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

by Comm, Joel

  It’s even possible to run these group sessions online and at a distance, giving you more opportunities for marketing. Dr. Gina J. Hiatt (www.academicladder.com), for example, is a dissertation and tenure coach who helps students write their theses and academics boost their careers. She provides a range of different coaching environments, including an Academic Writing Club, which is a four-week online course; individual coaching, consisting of 30- to 45-minute telephone sessions; and group coaching, made up of a 60-minute group telephone call and dedicated listserv. Software programs like Group Coaching Manager (www.groupcoachingmanager.com) make managing group coaching relatively simple.

  Of course, it’s also possible to sell coaching products such as online courses and DVDs. These won’t be personalized in the way that one-on-one or group coaching can be, but they should form part of your coaching revenue streams.

  A basic coaching program is fairly easy to create. The packages themselves follow a familiar formula, and the fees can be very high, offering hourly rates of at least three, and sometimes four, figures—that’s a seriously loud KaChing. Your success will depend mainly on your ability to build your name as an expert and to instill confidence in potential students to sign up to receive your knowledge.

  You should find that’s something that will happen naturally as you create good content and build your community.

  Kicking It Up: High-End Coaching

  But what do you do then? You have a number of clients whom you speak with on the phone once a week. You do a weekly group session using conference calls so that everyone can learn from everyone else’s experience. And you might even have the odd local client whom you’re teaching on an individual, in-person basis.

  In addition, you’re still writing your web site content, earning from ads, and pitching your information products.

  All of those things are going to deliver steady streams of cash, and if they’re done right, they’re going to deliver that cash in amounts that will surprise you. You’ll be hearing KaChing rings all around you, and they’ll be so loud you’ll think you’re working in a bell tower.

  But it’s not enough.

  The real benefit of putting information online and making it available to others isn’t the money it will bring you. That’s wonderful, life-changing stuff but it’s not the biggest reward.

  The real thrill comes when you see other people taking that information, putting it to work, and seeing success themselves. I know that sounds a bit cheesy, and it wasn’t my main motivation when I started online marketing. I wanted to make money. But once I’d made money, and once I saw that money continued to come in regularly and abundantly, I really did start to get the biggest kick out of sharing my knowledge and seeing other people enjoy success.

  All of the strategies I’ve described so far will help you do that to some extent. But nothing will do it as efficiently as a high-end coaching program.

  This is a step up from other coaching programs. Low-end coaching programs will let you provide personalized solutions to others, who will then have to take those solutions and implement them themselves. You tell them what they have to do, and you have to hope they’ll do it.

  Many will, but plenty won’t. Even after paying for their coaching program, they’ll listen to you and nod and thank you, but when it comes to rolling up their sleeves and battling the problems involved in creating a business, they won’t bother. Instead, they’ll sign up for someone else’s coaching program and wonder why they aren’t achieving the success they expect. You’re being paid, so you’re happy, but if they aren’t willing to put in the work, then they won’t be happy, and that’s always going to be a problem.

  High-end coaching is about results. It means helping people who are genuinely serious about achieving success and giving them the knowledge and the tools they need to achieve it themselves. It also means being selective about the people you coach.

  This isn’t an attempt to sell as many items as possible to as many people as possible. Your information products should do that. This is about choosing the people you want to guide toward their goals so that you can have the satisfaction of seeing them succeed.

  There’s something in it for you too, of course. When a person you’ve mentored is able to say that he or she became a millionaire because of your advice and guidance, the perception of your expertise goes through the roof. Your sales will rise, your web sites will receive more attention, and you’ll have people lining up to join your coaching programs.

  Because you’re being selective, and because you’re prepared to give more to your students—more time, more attention, more of a guarantee even (it’s not unusual for top-end coaching programs to promise an ROI of perhaps “$5,000 or your money back”)—you get to charge a giant amount of money.

  You can be really bold here and base the fee on the actual returns you think that the students will see. That’s not the amount they might see if they bothered to implement your ideas. It’s the amount they will see when they do.

  Sure, a high price will put people off. You want to put those people off. You want to coach only those people who have the confidence, drive, and energy to succeed. They don’t expect you to do it for them. They expect you to tell them what they need to do so that they can go out and do it themselves. They really will understand that spending $5,000 (or whatever it is you’re charging) is going to be a great investment.

  There are a couple of models for this kind of high-end coaching.

  The first is an enlarged and selective version of your regular telephone-based coaching programs. The spaces are limited; you choose only applicants you want to work with; and there’s more contact each week.

  This was the approach taken by John Taylor (www.johntaylorsblog.com), a marketing consultant and publisher. John has produced several information products and is active on WarriorForum (www.warriorforum.com), a meeting place for Internet marketers. He used the forum to announce a special coaching program about Internet marketing. The spaces were limited, the fee was $697, and in return, he would provide two 30-minute Skype calls each week and answer up to five questions per day by e-mail.

  To be accepted into the program, applicants had to jump through a bunch of hoops, which included stating the amount of time and money they were prepared to invest in their success each week, describing the objectives they wanted to reach, and writing a 200-word article on their best Internet marketing achievement so far (Figure 7.4).

  This isn’t a coaching program aimed at just anyone, and John isn’t trying to make as many sales as possible. He’s advertising his coaching on a site where he knows he’ll find dedicated students, and he’s weeding out anyone who isn’t completely serious about achieving success.

  Figure 7.4 John Taylor lays down the law in the WarriorForum.

  But the format of the coaching is still very simple. The students themselves won’t need to do more than take part in a Skype chat twice a week, and John can remain in his office in Scotland, talking to students around the world.

  The second model is to make your coaching more intensive. Instead of working with someone over a period of a month—or several months if you want to renew the coaching program—you cram the entire program into one packed weekend.

  For that period, you’re going to be completely dedicated. It will be a little like organizing your own miniconference, so students are going to need room and board as well as instruction. You might well spend more time preparing for the program than you’ll actually spend conducting it.

  However, the returns can be enormous. Paul Hartunian, a professional speaker and publicity expert, used to train other potential speakers to create a career for themselves on the lecture circuit. His three-day workshops took place at his ranch in New Jersey and cost $4,995. Classes were limited to just 15 students at a time, which meant that three days of coaching would bring him as much as $74,925.

  Clearly, only a small fraction of the community you build through your blog, your information products, and
your social media networking will be interested in paying a four-figure fee and spending a few days at one of your workshops. Those are the people who are most dedicated to their success though, so charging a relatively high price will increase your chances of seeing your students achieve their goals.

  When it comes to promoting this kind of coaching program, value is going to be critical. Even the most ambitious and confident students will think twice before handing over several thousand dollars. They are not just betting on their ability to achieve success; they are also gambling on your knowledge and your ability to communicate.

  There is no greater test of the power of your brand and the amount of trust that your community places in you. You can make that test a little easier to pass by making clear that in addition to knowledge, students will also be picking up lots of bonuses that are worth at least as much as the cost of the workshop itself. Paul Hartunian, for example, places the bios of speakers who have passed through his workshop on his web site at www.hartunian.com/speakers, thus giving them some valuable advertising. He also supplies the actual contract he uses when taking bookings, allowing students to adapt it for their own businesses. That costs him nothing, but saves his students a small fortune in legal fees.

  These kinds of workshops aren’t likely to be regular events. The high costs ensure that they will appeal to only a tiny fraction of your community, which means that finding new leads could take awhile. But at these prices, they don’t need to be regular events. You’d have to do only one or two a year to give your income a very loud, extra KaChing.

  8

  Case Studies

  You’re not the first person to want to make money online. That’s good news. The pioneers had a lot of work to do. They had to figure out which tools worked the best, how to use them, and what sort of content they needed to serve in order to build audiences that they could monetize. They had to decide how to build the web sites, lay out the ads, and format the articles. They had to create the Internet that we take for granted today.

  It was a process that took time, lots of experiments, and plenty of failures. Occasionally, as you’re surfing the Web, you’ll come across an old-style web site, complete with flashing horizontal lines, cheesy animations, and cursor trails, and you’ll wonder how on earth a site like that ever managed to attract visitors. The answer is that there wasn’t much else on the Web at the time.

  Now that there is a lot more on the Web, those sites aren’t making money. The sites that are making money are the ones that follow the formulas that work.

  In this chapter, I describe a number of web sites that make great models for entrepreneurs. Now I don’t know whether these sites are making a lot of money. I know that some are making some money; I suspect that others are making giant piles of money; and it’s likely that still others could be making a lot of money if they really wanted to. But perhaps that’s not the main reason they were created. How much these sites are actually making isn’t important. What is important is how much you could be making if you follow the models shown on these pages.

  Content Sites

  All web sites rely on good content. That’s true whether their goal is simply to attract readers and have fun or to make money for the site’s publisher. In this section, I look at a number of sites that offer great content and surround that content with a range of different types of revenue channels.

  TRAVELS WITH SHEILA

  I’m going to start these case studies with a site I know well. TravelsWithSheila.com (www.travelswithsheila.com) is my mom’s web site (Figure 8.1). It’s also a great example of how anyone—and I really do mean anyone—can create multiple revenue streams online based on the knowledge that they’ve built up indulging their passion.

  My mom is nuts about travel. She’s been everywhere, and she’s always on the move. I don’t think there’s a country she hasn’t been to, an airline she hasn’t flown, or some personal belonging she hasn’t left in a hotel room somewhere. During those travels, she’s built up a huge bank of knowledge. She can tell you how to find archaeological digs in Israel, trek safely in Kashmir, and feed the penguins in Patagonia. She can also tell you which travel companies have the best bargains, how to pack smartly, and why “dynamic conversion” always costs you more when picking up the bill in a foreign restaurant. When it comes to travel, she’s a gold mine of information.

  When it comes to computers though, she’s never really been ahead of the curve. It took me quite a while to persuade her that sharing her travel knowledge and stories online could generate enough money to help pay for those constant round-the-world trips. Since launching TravelsWithSheila.com, she’s come to appreciate that all the time I spent playing with the computer when I should have been doing my homework actually gave me a great education. That’s priceless.

  Figure 8.1 Home page of my mom’s site TravelsWithSheila.com. Note how the first thing that hits you is the AdSense ads. That’s smart positioning! She also has a search box and a newsletter field for capturing e-mail addresses, all above the fold.

  The first thing that strikes you when you reach the site is two AdSense units. They dominate the above-the-fold content area. In fact, of the real content, you can see only the headline and a few lines of the first article beneath those AdSense units. The pictures running down the side of the page, which look like vacation snapshots, help to frame those ads so that they blend into the page, but it’s the ads that are front and center. This site is designed to make money (Figure 8.2).

  There are more AdSense units in the articles themselves. Each page has a horizontal text unit immediately below the headline, a placement that makes the ads look like navigation links. Another square unit is embedded right at the beginning of the article, and there’s usually another one at the end to catch readers once they’ve finished reading and before they click away.

  Figure 8.2 In this article, my mom talks about finding travel bargains, and she works an affiliate link into the text. You can also see a Kontera ad, a link to her telephone coaching, her train guide information product, and the adventure finder widget that pays on an affiliate basis. It′s good content packed with subtle, moneymaking channels.

  But AdSense isn’t the only method that the site uses to monetize readers. The text also contains Kontera ads, and in the left column there’s an interactive tool that lets readers find quotes for their next adventure vacation. That’s an affiliate widget. Above it is a link to an information product, a 17-page guide that my mom wrote about European train travel. Readers can download it for seven bucks. And above that is a small ad that links to my mom’s travel coaching service. For $47, she’s available for half-hour phone consultations. (Buyers also receive the e-book and a subscription to her weekly newsletter.)

  There’s revenue from AdSense units. There’s revenue from Kontera. There’s revenue from affiliate links. There’s revenue from an information product. And there’s revenue from some simple and occasional coaching.

  It’s all based on content—nothing more than short articles—and the specific knowledge that those articles contain. That’s vital. My mom tells great stories. She has lots of information to share, and the people who read her blog are both entertained and informed. AdSense, Kontera, her e-book, and the other tools that she places on her site give my mom a number of different ways to cash in on those stories and her expertise.

  It’s all very simple. There’s nothing technically challenging about the site—my mom really isn’t the technical type. It’s just good content monetized with the Web’s proven monetization tools. You can think of it as an example of a mom-and-pop commercial web site.

  READWRITEWEB

  TravelsWithSheila.com is a one-person web site that uses good content and a variety of channels to turn the information in that content into cash. It also uses information gathered by doing something fun. My mom doesn’t get paid to travel—except when talking about it online.

  ReadWriteWeb.com (www.readwriteweb.com) provides a very different mode
l (Figure 8.3). Created in 2003, the site is a technology blog rated by Technorati (a search engine for blogs) as one of the top 20 blogs on the Web. It was created by Richard MacManus, a New Zealander who had previously worked as an analyst and researcher in Silicon Valley. The site made use of the knowledge that he had built up while working with technology firms.

  Today, it’s no longer a one-person site. Although Richard continues to contribute regularly, the site has a long list of staff writers and guest writers, as well as a production editor, marketing and experience manager, and other people with big job titles. It’s not just a blog; it’s a business with a full-time staff.

  It’s no surprise that ReadWriteWeb uses a variety of methods to monetize its content and ensure that those staff members are paid.

  Figure 8.3 ReadWriteWeb is a giant publishing company of a site, with multiple contributors, premium reports... and many sponsors.

  One of those channels is syndication. The New York Times technology section buys the site’s content. That’s not something you can rely on, although it’s certainly great when it happens. Advertising though is something you can rely on when you’re producing good content, and ReadWriteWeb uses a number of different methods. There’s a vertical AdSense unit in the right column, which is always going to be helpful, but it appears that most of the advertising space on the site is sold directly as sponsored ads. The ads appear as graphic squares of 125 x 125 pixels that appear on a monthly basis on the side of every page. Companies can place those ads by contacting ReadWriteWeb directly. The site also runs CPM ads, which are managed by Federated Media (www.federatedmedia.net), a web site advertising agency.