Learning Notes for Empire Building Kit by Chris Guillebeau – Week 8

I’ll start off with an introduction, Chris Guillebeau is the author of The Art of Non-Conformity and Unconventional Guides. He runs a course called Empire Building Kit (EBK for short) that I purchased late 2011.

This post is a mind map summary of my learning notes from week 8. Enjoy! Click on the link to see a large version of my Mind Map for Empire Building Kit Week 8 (opens in a new window/tab).

The main lesson for week 8 of Empire building Kit for me was the importance of email lists. The other topics discussed were traffic and lessons from Brooke Thomas:

• Web Traffic: How traffic is the lifeblood of an online business. 8 ways to generate traffic including writing to all your contacts in a non-spammy way and getting traffic from social networks.
• Importance of building email lists: The major major lesson for me was the reinforcement of how email lists are really useful. I used to use AWeber (aff link) but then started using Feedburner since it was free. Now I have a list of over 2,000 people on Feedburner list for Singapore Part Time Jobs website but I am going to bite the bullet and convert to AWeber since it supports multiple lists, segmentation, split testing and follow-up series. The importance of having an incentive to sign-up was another major lesson for me. I have given myself some deadlines to first create two incentives for employers and job seekers and then convert the list to AWeber.
• Brooke Thomas lessons: Another emperor or empress lesson in this case and local marketing was discussed which was again very good for me. The main lessons were shifting mindset to contribution than promotion while thinking of all past clients who have found the service useful. This applies to me so much as sometimes I am hesitant to approach business owners even though we can have a win-win. The last lesson from Brooke was to align with like minded businesses which has got me thinking about synergistic local businesses.

Next Steps

There are several things you can do:

• Share this mind map with friends if you have enjoyed it via Twitter or Facebook.
• Agree, disagree or have questions/comments then leave a comment below.
• If you have purchased EBK, I’d like to connect with you.
• Check out Empire Building Kit (aff link) where you can choose from 3 different versions to purchase.

See you again next week.