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How Blogs Helped The Four Hour Work Week Become a Best Seller - The Timothy Ferriss Interview

I’m sick of the usual interviews with Tim Ferriss, which waste time arguing over whether it’s possible to work four hours a week. What I want to know is how Tim got so many people to talk about him and his book, The Four Hour Work Week, and how he made his book into a New York Times Best Seller.

So I called him up and did my own interview. Here’s what I learned.

Blogs and radio

Before he published his book, Tim called successful authors to find out how they promoted their books. He discovered that the two most effective tools were blogs and radio–and radio was losing its influence. So he pursued bloggers

Least crowded channel

All the methods of connecting with bloggers were loud and crowded. Email is the most crowded. (Maybe because most people haven’t listened to my interview with Mark Hurst.) In-person, he says, is the least crowded channel. So he went to events that let him connect with bloggers face-to-face.

The messenger, not the message

Tim realized that building connections was about getting people to care about him, not his message. So he didn’t promote himself. He just got to know people by asking questions.

Robert has a mob around him

Blogging celebrities like Robert Scoble have mobs of people around them at events. (Here’s why.) Tim didn’t push his way in. Instead, he got to know the people around the celebrities–like Robert’s wife.

Being “trendy”

Alana Semuels, tech writer at the LA Times, taught this at the Mixergy PR Forum. She said that reporters don’t care about your company nearly as much as they care about trends. So when you want publicity, pitch a trend that includes your company. When Tim tapped into his blogging connections to promote his book, he didn’t pitch the book directly. Instead, he pitched a trend–people are outsourcing more and working less–and said that his book explains it.


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October 21, 2008 | Filed Under Interview, podcast 

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10 Responses to “How Blogs Helped The Four Hour Work Week Become a Best Seller - The Timothy Ferriss Interview”

  1. Olivia Kuhn-Lloyd on October 21st, 2008

    Great synopsis and solid answers to the other important question that surrounds Tim and the book. I get so much great info from these interviews and the forums. I feel like I need a cheat sheet of ideas that I can continually implement and build on. I guess that’s my job. You harvest the ‘pearls of wisdom’–I need to implement.

  2. M!hai @ Freshome on November 6th, 2008

    Tim is an internet artist, I’ve followed his evolution on the internet and I really appreciate what he has done.

  3. Rob Chant on November 11th, 2008

    Ah, okay, smart guy. I’ve just read through the key points, and working out how best to approach people based on finding the least crowded channel is one of those very obvious but somehow very cunning moves.

  4. Andrew Warner on November 11th, 2008

    Rob: Thanks for the comment.

    Going for the least crowded channel, in person, seems obvious, but isn’t it overlooked? Also, even if others do discover it, I think they’ll be too lazy pursue it. It’s too much work.

  5. Rob Chant on November 11th, 2008

    @Andrew — no problem, thanks for the reply.

    That’s what I meant really; it’s one of those really simple but brilliant ideas that everyone thinks they can have, but very few people actually do.

    I’ve still not watched the actual interview, but from the key points, what impressed me more than the idea itself was the way Tim approached the problem of getting his work out there. It seems as if he just completely ignored the status quo, cut away all the rubbish and just applied the simplest, most logical solution to each problem (with a good bit of lateral thinking thrown in I guess). That’s what’s really rare, and really smart. Or am I reading too much into it?

  6. Andrew Warner on November 11th, 2008

    @Rob - Tim is probably the biggest systematizer I ever interviewed. Everything he does seems to have a clear blueprint in his head.

    Actually, Mark Hurst is like that too. If you listen to my interview with him, you’ll see he has systems for speeding the most basic tasks.

  7. Rob Chant on November 11th, 2008

    @Andrew, thanks for pointing that out, I’ll have a look.

    Systemising is really important, but I think that really clear thinking and ignoring accepted ways of doing things is more son.

  8. Curtis Ludlow on November 13th, 2008

    Wow.

    Great advice! Thank you!

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