A while back, read an interesting article by a guy named Phil Eaton.
Eaton is a software developer who also runs a popular blog. He started blogging in 2017, in part with the goal of meeting cool, likeminded people.
Even after his blog and Twitter account took off, and although he made his email publicly available, Eaton found nobody ever reached out to him to talk.
So he got devious. He announced he is now charging $100 for people to talk to him.
Result?
You most likely guessed it. Suddenly there were lots of people, each willing to pay $100, and getting on a call with him.
Eaton’s goal was to connect, and he ended up doing so — with VCs, university professors, and startup founders.
He gave away the money to a charity, and made it publicly known that he is doing so.
The fact was doing this for entirely nice guy reasons made him willing to be much more pushy and promotional about his “$100 to talk to me” offer than he might have been otherwise.
So if you too are trying to build up a network of interesting people, and nobody is responding, then put a price tag on it and watch what happens.
“Yea all right,” I hear you say. “I guess that’s kind of interesting. But my time is valuable, my life is short, and I don’t want to simply open up my calendar to strangers for $100.”
Fine. then here’s a variant that I myself can recommend based on personal experience:
Rather than allowing anybody to pay to talk to you, talk to people who have already paid you. Or at least some of them.
I have a habit — not so strict, and I gotta be more diligent with it — of reaching out to people who have bought offers I’ve made.
I set aside an hour of time, usually on Sundays, to talk to one such person each week.
This has resulted in marketing insights, obviously, but it’s also connected me with some smart, successful, and surprising people — people I never would have guessed to be buying my offers, for reasons I never would have guessed.
In turn, I always make it clear that I’m happy to answer questions, give feeedback and my opinion, or generally offer help, within reason, to make the call worthwhile for the other person as well.
I happen to know that some people have taken the advice I’ve given and run with it to implement in their offers or in their client-getting efforts.
So do you wanna talk to me? Or connect with me? Or get my input or help?
No promises, but your best bet is to take me up on one of my offers.
For example, my most popular course, Simple Money Emails, which shows you how to write simple emails, like this one, to make sales today and readers reading tomorrow. For more info on Simple Money Emails: