KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays

by Comm, Joel

  The print book that I agreed to create with David Hancock went on to become a New York Times best-seller, giving me the kind of prestige and profile that I could never have earned any other way.

  Morgan James can propel rising entrepreneurs to a whole new level. It’s like giving your store a complete makeover, moving it up from a high-end shopping mall to a swanky Fifth Avenue boutique. You’re still making money. You’re still pushing buttons and hearing KaChings. But people look at you differently.

  Morgan James is very selective and demands an investment from its authors. It’s not right for everyone. There is an alternative, though. Printing technology has now evolved to a point where it’s possible to produce a single copy of a book and still make the effort financially worthwhile. Some of the companies that do the printing are even plugged into the main book distribution systems, enabling you to create a book and put it on Amazon and even in stores without having to fill your garage with boxes of unsold books. Not only will you be able to sidestep the big publishing companies standing in the way of your printed book, you’ll be able to become your own publishing company, producing your own books with practically no up-front costs at all.

  I had the opportunity to interview David Hancock regarding the entrepreneurial publishing model. You can download the MP3 audio at www.MadeEasyPublishing.com.

  You create the book and then promote it on your web site and through affiliate networks. But the book isn’t printed until the order is received.

  A number of companies offer services like this. Lulu (www.lulu.com) is perhaps the easiest and offers a wide range of different kinds of books, from publisher-grade soft-cover to case-wrapped hard-cover versions. The printing costs depend on the kind of book you want and the number of pages, but start at $5.30. Because you can set your own price, you’re guaranteed to make a profit on every sale. Amazon has its own self-publishing arm at CreateSpace (www.createspace.com).

  If you want to kick it up a bit, Lightning Source (www.lightningsource.com) works with some of the world’s biggest publishing companies. You have to apply to join its program, so it’s a bit selective, but this company is also plugged into Ingram’s, so you’ll have an easier time getting exposure, both in bookstores and online.

  The advantages of print-on-demand should be clear: There’s no risk, and you’re in control. The disadvantage is that because it’s not as selective as traditional publishing, it’s also not as prestigious. It can, however, make a useful alternative to an e-book for buyers who prefer to hold their books in their hands (Figure 4.3).

  Figure 4.3 Photopreneur (www.blogs.photopreneur.com), a blog that helps photography enthusiasts earn from their hobby, earns revenue with its print-on-demand photography book.

  Finally, when it comes to creating print books, there’s always traditional publishing. Because traditional publishing is so selective, it’s probably best to think of approaching major publishers as the last step on the ladder. You’ll find it much easier to get agreement for your book idea if you can already show that people are buying your e-book or your print-on-demand book, if your blog has lots of readers, and if you already have a following. At that point, the publisher can see that your knowledge has value and that people are willing to pay for it. You represent a much lower risk.

  BECOME A STAR WITH DVDs AND WEBINARS

  For many of the people looking to earn from their knowledge online, selling their expertise isn’t new. In addition to setting up web sites that explain how to invest wisely, write computer programs, or build better gardens, they also teach courses. Those might be small private workshops, or they could be evening classes at a local adult education center. Certainly, when you can build an audience at a class like that, you can also build an audience online and earn from it.

  Once your site is up and running, and once it has regular readers enjoying your knowledge, you should find that many of your readers will want individual, one-on-one learning opportunities. They don’t just want to read the articles you’re putting on your web site, they want to see you presenting that information in person. They want you to have the time to go into detail, and they want to be able to ask questions as you teach. When I asked my followers on Twitter what I should offer as a prize for a competition giveaway, the most requested item wasn’t an iPhone, a new laptop, or even a lifetime’s supply of pizza. It was a one-on-one lesson.

  Again, this is something that works well across every subject. Just as you can pay for classes on everything from flower arranging to zoology, so you can create a visual information product based on your expertise and sell it online.

  The easiest method is simply to record one of your classes. If you teach regularly, just put a video camera at the back of the room and let it run. You can always edit it later. If that approach is good enough for C-Span, it’s good enough for you. If you don’t teach regularly, just hold one class. Put on a seminar for people in your area and record it. Pack it with practical information, and you’ll be able to burn it onto DVDs and sell it online as an information product. You’ll make money once from the people who attend your seminar, and you’ll continue making money from the DVDs that you sell.

  There are plenty of DVD fulfillment companies around that will handle the copying and printing for you. Prices vary according to the design of the cover and the number of copies, but you can expect to pay no more than around $5 for each DVD. When LearningGuitarNow.com (www.learningguitarnow.com) can sell a six-DVD slide guitar course for $99, you should be able to pick up a big KaChing with every sale for discs of your classes.

  Filming yourself teaching and putting the footage on DVD does mean selling a physical information product. That’s very useful when you’re giving talks or putting on demonstrations. But when you’re selling online, of course, it’s not necessary. You can also create webinars and make them viewable for a fee, using PayPal or E-junkie to allow access. There’s plenty of software around, such as Glance (www.glance.net) and GoToWebinar (www.gotowebinar.com) that make the whole creation process very simple. The best way to learn how to use them is to do it. Try them out, practice, and you’ll soon discover that creating webinars really doesn’t demand any great skill at all.

  The same principle holds true for webinars and information products: They have to contain solid, practical information. Watch other webinars to see how other people do it, then slot your expertise into their models.

  One neat strategy is to use the information webinar not as a product itself, but as the free sample you use to sell a different information product. The post explaining the FTC rules that I put on my blog, for example, was very popular. But it was also light. The rules were horribly complex, and it’s very easy for online sellers to make a mistake that could cost them dearly. So my lawyer, Kevin Houchin, got together with a bunch of other legal minds—people who specialize in contract and commercial law—and produced a 230-page toolkit that explained exactly how the new rules worked. Buyers also received modifiable legal documents and regular updates as the rules were applied in the real world.

  Figure 4.4 The Site Compliance webinar provided solid information and helped Kevin sell his FTC toolkit.

  I know that a lot of work and expertise went into creating that information product, and I also know that the risks involved in not following the FTC’s guidelines—even accidentally—could be massive. So at $97 for 230 pages of legal advice I was certain they’d need some pretty big servers to handle the demand.

  Kevin’s a good friend and I wanted to help him, so to bring in buyers, we put on a free one-hour webinar (Figure 4.4). You can see that webinar at www.sitecompliant.com/webinar.php. You’ll see that first we used the webinar to capture e-mail addresses. Again, we don’t sell those e-mail addresses. Kevin just uses them to send potential buyers information about the legal aspects of doing business online. If they don’t want to receive that knowledge, they can unsubscribe. Kevin’s challenge is to make the information he supplies so interesting that no one wants to unsubscribe and
that people who didn’t buy his FTC toolkit the first time they saw it do so in the future.

  Users then receive a confirmation e-mail containing a link to the webinar itself. We tried to pack as much vital information as we could into that webinar, but we didn’t think that people would want to watch for more than an hour. To discover the rest, they’d have to buy Kevin’s kit, which is advertised at the bottom of the page.

  So you can put your information on DVDs and sell them online like any other product. You can create a webinar and sell access to it. And you can use that webinar as a free sample of the information that you have available in your premium information product.

  Is all of that stuff easy? Moderately. As with anything, when you know how, it’s a breeze. Creating DVDs and producing webinars doesn’t require any specialized knowledge. You just have to do it. The first time will be confusing. The second time will feel a little more comfortable. The third time you open the webinar software or upload your class footage to a DVD fulfillment company, you’ll wonder why everyone isn’t doing this.

  ONLINE TRAINING PROGRAMS

  A webinar is usually about an hour. That’s not a lot of time, but it’s enough to provide an introduction to a topic or go into detail about one strategy. A DVD course might consist of multiple discs and take several hours. An alternative approach is to create a complete online training course. Instead of being delivered on a disc, these classes can be taken on the Web. Once you’ve created the course, you’ll be selling access—exactly like a webinar.

  Creating a course isn’t as difficult as it sounds. Software company Articulate (www.articulate.com), for example, has a range of e-learning programs. They’re not cheap, but they do come with a free trial that lets you see that they really do create some attractive courses.

  This isn’t a product that’s going to suit every publisher or every topic. But if your subject can be turned into a long-term course, and if your site has a large enough audience to generate sufficient sales, the $399 or so that Articulate’s main course design program costs should start to look like a very good deal.

  Books—both digital and traditional—DVDs, webinars, and online courses are just some of the ways that you can create information products. Online entrepreneurs are using these methods, and I have successfully used many of these methods, too. But it’s not the format that’s important. It’s always the information.

  Get that right and the format is just a way of delivering your expertise to your buyers—and hearing a KaChing.

  Writing Copy that Sells

  Once you’ve created your information product—whatever kind of product it is—the next step is to build a sales page that pitches it.

  Of course, you’ll already have a web site that has regular readers, trust, and brand value. You won’t have to do more than mention that you have a book available for many of those users to rush out and give you your first KaChing. That’s the result of the online sales process: Like me, know me, trust me, pay me.

  Your regular readers will have already gone through the first three stages, so when you bring out your product, they’ll be ready for the last stage.

  But you don’t want to market only to your regular readers. You also want to bring in readers of other web sites—anyone, in fact, who might have an interest in the information your product contains. You won’t have time to lead those new people through that sales process. You’ll want to convert them right away by persuading them, as soon as they reach your page, of the benefits of your product.

  That means creating a page filled with effective sales copy—and usually that means creating a one-page sales letter.

  You’ve probably seen these letters online before. They’re unique to the Internet. Head to sales conferences and you’ll be given brochures, flyers, and all sorts of different promotional material, but nothing comes close to the length, detail... and sheer persistent power of an online one-page sales letter.

  That’s because offline, space costs money. The more content that sellers want to put in their sales materials, the greater their printing costs. When you’re printing thousands of copies at a time, those differences matter. On the Web, it doesn’t matter how much text you place on a page. While packing a page with too many videos and images can slow loading time, you won’t pay any more for space on the server—and that extra weight is unlikely to be a problem with a sales letter, anyway.

  When you’re selling online, you’re free to go on and on ... and on about all the benefits that your product can bring. Sales letters can be thousands of words long and offer testimonial after testimonial and subheading after subheading. They’re enormous.

  But they work. In one test conducted by Marketing Experiments Journal in 2004, long-form sales letters consistently outperformed short copy, sometimes by as much as 400 percent. In my own experience, I’ve seen upsells and one-time offers produce conversion rates as high as 70 percent. That doesn’t always happen. In fact, it doesn’t happen often, but I’ve never had it happen with any other sales technique.

  The reason that well-written long-form sales letters work is that they accomplish two goals. First, they have the freedom to describe every sales point and answer every objection that can be raised from every reader. That’s also why they’re so long: they have a lot of work to do.

  And the other reason they work is that their sheer bulk creates the impression that this product will do everything you could want and more. They bludgeon the reader into submission. One of the most common reactions to reading a one-page sales letter is, “Okay, I get it. How much is it already, and where’s the buy button?” When you have readers asking that question, you should have no problem at all converting them.

  Of course, the downside of a sales page that long is that no one actually reads it. Or rather, no one reads every word of a sales letter. But that’s the beauty of one-page sales letters: They don’t have to.

  Different readers will have different objections and will be persuaded by different benefits. As readers scan a sales letter, the format of the page—the subheadings, the bolding, the italics, and the testimonial boxes—will help them to notice the points and arguments that are most likely to push their buttons. Readers will begin at the top and, as they scroll down the page, stop naturally at the areas that interest them the most. Those subheadings and boxes provide easy entry and exit points.

  All of that information overload has another benefit: The details leave the reader more than satisfied. Whatever your product does, you’re going to have competitors. Saturate your readers with information, and they’re going to be less likely to look elsewhere for a similar product. If they don’t buy from you, they’re not going to want to start reading another sales letter all over again.

  One-page sales letters that promote information products aren’t subtle. They’re not meant to be. But they are effective, and they need to be well written.

  Usually, the best way to produce a sales letter is to hire an experienced copywriter to do it for you. Freelance services like eLance (www.elance.com) can be good places to look, and you can also try writing agencies like Scribat (www.scribat.com). Be sure to look at samples, but don’t expect the writer to be able to provide conversion results. Clients rarely share them with the writers who produce their sales letters. You’ll have to look at the sales letters and judge for yourself how persuasive they are.

  It’s also possible to write sales letters yourself. Although they look tricky, sales letters actually follow a very rigid structure and use all sorts of little copywriting tricks to lead readers to believe that they need your product. You’ll start with a gripping headline that attracts attention, lays out the problem, indicates that you have the solution, and describes the benefits that those solutions will bring. Subheadings are used to break up the sales letter and introduce new benefits, while testimonials help to build the trust you’ll need to make the sale. You can get those testimonials by handing review copies of your product to friends and colleagues and asking the
m to say something nice if they like it. Just make sure that you follow the FTC’s finicky new guidelines.

  If you don’t want write it from scratch, there are plenty of templates available that you can use to form your sales letter. My friend Michel Fortin, who has been called “the best sales-letter writer on the Internet,” has created a very neat program called ScribeJuice that makes the whole process very simple. You can find it at www.scribejuice.com. Even if you prefer to hire a writer rather than try to do it yourself, check out the sales letter on that page; it’s a perfect example of how a sales letter should work:• The gripping headline provides a solution to a big problem right away.

  • Bullet points at the first scroll down the page sell the benefits, not the features.

  • The red subheadings create urgency.

  • The black subheadings describe the content so that readers are able to spot the features that appeal to them.

  • And there are tons of testimonials that deliver that trust.

  Notice how Michel offers different products and uses an e-mail field to capture the addresses of people who haven’t been persuaded. He’s likely to pick up a very high conversion rate with a sales letter this good, but he’s not going to turn everyone into a buyer. In addition to sales immediately, he’ll also pick up plenty of near misses that he’ll be able to convert in the future with mailings and bonuses.