How Tim Ferriss Named “The 4-Hour Workweek”
After his book The 4-Hour Workweek became an international bestseller, Tim Ferriss told an interviewer he wanted to name the book The 3-Hour Workweek…
…But, Ferriss quipped, “My publisher thought ‘3-Hour Workweek’ was unrealistic.”
Ha!
I’ve read the The 4-Hour Workweek a few times. It’s loaded with valuable lessons.
But the most valuable lesson is one not even in the book. It’s the story about how he named the book.
Ferriss didn’t dream up the name by bouncing ideas around the publishing house conference room. He went straight to his market.
He spent a whopping $200 on a Google Adwords campaign. He tested six different ads, each headlined with a potential book title.
The title with the most clicks would be the winner. The 4-Hour Workweek won going away.
The lesson: Listen to your market.
So many businesses dish out content without doing this.
Content creators think they know — the best title for their book, the most interesting topics for emails and blog posts, the right stories to tell.
But they don’t know because they haven’t listened to their prospects and customers. They haven’t conducted the research. They haven’t heard what’s most important to the people who will read the book, visit the blog, see the posts. They haven’t discovered the right story to tell.
Ferriss devised a way to listen to his market, to hear what they wanted, to discover the story.
If you conduct the research to discover the story, you’ll generate more relevant content that will captivate prospects and inspire them to act.
Don't go away yet..
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