What's the book about?
“Lazy Entrepreneur” John Lamerton shows readers how to avoid working harder than they need to – by leaning into a content marketing ecosystem that, once created, has momentum and ongoing residual benefit – enabling you to do the work once, and reap the rewards again and again.
What problem does the book help you solve?
If you’re currently posting daily on Instagram, twice a day on Facebook, tweeting five times a day, and writing a couple of dozen LinkedIn posts every week, then you’re probably so busy creating free daily content for the silicon valley tech companies that you’ve got no time left to actually run your business.
What do you do if you want more business next week? That’s right – you have to keep writing more free content. You’re stuck on the social media hamster wheel.
Evergreen Assets shows you how to build a complete business ecosystem of content-led assets, that you own and control – ensuring that your content marketing works hard for you, rather than the other way around!
What's the most useful part of this book?
The book is structured around the six Evergreen Asset “classes”:
- Leads
- Nurture
- Sales
- Fulfilment
- Admin
- and Viral.
This means that once you know what part of your business’s ecosystem needs work, you can jump straight to that section.
As John says in the book:
- “If your phone isn’t ringing, you may need lead assets.
- If no one’s buying, focus on sales assets.
- If they’re buying but not paying (or not paying on time!), add some admin assets.
- And if everything’s working like clockwork, but you simply want to turn one customer into more than one – let’s add some exponential growth with some viral assets.”
Each section also has a “One Asset to Rule Them All” – highlighting the highest-ROI, biggest bang-for-your-buck, lowest hanging fruit that you might want to tackle first, as well as a TL/DR (too long, didn’t read) recap at the end of each asset, so you don’t miss the important stuff.
What 3 lessons have you learnt from the book?
1. Focusing on creating Evergreen content increases your Actual Hourly Rate.
The ROI from Evergreen Assets is lower in the short term, and exponentially higher in the long term – especially when you combine multiple assets and allow the residual benefits to compound over time.
In the short term, you may need to turn away paid work for the hour(s) of creation and receive nothing in return for weeks (or months) on end. But the beauty of Evergreen Assets comes further down the line, when – in many cases years later, you’re continuing to earn from an asset you created long ago, constantly increasing the value of the time investment in creating the assets.
2) “What’s working right now” is a myth.
There’s a rather amusing anecdote towards the start of the book that anyone who’s ever sat through a “selling from the stage” pitchfest will resonate with.
John takes us to a Holiday Inn Express somewhere on the M25 on a damp and grey Sunday morning, where a poor imitation of Tony Robbins is trying to use his NLP hacks and the “what’s working right now” guru-magic-trick to rob you of £1,997.
John reassures us that we can safely ignore “what’s working right now”, and instead focus on “what’s always worked”. Say no to shiny objects, and yes to objects that last for decades (or longer).
3) You’ll sell more by not selling.
John makes the counter-intuitive argument that by selling less, you’ll sell more.
By giving more away for free, by not selling at every opportunity, and by playing the long term game (there’s a recurring line that John uses throughout the book – “it’s not a numbers game. It’s a relationships game.”
John’s “One Nurture Asset to Rule Them All” is to send weekly emails, that don’t sell anything at all in them – and he demonstrates time and again that this approach actually increases sales – because it elevates you above all the other desperate people trying to flog their wares by simply shouting louder and louder.
Who would you recommend this book to?
This book would be really useful for anyone who’s working harder than they need to.
Anyone who’s currently stuck on the social-media-hamster-wheel, who spends their days constantly chasing shiny new objects, or who has been sucked into paying for courses on “what’s happening right now”.
This book will inspire you to think much longer-term about your content marketing strategy, and offers a “swipe-and-deploy” framework for doing so, that will enable you to do the work once, and reap the rewards again and again (and again!).
You can get a free chapter of Evergreen Assets here.
