by Comm, Joel
Even when I sat down to create that book, I was following a model. It’s the model that we use now in helping others publish their first book via my friends at Morgan James Publishing. The credibility that individuals garner by having their book published helps them to become the leading specialists in their fields, to create their web sites, and to benefit from exposure.
If it works, do it. And if someone else is achieving success, copy them.
Mentors are hugely valuable in providing models for your own success. They provide knowledge, they provide connections, and they provide relationships.
They also provide another key to your success.
7. YOU HAVE TO GROW
One of my first mentors was a professional business coach. Back in 2005, he gave me a piece of advice that was so simple and so unwelcome, I wondered if he knew what he was talking about.
He told me to get an office.
I was working from home then, which I liked, and an office seemed like an unnecessary expense. But he was right.
I rented an office and hired an assistant. My stress levels dropped, my productivity went up, and the extra income more than covered the extra expense. Since then, every time I’ve hired someone, they’ve made money for me.
One of the toughest things that entrepreneurs have to do if they’re to achieve success is to let go. You have to fire yourself from doing the things that you shouldn’t be doing. You should be doing only the things that suit you best, the things that bring the most revenue to your business.
The rest you can give to someone else.
Outsource your tasks. Hire employees and freelancers. Form joint ventures with people who can bring skill sets you can’t supply yourself. Sometimes, you can even find volunteers who will work in return for free software, experience, or publicity. If you want to grow, you can’t stand still—and you can’t do everything yourself.
In this chapter, I’ve tried to reveal the value of your uniqueness, and I’ve explained the seven keys that you will need to open the gates of your success. In the course of the next five chapters, you will learn the most powerful, proven methods for turning that uniqueness into money on the Web.
Let’s begin with the foundation of online success: content.
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Content Is Not King ... It Is KaChing!
You might not be able to hear an actual KaChing sound as you’re building an online business, but there is one sound that you’ll come across so often it will remain stuck in your head like a bad pop song.
“Content is king.”
It’s the Internet’s chorus, what everyone says when they give advice to new publishers, and what everyone believes as they build a web site.
And they’re all right, of course. The Internet is made of content. It’s what web sites are built to hold and it’s the reason that people open a browser and type in a URL. Internet users surf to learn and be entertained, and they learn and are entertained by digesting content.
What they see will vary tremendously. Some people are just hoping to learn the latest football scores. Others want to read a report that explains why their team lost that match. And some people want to learn why some football tactics generally work better than others so that they can become football coaches.
Whatever you want to find online, whether it’s information that’s vital and important or trivial and entertaining, and however far you want to take your reading, the Internet is capable of delivering content that tells you what you want to know.
To build an audience online, you have to create content. The better the content, the bigger your audience, and the more influence you’ll have over your readers. The more readers and influence you have, the more advertisers will pay to pitch to them, and the higher your click-through and sales conversion rates.
Your ability to earn online then is limited only by your ability to create content that people want. And that’s not necessarily just content they can read. Although most Internet content is delivered through words, almost from the beginning, the Web has thrived on its ability to deliver content in all sorts of different ways.
However you deliver your content, as long as it’s informative, entertaining, or both, you can build an audience and create value.
In this chapter, I will explain the principles behind profitable content. I’ll first discuss how to create content that can generate income, and then I’ll reveal no fewer than a dozen different ways to turn that content into cash.
You Don’t Have to Be a Writer to Write Valuable Content
This is when people start to get scared. Once they’ve played around with Blogger or a web site template, they realize that actually there’s nothing to creating an Internet site. It’s just a matter of checking a few boxes and playing with menus. At the beginning, it all feels very strange and new, but within a few hours, it’s as simple as using a pocket calculator.
But the web site only provides a structure. It’s as though you’ve been given a store that contains nothing but empty shelves. You still have to fill it with stock. On the Web, that stock means content—and usually, that content means writing.
There are few shortcuts here. There is free content available that you can put on a web site—things like old books that are past their copyright and now in the public domain, and even old photographs and movies. But such content isn’t original, and you’ll be competing with all of the other sites offering exactly the same product. You might be able to make a little money with public domain works, but they’re rarely the foundation of a successful, ongoing Internet business.
That demands original content ... and that, in turn, requires original writing.
For people who have never written anything longer than a shopping list, that can sound terrifying. If the thing you hated most at school was writing essays and compositions, if you never got more than a D any time you had to put words on a page and give them to a teacher, I can understand that you’re not going to like the idea of putting words on a web site for millions of people to read.
The good news is that writing for the Web is not like writing for school. It’s not like writing for college, and it’s not even like writing for work.
It’s like writing for you.
That’s crucial. Obviously, if you’re a great wit and can crack jokes and tell killer stories, then you’ll have it easy. But you don’t have to do any of that. All you have to do is transfer the knowledge that’s in your head to the heads of your readers.
So don’t try to impress anyone with your writing skills. Don’t go flowery or use long words to show that you know how to use a thesaurus. There are no bonus points for pretty writing. There are, however, extra users and additional income available for clear writing—and that comes down to two things: information and style.
Of those two, information is the more important, so know what you’re going to say before you say it. On Twitter, you can write whatever’s going through your head at that particular moment, but when you’re writing an article or a blog post, you need to have a plan. That will ensure that every sentence communicates something important and that every word has a use. You won’t wander all over the page until you stumble over a good point.
The plan doesn’t have to be anything too detailed. It’s unlikely you’re going to be writing more than 1,000 words—attention spans on the Web are fairly short, and very long posts can put people off—so you won’t have to worry about creating long lists of subsections. But you should have an introduction, approximately three points that you want to discuss, and a conclusion.
That’s all there is to it. If you aim for each of those three points to run around 300 words, with another 100 or so for the introduction and conclusion, you’ll have your article.
If you wanted to write an article for a gardening blog about the right way to choose a bonsai tree, your plan might look like this:There are lots of bonsai trees available, so here are some principles to guide your buying choices:Climate—There’s no point in buying a tree th
at’s going to die in your garden.
Shape and size—What look suits your garden best?
Care—Do you want to prune and train the tree yourself, or do you want one off the shelf?
Keep these points in mind, and you’ll make the right choice.
Now, I don’t know whether those points really are important factors to consider when buying bonsai trees. But I do know that this structure is the simplest way to plan effective content on the Web: an introduction, three main points, and a conclusion.
Make the introduction hard-hitting. In RSS feeds and on blog home pages, users will see only the first few lines of the article, and they’ll use those lines to decide whether to continue reading. Your opening should be powerful and interesting enough to create the kind of curiosity that pulls readers in. And if you want to make it a little special, try to make sure that at least one of those main points is unique and original. When you’re writing on a popular topic, don’t just repeat what everyone else has said; give it a unique perspective—ideally, something drawn from your own experience.
Statistics can also help to show that what you’re saying is factual and well researched. You can find them on sites like census.gov, fedstats.gov, and the web sites of professional associations. They make your arguments look convincing and give readers solid facts that they wouldn’t have known otherwise. Saying that “according to the Nursery Sellers Association, sales of bonsai trees have grown 83 percent in the past four years” adds weight to your post.
That structure is a basic model that you can always call on when you’re planning content. You can adjust it for articles of different lengths and add or take away paragraphs depending on the topic. The structure itself isn’t important. What is important is that you use one every time you sit down to create new content.
Seven Content Types that Go KaChing
Content can come in many different forms, and all of them have their value and their uses. Here are seven of the most common types of content that you’ll come across online, together with their strengths and weaknesses, so that you can choose when and how to use them.
1. HOW-TO ARTICLES
How-to articles are the most direct way to transfer your practical skills to your readership. They’re like short manuals that teach a skill. Tim Carter’s site is packed full of them, and they don’t all have titles like “How to Grout” (although that is the name of one of his videos).
The main strength of these kinds of posts is that if you have the knowledge, they’re very easy to write. You simply want to take the readers by the hand and guide them step-by-step through the process of accomplishing the task. The format is largely the same whether you’re explaining how to lay tiles, create a layer in Photo-shop or perform a cobra in yoga. It’s all very simple: Just tell people what they need to do and, ideally, toss in a few pictures to show them. Scatter some ad units in appropriate places on the page, and KaChing, you have profitable content.
As an additional bonus, content like this tends to stay fresh for a long time. A post explaining clearly how to build a deck will be as useful six months after it was posted as the day it was written. Your site won’t degrade in time, but will grow increasingly valuable as you add new content.
The disadvantage of how-to articles is that posting a large number of them turns your site into a practical resource. Visitors might stop by when they want to know how to knit a sweater or back up their hard drive, but it’s unlikely to form part of their casual reading.
That’s not necessarily a problem. Sites like these can still make lots of money. But an online manual might not be the type of site you want to produce.
2. NEWS ARTICLES
News sites are among the most popular on the Web, but they’re not necessarily the most profitable. The big news companies like Fox and the BBC already have reporters in place who send back content, so for them, the biggest challenge has already been met and the biggest expense has already been covered. When it’s just you, you’ll struggle to bring in original content.
There are solutions, though. AppleInsider.com is a news site with no original news content at all (Figure 3.1). It simply aggregates news stories about Apple from around the Web. Anyone interested in following what’s happening at the iPhone maker can go to one place and find all the information they want. For the publisher, ads for Macs and iPods will always do well on a site this tightly niched. Alternatively, it’s always possible to throw the odd news article into any site and show that it’s dynamic and up-to-date.
There are a couple of problems with writing news articles, though. The first is that unless you’re breaking the news yourself, you’re going to be rewriting. Cutting and pasting content from a news site is illegal, wrong, and may earn you rude e-mails from lawyers. You’ll certainly hear a loud KaChing then, but it will be the sound of your money going out. So, you’ll have to rephrase the content and state where the information is coming from so that the copyright owners can see that you’re not stealing their product.
Figure 3.1 Applelnsider.com provides news-and ads-about Apple and the products Apple fans like.
The second problem is that while news sources are currently free on the Web, it doesn’t look like things are going to stay this way for long. News Corporation (owners of the Wall Street, Journal and a host of other newspapers) has already said that it plans to start charging users in 2010. Other publishers are waiting for News Corporation to make the first move before they bring in their own subscription models. That will make aggregating news on your topic more difficult. On the other hand, it will also make your site more useful to people who don’t want to pay multiple subscription fees to different news sites. Best of all, once users are accustomed to paying to read quality content on the Web, they’ll be more inclined to pay you for your content, too.
3. OPINION ARTICLES
News articles tell people what’s happening. They’re at their most valuable when the information you’re providing is exclusive or when it’s closely related to the subject of your site. But you can make news articles even more useful by combining them with analysis.
This can make all the difference between having just another web site in your field and owning a successful, important web site in your field. Whenever anyone reads the news, the question they always want answered is, “What does this have to do with me?” That’s true whether they’re watching Fox broadcasters explaining the deficit, a local newscaster reporting on the opening of a new car park, or a sports reporter interviewing a coach. While all of that might be interesting information, viewers want to know whether they’re going to be paying more taxes, spending less time looking for a parking space, or getting a piece of information that will help them win an argument in a sports bar. Tell your users why the news is important and what it means to them, and you’ll be transforming content that everyone has into unique information and demonstrating that your site is the place to come for expert advice.
For example, in October 2009, the Federal Trade Commission wheeled out a bunch of new guidelines governing the use of testimonials and endorsements in advertising. It was horribly complicated stuff, but it was vitally important to anyone who sells anything online. Anyone with a web site that sold products needed to know about the new rules, so it was no surprise that site after site reported the changes. But what I really wanted to know was what the changes meant. What was I allowed to do, and what did I now need to do differently? I contacted my lawyer for advice and, with his permission, shared that advice on my web site. You can read it at www.TwitPWR.com/newftc.
This isn’t just a news article saying that the FTC has brought out new rules. There were thousands of articles saying that. This is a professional opinion explaining what that news means, and it’s one of the most popular pieces of content on my personal blog.
Clearly, you don’t have to ask a professional to explain the news for you—although there’s nothing wrong with doing that and many will agree in return for the free marketing. You can also an
alyze it yourself, giving you another easy and valuable piece of content.
4. REVIEW ARTICLES
Review articles are among the most popular types of content, not because they’re easy to write—they aren’t—but because they’re very easy to monetize.
Create a site that offers reviews of new computers, for example, and you can be sure that many of your users will be people interested in spending thousands of dollars on a new machine. Next to your review of the new Mac, you’ll be able to place an ad, and if your readers are interested in making a purchase, they’ll be able to click through and spend their cash. Advertisers will be confident enough that it’s going to happen to pay you lots of money to tempt people to buy their products. You’ll find it very easy to get targeted ads, and you’ll find it very easy to convert users into buyers ... provided you can produce good reviews, and that’s the tricky part.