guides have been a key strategy for growing my online business – because they go far above and beyond the regular blog posts.

If you want to get started with creating one today, get hundreds or even thousands of email subscribers to your online business, bring in more paying clients to your business and establish yourself as an industry leader, then check out my FREE 47-page Ultimate Guide Checklist below.

It’s just the thing you need to get started with making a bigger impact in this world and skyrocketing your online business – and I guarantee you that it’ll be the BEST e-book you’ve read in a while.

Just leave your name and email below and I’ll send the free guide straight to your inbox.

Thanks again for reading, and don’t forget to leave a comment below with one thing in which you’ll go above and beyond.

Talk to you soon!

-Primoz

7 Mistakes to Avoid While Writing Your First Ultimate Guide

By Primoz Bozic 1 Comment

Writing an Ultimate Guide isn’t easy.

Even with the right support, it can take MONTHS to get one written – and many people get stuck in their perfectionism and never finish it.

Over the past few months, I worked with my 1on1 client Matej on creating his Ultimate Guide about “How to Find More Time and Energy to Start an Online Business”.

I’m super proud of all the work that he’s put into the guide, and it’s a really incredible piece of content.

After he finished writing the guide, Matej reached out to me and shared with me a few key lessons that he learned from writing his first guide, that he will use to write his next Ultimate Guide in half the time.

I absolutely loved these lessons because they show the other side of writing really exceptional content that very few people talk about.

I loved how Matej openly shared the mistakes that he made, as well as the specific ways in which he will avoid them next time – so I decided to share them on my blog.

If you’re thinking about (or in the process of) writing your first Ultimate Guide, this is a must read.

Matej, take it away :).

Matej’s mistakes and key takeaways from writing his first 25k word ultimate guide

In late December 2016 I started working on a bigger project for my side business – writing an ultimate guide “How to Find More Time and Energy to Start an Online Business”.

I knew it does not have to necessarily be a huge project lasting for months. However, I wanted to make it great, highly valuable for my readers for the years to come so I wanted to put a lot of effort into it.

With the demanding full-time job and two small kids at home (2 and 5 year old) I knew it’s going to be a challenge but exciting one. I wanted to write an Ultimate Guide for months but was always avoiding it.

Suddenly, my mentor Primoz Bozic shifted his business to helping people writing Ultimate Guides and I’ve become one of his first 1on1 clients. So we started working together.

Expected time frame for publishing the guide was 2-3 months.

I was very excited to make it happen.

Looking back, it has been 5 months until I finally published my Ultimate Guide.

I know I could have published my guide a lot faster, and now I know exactly how to write and publish my next Ultimate Guide in half the time.

Today I want to share with you the biggest mistakes I’ve made while writing my first Ultimate Guide and the key takeaways from the process that you can use to successfully write your first Ultimate Guide without spending 5 months on it like I did.

Mistake #1: I tried to make the Table of Contents too perfect

When Primoz and I started working together, things went really well. I had a lot of my free time since there was a Christmas holiday, and I didn’t need to go to work.

I spent most of that time jumping on calls with a few of my readers and friends to narrow down and validate my idea for the Ultimate Guide.

Validating my business idea by talking to people had always been tough for me, but finally I’ve managed to do it and it was actually a ton of fun.

Not only did those calls help me with my idea, but I’ve also aimed to add massive value to those people as well.

Every time I jumped on a call with someone to help me with the idea, I also offered to help them out with any questions they would have about finding more time and energy to work on their side business.

As I did that, one of the readers loved my help so much that he wanted to work with me.

That’s how I landed my first ever client from my side business:

Once I was confident about the idea I’ve started working on the Table of Contents.

The first draft was done pretty fast, but then I hit a roadblock.

I was not sure if it’s great enough. And because I wanted to make it perfect I was tweaking the Table of Contents for about two weeks.

I went back to the people that helped me validate the idea for my guide and asked them to give me feedback on my Table of Contents.

The problem was that I needed to wait for them to get back to me, then incorporate their feedback, and repeat the process over and over again.

This lead me to procrastinating on my guide because I did not feel like working on it again and again. There were quite a few days when I was not working on it at all because I did not feel like it.

Luckily, Primoz stopped me from further procrastination and told me that my Table of Contents was good enough to move forward.

I spent just one more day polishing the final version of the Table of Contents by jumping on Skype calls with two friends who helped me finalize it right on the spot in the way I was confident that it’s great.

Here’s what the final version of the Table of Contents looked like:

What I’ll do differently next time:

After writing the first draft of the Table of Contents, I’ll get on a call with 1-3 of my ideal readers and go through it live together.

It’s much easier and faster for both parties than waiting for people to leave you comments in the google doc. It’s also much better talking through what they think about the guide and how they feel about it.

Together, we can easily tweak some of the headlines to make them more compelling and find the right order of the chapters so the guide flows well.

I won’t spend more than one week on the Table of Contents because I know it will lead to procrastination and doubts if it’s great or not.

I’ll spend a week on it, make it good enough, and then make further changes as I’m writing the guide if I need to.

Mistake #2: I bit off more than I could chew

As soon as I completed my Table of Contents, I knew that the guide would be huge.

I knew that because I always write very long posts where I try to explain everything in detail to give as much value to my readers as possible.

I thought that was OK since I wanted my guide to be really great, and the best piece of content on the internet on that topic.

However, looking back and seeing that this was my first ever Ultimate Guide, I would probably split the guide into a few smaller topics.

This way, I’d cover just one specific topic in great detail (like how to find the energy to work on your side business after you come home from work), and write a guide that’s about 10k words long instead of going for that 25k beast:

Doing this would help me create the guide two or three times faster, and I’m sure it would also be easier to keep the momentum while writing my guide.

What I’ll do differently next time:

The next guide I’ll create will be about a smaller, more specific topic.

I’ll aim for something like 7-12k words with it, and focus on getting it out there faster.

If you’re planning on writing your first guide, I encourage you to start small too.

You want to test how Ultimate Guides resonate with your audience andlearn how to create them while having fun.

You don’t want to spend months figuring things out or getting lost in the process, especially if you do not have anybody to hold your hand along the way.

I also encourage you to take into account what kind of a writer you are.

If you don’t have a problem with writing long posts, then it’s OK to create a longer guide. But if you tend to write shorter posts and struggle with writing really long ones, pick a guide that’s shorter and create a longer guide down the road when you’re more comfortable with it.

Mistake #3: I wrote about topics I was not too confident about

If you do a lot of research for your Ultimate Guide in the beginning, you will get a lot of feedback on what you should include in the guide.

This can be good and bad.

When I started writing my guide, I knew that mindset issues plays a huge role in our performance and achieving the results especially with business on the side.

From the feedback I’ve gotten, I saw that other people would want to learn more about solving them.

The problem for me was that I did not have proven solutions and experience with solving them. I have some good tactics which helped me, but I wasn’t too confident about giving too much advice on that topic.

However, because I really wanted to help my readers, I still wanted to write a chapter about those things to satisfy them. That’s what they told me that they want.

And we always tend to please people.

This lead me to a lot of procrastination on writing that chapter.

I did not want to start writing it because I did not have the best of ideas to write about.

Instead, I spent a lot of time researching the materials I could include in the guide. I was trying to learn more about those problems so I could better explain them in the post.

That was a big mistake, because this one chapter delayed writing the guide for a few extra weeks.

What I’ll do differently next time:

Whenever I won’t feel confident about writing about a topic that’s in my Table of contents, I’ll skip it.

I’ll remove it from the Table of Contents and perhaps revisit it down the line once I’m more confident in giving advice about it.

I know that there’s a lot more I can write about. Removing one chapter from my guide will not make or break it.

I encourage you to do the same.

As you’re writing your guide there will also be times when you’ll face the writers block or you will feel like you do not want to write about one section at the moment.

If you’ll still be confident you can write it it does not mean you have to remove it from your guide.

Just skip the chapter for a week or two and jump to the next exciting one. You can always come back later when the inspiration strikes you, or you remember those nice stories you wanted to cover in that chapter.

The most important thing when writing your Ultimate Guide is to keep your momentum going, and keep writing as much as possible in succession which will pretty much ensure that you won’t get stuck.

Mistake #4: I spent too much time editing my guide

I have to admit that my perfectionism prolonged the publishing of the guide by 2-3 months.

That’s because I wanted to make it the most epic guide which would stand out and stand the test of time.

Because I wanted to make sure this would really happen, I spent about 2 months editing the guide.

The guide has 25k words which took quite some time to go through.

As I edited the guide I was played too much with the content, grammar, styling the phrases.

Many times I’ve rewritten sentences more than 5 times to make them easier to read and more “compelling” as if I’d been writing a sales page.

There were also many sections which I thought were not good because I had written them during the sessions where I had lower energy.

I really saw the difference in the quality. And my mentality urged me to rewrite them completely.

And that’s what I did.

This added tens of hours into the process of getting the guide finished.

What I’ll do differently next time:

Next time I won’t spend so much time editing my guide.

I’ll do just one round of editing while focusing just on fixing only broken sections, things that are truly hard to understand, or things that do not fit well the guide as a whole.

I won’t try to make it perfect.

I know that the most important thing is to share my highly valuable advice with my readers.

One unclear sentence or paragraph here and there does not make a huge difference in this long piece of epic content.

What makes the true difference is the content itself.

Instead of making my next guide perfect, I’ll just focus on making it more 10x more epic than anything else out there.

Mistake #5: I tried to include every influencer I knew in the guide

I knew that I can add value to the influencers I wanted to build relationships with by mentioning them in the guide.

Especially by sharing their advice that I’ve implemented in my life. Mentioning the things that they taught that worked for me.

I wanted to spread the word about as many people as possible in my guide, and I created a huge list of people I wanted to include in it:

It was a good intention. But, it cost me many hours by browsing through the articles of influencers to find the best fit for my guide.

And while doing so I got often caught up with reading new articles and then thinking about new ideas. This took my focus away from writing the guide.

What I’ll do differently next time:

Next time, I’ll pick just a few influencers that I want to build relationships with whose advice is already a good fit for your guide.

I won’t try to include everyone, just the people who I already know and that have already helped me with their advice.

I’ll mention the influencers who made a difference in my life or life of my clients that are directly relevant to the topic I’m mentioning in the guide.

If I find myself browsing through their articles to find one that’s a good fit, I’ll skip the influencer and possibly talk about them in one of my future guides.

Mistake #6: Spending a month on my content upgrade

Working on my Ultimate Guide helped me get a lot of clarity around my business idea.

Because of that I decided to create an email course as a main opt-in carrot for my website. I would also use that free course as a content upgrade for the whole guide:

Initially, I thought it’d be easy and fast. I was really convinced and confident.

It turned out to be quite the opposite.

Again, I wanted to make it as best as possible, so it took me ton of time to write email sequence.

Not only writing it took me so much time, but setting everything up on my website and in the email service provider was a lot of work.

It was a whole new project which should have been done after publishing my guide.

This was another thing that delayed publishing my guide by another mont..

What I’ll do differently next time:

I know that creating a content upgrade is a great way to maximize my opt-ins from the ultimate guide.

However, next time I won’t spend a whole month on it and try to make it really big.

Instead I’ll create something crunchy for my readers. Something they could easily implement and will give them immediate results.

For example, I could create a quick cheat-sheet of the tactics from the guide, or a one-page worksheet that would help them implement my advice faster.

Mistake #7: I didn’t enjoy the process all the time

Probably the worst thing I was doing through this project was thinking about the outcomes of it.

I was super excited at the beginning and had a ton of fun working on my guide for the first few weeks.

But then it got into my head and I started to think about the number of subscribers, or even potential coaching clients I could get as a result of publishing the guide.

That’s why I wanted to make it perfect and was doing all of those mistakes mentioned above.

In the process I forgot to have fun with it, to enjoy those quiet early mornings, working sessions in my favorite coffee shop, or the late nights sipping the red wine.

I’ve lost the excitement because I was pushing myself to make it fast and perfect.

What I’ll do differently next time:

Next time I’ll focus on having a lot more fun with my Ultimate Guide. I’ll enjoy the process.

I’ll write about the topics that I like talking about with people. About the advice I give to my readers. And the things I thrive learning more about myself.

If you’re writing your first Ultimate Guide, the best piece of advice I can give you is to have fun with it.

You’ll learn a ton and also get a lot of experience throughout the whole project.

Don’t worry so much about the outcome, and focus on the fact that you are creating something amazing.

Want to get started with writing your first Ultimate Guide?

I hope you’ll be able to use some of this advice to successfully write your first Ultimate Guide.

If you do so, I’m sure it’ll help you create an amazing and very helpful piece of content for your readers.

While enjoying the process and having a lot of fun along.

If you want to take a look at the Ultimate Guide that I wrote, you can read the whole guide here:

How to Find More Time and Energy to Start an Online Business [The Ultimate Guide]

If you want to get access to the whole framework that Primoz and I used to help me write my first guide, make sure you read Primoz’s Ultimate Guide checklist below:

Get your FREE copy of the 13,000+ word Ultimate Guide Checklist

And if you’re guilty of making one of these mistakes yourself, share which one it is with us in the comments below.

To your success!

-Matej

Copyright © 2025 · Primoz Bozic