Tell me if this has ever happened to you…
You’ve spent hours writing that perfect blog post, and crafting a headline you know people just can’t resist clicking on, and once you hit publish…
Crickets.
Or how about that YouTube video you spent so long filming, editing and making sure it was just right, only for nobody to end up watching it?
Or even worse yet…
You ran a bunch of Facebook ads, but nobody seemed to care, or even bother clicking on them?
Money down the drain.
You’re not alone.
And figuring this all out – how to get people to engage with your content, your business, and your products – is literally the make or break for your business.
However, there’s one company that’s cracked this code.
Not only have they figured it all out, they’re literally laughing to the bank – to the tune of more than a billion dollars a year!
I’m talking about Agora Publishing.
And for a few years I was lucky enough to work for them, and get flown all over the world to be taught their billion-dollar secrets.
In fact, one of their biggest business secrets is how they’ve been able to build such a mammoth business off the back of failing ideas.
Sounds crazy, right?
Let me show you how they do it…
How To Build A Billion Dollar Business On Failed Ideas
Imagine you had the ability to know every funnel you poured money into was going to be a success?
I’m sure figuring this out would be worth millions to you, wouldn’t it?
Well, Agora Publishing has figured it out, and it’s not worth millions, but rather billions.
(Seriously, that’s how much they pull in each year, go check them out).
In a time when research has shown that we’re exposed to over 5,000 marketing messages per day, this kind of skill becomes even more valuable.
So, how exactly do Agora get people to simply walk straight past the other 4,999 adverts & marketing messages they’re exposed to in order to buy their stuff?
They’re using a concept called Accelerated Failure.
The idea behind it is that you need to fail fast and fail cheaply, so you can shortcut your journey to success.
“Harness the Power of Accelerated Failure – the faster you fail, the faster you succeed.” Bill Bonner
Since most of the ideas you publish won’t work, that also means that most of what you test will be failures too.
The trick is getting through those failures as quickly and cheaply as possible.
By eliminating the things that don’t work, you’re left with the things that do.
Did you know that Google has over 166 failed products?
It has a name, the Google Cemetery, and someone has even created a website dedicated to their failures: https://gcemetery.co/
You see, the meter is always running, the costs to run campaigns or even your business are perpetual, which is why you need to test and reject the things that don’t work so you can discover the things that do work as quickly and cheaply as possible.
The faster you make mistakes, the faster you’ll learn.
Obviously some mistakes can be pretty serious, and you don’t want to be making those. I’m certainly not saying you need to start taking massive risks here, you just need to be smart about the ones you are taking so that you’re left with winning ideas.
Think about it like this – You’re in the ‘what’ business, not the ‘why’ business.
Its about figuring out what works, not why it works, because the faster you can get there the faster you’ll find success.
In most cases you don’t know why something works, and that’s why you need to get to that ‘what’ as fast as possible (rather than spending weeks and months pontificating on the ‘why’).
But how exactly do you get to the ‘what’?
You fail. And you fail fast and cheap.
Since you don’t know precisely where success lies, you want to work through as many failures as possible so you can find success as quickly and cheaply as possible.
This is what accelerated failure is all about.
“If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness” Jeff Bezos
At the end of the day, the best ideas win, but the stumbling block is that more than half of the ideas you test are not going to work.
The problem is you just don’t know which half.
And it’s becoming more and more expensive to market these days, which is why you need to be good at marketing if you want your business to grow (let alone survive).
It costs exactly the same whether or not you send out a good campaign or a bad one, publish a good advert or a poor one.
This is why you want to spend time and money on ideas. Seeing which ones work and which ones fail.
Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking how much they need your product or service. You have to convince them, that you have something they need.
If you express that through a clear and concise idea that they will respond to, they will buy from you.
It’s a numbers game at the end of the day, and testing which ideas work and which don’t is how you’ll win.
You simply don’t know what’s going to work, which is why you need to test test test (IE fail repeatedly).
Which brings me to…
Ready, Fire! Aim
If there’s one thing I learned from Agora, its that to stay ahead of the competition you need to be very good at getting good ideas to market as soon as possible.
Being able to test ideas shows you what works and what doesn’t, so that by the time it comes to the more important forms of your marketing – where you’re spending lots of money – you know you’re armed with ideas that people will respond to.
You do this through the process of “Ready, Fire! Aim”.
“Improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures, and the magnitude of your success is based on how many times you’ve failed at something” Mark Manson
Chances are the campaigns you launch hardly ever ‘take off’ from the get go, and it’s no different for any of the big guns either.
Did you know it took ClickFunnels 6 months to find the right idea that people responded to in order for them to actually start making money? But when they did, they hit the million-dollar mark within a month (and ultimately did 10 times that in their first year).
When Dean Graziosi launched his book Millionaire Success Habits, in the first few months he could barely sell a few hundred copies a month.
It got so bad he actually questioned what he was doing. Thankfully a few months later he cracked his big idea and to date he’s sold nearly a million copies.
They both did something most entrepreneurs and marketers rarely ever do… they tweaked & optimized until they had a winner, and then they hit the “scale button”.
They spent months figuring out what didn’t work, until they found what did.
This is something most businesses simply don’t do.
They run campaigns, and when they don’t work they proclaim how “Facebook doesn’t work” or Google ads are “too expensive”.
It might seem incredibly straightforward, but so few people ever do this with their ad copy, landing pages, email subject lines, you name it. They never test their ideas.
You hardly ever have a winning campaign from launch, but if you test and optimize ideas beforehand, you’ll end up with a number of funnels that feed, run & grow your business on autopilot.
That’s the power of accelerated failure and “Ready, Fire! Aim”.
The Secret Behind Agora’s Billion Dollar Publishing Empire
Agora Publishing and Bill Bonner have figured out the secret to success.
It’s all about accelerated failure.
You want to fail fast and cheap.
You need to start testing ideas to see what people connect with, and what specific things resonate with your dream customers.
This is where things like your blog, YouTube channel, podcast, Facebook profile or Instagram page all come in.
Once you find good ideas you can then start to turn those ideas into things that actually matter, like products or campaigns that actually make you money.
The secret to your success lies in failing forward.
Until then, here’s to failing your way to success!
Steve De La Cour
Founder & CEO
Kong
