Keep, Update
or Retire the Product?

Transcript from the episode recording, with speaker names added and paragraphs formatted for readability. Automated transcription may contain errors; the audio is the original record.

Brad Hauck 00:14

Some products pay the bills, but that doesn't mean they should stay. In this episode, we're going to tackle the hard call that most experts like to avoid. What do you do with an offer or a product or service that still brings in money but no longer fits with where you're heading? This is about strategic pruning, not panic. The tension sits between steady revenue and clear direction. When does a profitable offer turn into a brand anchor that keeps you stuck in the wrong place? How do you measure opportunity cost instead of just looking at monthly income numbers?

And what happens to your positioning when a legacy product keeps telling the market who you used to be? If you want to grow, you may need to let it go. The real question is whether you're brave enough to choose a direction that's different over your own comfort. Good morning, Dixie.

Dixie Carlton 01:02

Good morning, Bran. Wow, what an interesting conversation we're going to have today. There's a lot to unpack.

Brad Hauck 01:08

Yeah, it's a good question because so many people have products and they leave them on their websites and they talk to them about to the market, and yet their actual focus has changed completely. And should you keep that? Should you leave it as there, just in case someone wants it? Who knows? But so it's a good, it's a really good topic, and I think it's a good topic for this time of year because again, start of the year, we're looking at what we're doing as we move through the year, and getting rid of legacy products is sometimes a really good thing to do.

I know for myself, I have a few legacy products, and it's well, do I delete them, totally get rid of them, or do I move them like a video one? Do I put it on YouTube and just make it available to everybody? Or what do I do with all this stuff that I create? Because I'm a content creator.

Dixie Carlton 01:55

I completely understand. And I'm the same. Like you put hours and hours into creating something, and it's really hard to let them go, especially like if they're old books or workshops, or I've still got some notes from when I was doing retail training 20 years ago. And I do appreciate that that is never something I'm going to necessarily go back to. So I don't really need to keep those notes, but I still haven't quite managed to convince myself to let them go. There's order in me that doesn't like to sacrifice content that I've created.

Brad Hauck 02:26

Yeah, I think you spend a lot of money and time sometimes putting things together and other things you collect along the way as well that may not be products, but you put them aside and go, I'll need that one day. Yeah, with this massive stuff. And it's really good opportunity when you sit down and you think about okay, where am I going? What products do I have? We talk about funnels a lot, but a funnel is designed to drive people down a stream of products, basically, or a stream of services to get people to move on.

But if you've got too many products sitting there, you're actually diluting your funnel because people are like, oh, you got that and you got that, you got that. Oh, well, where do I start?

Dixie Carlton 03:06

And that's of course the classic thing about confusing your market, which is the worst thing you can do for your personal branding. Confuse the market. And then we'll then wonder why everyone's not picking up what you're putting down when it's round two.

Brad Hauck 03:21

Yeah, absolutely. Thinking about products, they're often what we call brand anchors because we anchor everything we do to drive people to buy in that product. But then the market changes. So where I used to talk exclusively about search engine optimization, now I'm talking about AI and bringing elements of that into search and content creation and being a leader in your field within your industry, taking and doing that. So, does a product I have about how to do SEO on your site have any place anymore? Because I'm talking about AI. They're not they're not exclusive. I can see how you can tie them together, but are they truly worth keeping or is it worth moving on?

Dixie Carlton 04:03

Well, that's such a great question. And I think that's something that only every individual can answer, to be completely honest. Sometimes it is an easier thing to say, but this still fits with that is not different, that is an andor not a yes but situation. I think it depends very much on whatever else is going on, what all of the situation really looks like in terms of what product, what content. Like I've got books that have been around for 25 years nearly, and they are never going to be something that I go back to and work in that space.

My first book was about the power of promotional products. And I had a promotional products company for 10 years, and I had moved into writing by writing down everything that I had been telling my clients about the business of using promotional products as marketing. So that was then. I don't have any reference to that book or any of what I do with that on any of my website or any of my marketing materials. I still use my knowledge in that space, but it's not a book that I would ever put in front of people now because it would just confuse my market.

But at the same time, every now and then I also look at that and I think, oh, but that was a really successful book. That was a really good, and I really like oh, we're talking about direct mail and getting back to basics a few weeks ago. And well, maybe I should pull that out and write it again or do an update. And so that's always an option. But that's still not necessarily fitting with what the rest of my career path has been all about. So I also have to take responsibility for saying, let's not go confusing the market, Dixie, as much as it might be a fun thing to do.

Brad Hauck 05:47

Yeah, exactly. And also I think you make a good point there. It's a book. In the case of books, can sit on Amazon forever if you want to, and they can keep selling. So they become part of your back catalogue, as we call it. And they're always there as well, you've written all of these books. So you must know something. And that's fine. But whether you have it on your website or whether you talk about it when you're on stage, well, that's different entirely. And then if you look at a course, one of the things I had a an SEO course that I did, it was fantastic at the time.

Now I look back at it, and of course, the video quality's shocking compared to what we have now. And I looked entirely different. And all these things, the web looked different even. So you look at it and you go, well, actually, it hasn't dated well, just given the nature of technology and change. So do I keep it or not? The content might still be relevant. So that's where you start to become, well, it's good stuff and it still applies. But on the other hand, does it reflect your business in the light that you want your business to look now when people look at you?

Dixie Carlton 06:57

Yes, it's the old question, do I stitch it together and make a different kind of quilt out of it that really becomes more patchwork, or do I let it go and get something that's a little more sophisticated looking and functioning into my ecosystem of my marketing tools? And I think increasingly it is a better idea to let it go and move towards the more sophisticated looking information or content that does support you further as you get more and more into the role that you're doing. Yeah.

Brad Hauck 07:30

I think when you look at some of the really top speakers, they'll come out with a book every couple of years and they will basically let go of the old idea and they'll move into the new idea that they bring to their audiences. So they will be talking to the same audience possibly, but with a new topic. So they get invited back to speak because they've got a new book, a new topic that fits with current thinking or forward thinking. So there's also that aspect where you actually are just going, okay, well, completely new topic, move forward.

Some people work that way, and I think that works really well. It depends really, I think, in all in some cases, what field you are in and what how you talk, what you speak on.

Dixie Carlton 08:14

And also some fields grow significantly faster than others, like technology, social media, for example, they are all fast-growing career paths or topic areas. When you look at other things like, let's say leadership or management concepts, HR concepts, that's still a big flourishing growth industry for a speaker or an expert to get into. But the overall concept of that has not kept pace with the speed of which technology and social media, for example, has yeah, it doesn't change.

Brad Hauck 08:48

If you look at those topics like leadership, and I do a little bit of work in that area with my firefighting, and it really doesn't change. The basics of leadership are leadership because we're talking about psychological skills and things like that. So while people come out with new theories, it doesn't necessarily mean they've actually embedded something new. And whereas social media, that's a great one. What Instagram is now wasn't 12 months ago. It's entirely different. And so there is very much a difference of do I cut it or not. So definitely, I think working within your own market and understanding the speed that your market changes will affect that.

Dixie Carlton 09:28

And I think this also comes back to a very basic thing about personal branding, is that you have to keep pace with it. Like you don't want to necessarily go all out and change completely and radically. You want to continue throughout many years of evolving your personal brand. So your branding keeps up with what's changing in your industry, and you're keeping up with what's changing in your industry. But you don't have to necessarily go saying, hey, I'm gonna throw the baby out with a bath water and start completely fresh every single time. I think it's an evolution, not a complete diversity.

Brad Hauck 10:07

Yeah, you know, you're not gonna be throwing products away every day. But you know, it is important to understand that some things are probably a little bit more green, they last forever. So if we take something like how to win friends and influence people, it's pretty timeless. And so you really can go forever on something like that. And but if you talk about how to use the internet to get more business, well, that that will be gone in two years. So it really does depend on what you're doing. And uh you brought up before about your book, and you were saying about do I rewrite it, do I release the version two?

And that's not a bad idea in some cases. Some books really good when they're updated because the basic premise of what was in the book is great, but maybe how you do it has changed slightly, or maybe you've learnt more and now you can bring new stories or new ideas to the concepts you're already talking about.

Dixie Carlton 11:06

Well, Adam Houlihan is a great example. We've done his books for a few years where every second year for Lint Dunn, because he's a LinkedIn master, for Lint Dunn, he would update the entire book on a two-year cycle. So he had two books that every year would be updated one after the other. And he did that over several years. And that's a good way of approaching something that's a social media, for example, social media talk, like and I think AI, lots of AI books coming out now. I think it'll be the same with that. I've personally updated several of my books over the, in some cases, over many years, because like my advertising, branding and marketing 101, which started out as being called Navigating the Marketing Mindfield, I first released that back in 2006 or 7.

And it has evolved just as everything else has evolved. New covers, new design. I've added an extra chapter in in the last evolution of it about using AI for your marketing. But at the same time, it's still a book about the basic jargon and understanding of what marketing is in relation to advertising and branding, and how they are different and how they fit together. That is the general concept of that book. And so it's now, I think, into its sixth or seventh edition. And some books you can and should do that with. I've also got From Idea to Authority, which is part of my Author Journeys series, and that has also been updated, I think, maybe four times now.

Because sometimes there are things that need to be added in. And it's also good to refresh the brand of the book or refresh the content of the book, regardless. I often get people saying to me, Oh, well, I wrote this book about I'll give you an example, someone who was a a marriage counseling coach. She said to me, Well, I've got this book that I did about eight years ago, but I don't really know that it's necessarily my thing anymore. And I said to her, Well, are you still doing that work? And she said, Yes.

I said, has the work itself changed? And she said, not really. I said, well, why don't you just refresh it, get some new reviews, maybe just add a couple of extra checklists in there or some extra great content, give it a new cover, and just say, hey, this is a new edition and this is revising what you've already got without changing anything, but making sure that it's still current and appears to be current and serves you. Yeah. I think it again, as you said before, it depends on the industry, it depends on everything else that you're doing and how you want to be perceived going forward for the work that you do.

Brad Hauck 13:39

Yeah. And I think also we often look at products and go, that was a good product, and we update it and all that. But we also have to be realistic. How many sales have we had of it? How many downloads have we had of if we're giving it away as a lead magnet? Is it actually worth the time and money to actually bring it up to date? Or are you just kidding yourself? You think it's a great product, so you're updating it for you. If the market hasn't bought it, you're selling one copy, so whoop-y-do.

Is it worth the effort and time to do that? And often we get caught up in our own stuff. So we think, no, this is a really good book. I remember way back when I sold hundreds of copies of this, so I should redo it. But that doesn't mean if it hasn't sold hundreds of copies for the last couple of years, probably telling you that the market doesn't give a crap anymore. And that's technical to empathy. That's important to realize that the market's actually reflecting something back to you. Just updating it doesn't mean it's actually suitable.

In in the case of your marriage person, that made sense because they were still talking about it, it was still applicable. So yes, it was absolutely worth doing. It wasn't worth culling. And so it it makes sense to do that. And sometimes maybe it's worth actually talking to someone outside of your area, too, or to some other people, and say, I've got this and what do you think? And get a little bit of feedback. And then they can ask you questions, or in your case, I think you know, going to an expert is the best way.

She came to an expert, you're able to ask the right questions. And that that's really important too. Asking the right questions is key.

Dixie Carlton 15:16

Absolutely. Oh, there you have it. I think we've given people a lot to think about. Do I update? Do I not? Do I diversify? Do I stay on the same path? How is it that I can really maximize my convincing myself that I should keep something old versus refreshing something old? And again, I think you just nailed it. You need to sometimes talk to an expert about what you actually need to be focusing on.

Brad Hauck 15:44

Absolutely. And the final thing I would say is that make sure you archive whatever you're doing. So that even if you pull it off your website and you stop selling it, archive it because the chances are that you'll want to come back to it at some stage. So, for example, with videos, I'll actually archive them onto YouTube and I will put them as unlisted. So I can always go and get them because I can download them from YouTube, but they're stored somewhere pretty safe. And I've made the mistake before where I've deleted videos from courses and then gone, oh my gosh, I wish I had that because I wanted to give it to somebody to show them something.

So just remember, just because you've removed it from your products and services catalog, that you shouldn't remove it from your digital history.

Dixie Carlton 16:30

Absolutely 100% agree with you.

Brad Hauck 16:34

Okay. Well, thank you for tuning in The Experts Journey today. If you picked up some useful tips, take a moment to subscribe and share this episode with a fellow speaker or expert in your network. It really helps us reach more people.

Dixie Carlton 16:47

And if you can, go ahead and make sure that you review our podcast as well. That's always helpful.

Brad Hauck 16:53

Excellent. And if this episode has you thinking about writing a book, but you're not sure how to shape your ideas, structure your thinking or turn your expertise into something people actually want to read, reach out and talk to Dixie at indiexpertspublishing.com. She'll help you turn what's in your head into a clear, compelling book that creates authority the right way. And if you're doing the work but not getting enough clients, start with clarity. When your message is clear, everything else works better. That's where I come in. The brand clarity blueprint helps define what you're really knowing for me.

You'll find me at www.bradhauck.com. Take the step that fits where you're stuck right now, and we'll catch you in the next episode.

Dixie Carlton 17:34

Lovely. Thanks, Brad. Have a great week, everyone.