Hi! I want to share
[2022-07-09 06:01:08 AM] : Hi! I want to share with you a recent experience I had and a takeaway I think could help some others. I'll try to keep it short or break into a thread soon.
A while ago (like some years) I wrote a couple of blog posts about a subject I didn't find particularly interesting or complex: webservices usage with php. I did that since I had been asked to produce a live course on the subject for a training company. When they first approached me I thought: "Ok, I'll do it but... who's going to buy THAT?"
To my surprise, from all the courses I made for them, it was the best seller all along. And I can almost say the same about the hits to my own blog. These four or five post have definitely been in the all time top 10
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[2022-07-09 06:02:28 AM] : So, at one time I put them toghether into a pdf and used it as a lead magnet. I was hoping to do a new live version of the course on my own but that didn't work out.
Eventually I decided to re-format the thing and offer it as a paid downloadable, which I did.
[2022-07-09 06:02:41 AM] : This was way before joining 30x500 btw
[2022-07-09 06:04:29 AM] : So anyway, the book has been there, hanging on my website and making a sale every now and then for a great total of 13
[2022-07-09 06:05:32 AM] : In the meantime, I developed two Udemy courses, one on this subject and another about Symfony (my favorite php framework) and guess which one was the most sold one? Yes, webservices FTW
[2022-07-09 06:06:34 AM] : Also, I had a few people ask me for 1 on 1 consultations to help them overcome issues in their projects and many of them were related to implementing some webservice
[2022-07-09 06:08:49 AM] : All of this has been just laying around in the background until this week where two sales of the book happened (one on Monday, the second on Tuesday).
That triggered a thought in my head to re-take on a project for a second, more thorough version of the book I started working on a while ago but this time I figured I'd take a different approach to producing the book
[2022-07-09 06:10:04 AM] : Basically I realized that, since I launched the first version of the book I've been producing many more webservices related e-bombs so I decided to pack those into the book (so I don't have to come up with topics and do a lot of content creation from scratch)
[2022-07-09 06:14:19 AM] : And then something really interesting happened. I decided to go through my old emails, looking for questions I've answered for people over the last few years.
I tagged each email according to some keywords found within it and, not surprisingly, found a high percentage of them be related to webservices.
So I created a Google Doc where I put links to the original emails and tried grouping them into categories.
[2022-07-09 06:15:14 AM] : In many cases the questions I got asked were so specific that they can only be useful as real-life examples to showcase the application of the concepts explained in the book
[2022-07-09 06:15:59 AM] : Others are straight questions that can easily be turned into e-bombs (Like "how to send a file to a SOAP Webservice")
[2022-07-09 06:16:20 AM] : Then I have some others that I'd categorize as troubleshooting
[2022-07-09 06:16:39 AM] : And finally some others aimed at seaches for specific tools
[2022-07-09 06:17:46 AM] : That's where I stand now. My plan is to create a blog post for each of the questions I got and then add them to the book
[2022-07-09 06:18:46 AM] : I already promised every buyer of the original version to send them free updates when they became available so hopefully I can get some testimonials from them before doing a more public launch... what do you think of this idea?