KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays (30 page)

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

Authors: Joel Comm,Mark Victor Hansen

BOOK: KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays
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It’s no surprise to find that his own platform offers all of these things, as well as search engine optimization, the ability to include AdSense units and affiliate links, a way to sell information products from inside the site, and a range of templates to choose from.
 
SubHub is not the only service offering the ability to create membership sites easily. WildApricot (
www.wildapricot.com
) is really geared toward helping nonprofits and clubs create member sites, but it can be used to build subscription sites as well. With fees that begin at $25 per month (although the $50 option offers more useful features), it’s not terribly expensive, but the sites can look a little cheap, too. At $97 per month, SubHub is almost twice the price, but the sites created
do
appear professional—and are worth paying for.
 
GrowingforMarket.com
(
www.growingformarket.com
) was created using SubHub. The site, which provides information for farmers, offers three different subscription levels. Online subscribers can download a PDF of each new edition of the magazine; “full-access members” can also access the archive; and “full-access-plus” subscribers receive a printed copy of the magazine each month.
 
Note that there are no community features on this site. SubHub simply allows the publication to restrict access to its content and charge a rate that starts at $30 per year. Assuming that the site is paying an annual discounted fee to use SubHub, it wouldn’t need to sell more than 33 subscriptions to cover the hosting, building, and maintenance costs. When you’re supplying key information to a tightly niched market, it’s possible to do that with content alone.
 
When you’re looking to build a membership site, there are plenty of other options around as well, including MemberWing (
www.memberwing.com
), a WordPress plug-in that lets publishers hide their premium content behind a pay wall. It’s also possible, of course, to create all of these features yourself. The advantages are that you won’t have to use one of the templates the platform provides and you’ll have complete flexibility about the site’s look, feel, and layout. If you’re handy with Dreamweaver and know what to do with PHP, then it shouldn’t take you too long. If you have the cash and want to hire someone to do it for you, it shouldn’t be beyond the skills of most decent PHP programmers.
 
A platform like SubHub will give you the site, complete with the protected content, membership forums, and all of the other things you’ll need to persuade people to sign up and pay. But what if you want a print magazine like the one I send to subscribers of my
Top One Report?
 
One option is to do what GrowingforMarket does: Create a PDF version of the magazine and place it behind the pay wall. It’s simple, and because there are no production or delivery fees, you can charge a small amount for it. In effect, you’re creating a different kind of blog, one with the format and layout of a traditional magazine. You won’t get the piracy protection, though. While PDF documents do have some level of protection, they can always be shared, e-mailed, and passed around.
 
In addition, they don’t have the perception of value that comes with a print publication, nor do they have the same ease of reading—which is why even GrowingforMarket charges more to send a copy of its publication to its subscribers’ physical mailboxes.
 
Creating a print publication doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive. While it’s always possible to work with a local printer who can run off copies for you, that can be expensive, especially for small print runs. Laying out the publication each month can be time-consuming, and you’ll still have to cope with changes in your subscriber list—which happens often, especially as your list grows. If you’re lucky, and you can work the extra cost into the price of the subscription, you might find that your local printer is also willing to address the envelopes, add the postage, and mail them for you. That should help to save you—or your assistants—some unpleasant work each month.
 
Again, though, much of the tricky stuff has now been simplified with automated online systems. One option is to use MagCloud (
www.magcloud.com
), a service created and run by Hewlett-Packard. You can create your magazine using any design program you want, upload it to the site, and receive a proof copy to review. Once it’s approved, the magazine is added to MagCloud’s store and is available for sale on a print-on-demand basis. The cost for publishers is 20 cents per page, but publishers get to set the sale price, so any rate above 20 cents is profit.
 
Don’t expect too many one-off sales just by listing your magazine on the web site, though. Promoting MagCloud’s store isn’t the best way to market your magazine. Instead, use the site’s bulk orders feature. You’ll be able to mail in your subscriber list and send the magazine to all of your subscribers automatically. Once the number of copies printed reaches 20, the cost falls by 20 percent. You’re billed for the printing costs, but if you’re collecting the subscription fees automatically anyway, that shouldn’t be a problem. You’ll have the cash.
 
The result will be a magazine of, say 24 pages, that costs $3.60 plus shipping to produce.
 
Those are just the printing and production costs. The real work comes in writing, design, and layout. Although a printed publication and a blog are just two ways of delivering information, the format of the information is very different. Readers have less patience online, so they’re more likely to read short posts of 1,000 words or even less. Magazines tend to have three different sections, each with content of different lengths. The front-of-book section might have an editor’s introduction, then news summaries describing events in your field. It’s supposed to pull readers in and spark their interest before they move on to the features.
 
Those features are the meat of the magazine, the place where subscribers will really feel they’re getting their money’s worth. The articles there can be longer than the kinds of posts you might be placing on a web site. They’re likely to be more detailed, perhaps include feature interviews or provide clear step-by-step instructions to achieving a goal. Your model will be the kinds of articles you can read in magazines rather than the kinds of posts you can see on web sites.
 
Finally, the back-of-book section might include columns or reviews—additional content that subscribers might find interesting. Of course, these are just guidelines. It’s always possible to mix things up and decide how you want your publication to look.
 
As for the writing—the most important part of your magazine—creating an entire magazine by yourself is likely to be too difficult and take up too much of your time. You will need to outsource the writing to members of your team, to professional freelance writers, or to guest contributors who are experts in your field. You should find that many people are willing to contribute for free, as a way of putting their own name and expertise in front of your readers, but it’s not difficult to work out how much you can afford to pay for regular contributions of features or columns. It’s still best to hand over the general management of the publication to someone on your staff. Creating the kind of magazine that actually contains the value it appears to offer is a pretty demanding job.
 
Even that is not as demanding as bringing in subscribers, to both the magazine and your membership web site. Because part of the value of the site will often be the community and its networking opportunities, the site will need a critical mass of members before subscribers will feel they’re getting their money’s worth. The best option is to focus first on building the community through your blog, Twitter timeline, and other social media channels; only after your traffic reaches a reasonably high level should you open the elite version of your subscription-based community.
 
Your magazine will be particularly helpful in making the conversions. The standard tactic for bringing in subscribers is to create a low-cost trial that automatically triggers the subscription fee if there’s no cancellation. I usually offer a trial of the
Top One Report
for $1, and I make the offer in various locations. It appears at the end of my e-mail newsletters; I tweet it occasionally in my timeline; there’s a giant button on my web site that leads to my TopOneReport member page; and, as we’ve seen, I also talk about it whenever I give away a free information product to help build my mailing list.
 
The community site tends to appeal more to people I meet and address at conferences. They like the idea of being able to continue talking and exchanging information even after they have left the hotel and headed back home. Much depends on where you’re doing the marketing and whom you are marketing to.
 
Membership sites can be huge revenue generators. If you can set a high monthly fee and bring in enough paying members, you can find that you’re running a club that’s bringing in tens of thousands of dollars every month and a handsome six-figure income in subscription fees alone. Although the mechanics of creating that site may no longer be difficult, it will require work and expense to build and maintain.
 
When subscribers are paying a regular fee, they expect to receive full value for those fees every month. Otherwise, you’ll find that the number of your subscribers will fall off pretty quickly.
 
While the writing, editing, and printing are all things you can outsource, a membership site does not offer the same kind of passive revenue as a page of content with an affiliate link or an information product sitting on ClickBank and being promoted by affiliates. New content has to be commissioned, created, edited, and published regularly. And because the time lag between writing, printing, and delivering is so much longer than it is online, the printed publication will need long-term planning and a lead time of at least a couple of months.
 
Even maintaining the membership site itself, where the members themselves will be doing most of the work, will need plenty of attention.
 
On the other hand, being the head of a community of paying members can be both incredibly rewarding and remarkably satisfying.
 
7
 
Coaching Programs
 
At the beginning of this book, I made a confession. I confessed that the success I’ve enjoyed online wasn’t all due to me. Sure, I like to tell myself that even though I might not have invented the Internet, at least I invented Internet marketing, but that’s not true, either.
 
My growth has come by working hard, spotting opportunities, testing different strategies to see which bring the best results, and through determined implementation.
 
But it’s also come by learning from others. Right at the beginning, I hired a business coach who helped me to find the best way to work. I’ve since hired other coaches who have been able to provide great advice and the benefit of their experience. They’ve been invaluable whenever I’ve moved into an area I’ve never operated in before, and they’ve certainly more than repaid the fees that I paid them for their suggestions.
 
That’s why once I found that some aspects of Internet marketing were coming easily to me, I was happy to share my knowledge with other entrepreneurs.
 
Of course, my e-books, my information products, and my web sites were doing that already. But there’s always something a little special about being able to meet with the coach, ask questions, and receive answers focused on your particular problem and your specific goals. It’s special to the person receiving the information, and it’s no less special to the coach. As a coach, I get the satisfaction of being able to interact personally with my audience instead of merely pouring my knowledge onto the page and hoping it’s valuable to someone.
 
It can pay pretty well, too.
 
While fees can range widely for coaching—from zero at talks where the main benefit is to lead people to buy your products (which, with the right talk can generate some giant sums) to thousands of dollars for just a few days’ work—coaching is one of the most lucrative ways for a successful entrepreneur to make money out of his or her expertise.
 
In this chapter, I explain how, once you’ve created a successful Internet business, you can move into coaching. First, I explain what coaching is; then I discuss strategies for branding, because who you are is going to be almost as important as what you know.
 
Then I talk about using PR to get mass impact for your coaching events and explain how to start a low-end coaching program before ramping it up to the high-dollar stuff.
 
Coaching isn’t for everyone. If you’re happy building your company by yourself, creating content, marketing products, and forging joint ventures, then that’s fine. It’s a great way to build a prof itable business. But if you do want to give back a little more, then coaching can be both a valuable and a very satisfying way to help others along the path you’ve created and to cash in on your knowledge.
 
What Is Coaching?
 
One of the themes of this book is that your knowledge is valuable. Whether that’s professional knowledge built up through years of training and experience or information that you’ve managed to accumulate by doing what you love, you have an asset that people will pay to own themselves. Blogs, information products, and membership sites are just different channels through which you can deliver that expertise online and receive a fee for it.

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