The Six-Figure Second Income: How to Start and Grow a Successful Online Business Without Quitting Your Day Job (12 page)

16. Information Wheel

Also cal ed slide charts and wheel charts, these were ancestors to the hand-held

computer but they’re great even today. Some of them are disk-shaped where you spin

one wheel that has little windows punched in it to reveal information on the disk

underneath. When you properly line up the windows it provides the answer. Other

versions are like paper slide rules, where again you line up several moving cards to

arrive at an answer.

If you stil don’t know what I’m talking about, you can see them in action at:

www.alcott.com. They never need batteries and can’t be hacked into or infected with

online viruses. They’re compel ing because they are so retro. In our hyper-tech age it’s

almost like going back to an abacus—it makes people stop and think, “
Wow
, I haven’t

seen one of those in decades.
Cool!
”

People wil not throw them out and are likely to show their friends. It can be an

excel ent bonus for you to offer alongside your product or it can be a product in its own

right.

17. CD

We discussed audio CDs before. You may know that you can also put video on a CD,

depending on its length and format. CDs are one of the mainstays of the info product

world.

Some manufacturers make tiny round CDs and even ones in the shape of a business

card. I suggest you do not bother with these formats because they have been known to

damage CD players, and that is the last kind of impression you want to leave with a

potential customer.

Of course, technology has advanced beyond CDs to iPods, USB drives, and many

other formats. You can also ask a potential customer to download an audio file off the

web, saving you the trouble of creating and shipping a CD.

Be very cautious about going down that route because what is easiest to produce

often is not the most effective for sales. First, let’s consider the road warrior who’s an

ideal prospect to listen to your stuff during his long commute. Virtual y al cars now have

CD players, but if you ship your product or special report on a USB drive, only a fraction

of cars have ports for them.

Similarly, if you get your prospect al excited to listen to your audio but then ask him to

download it, wil he bother to? And if he does, the next morning he’l be running late for

work. Do you real y think he’l remember to hook up whatever needs hooking up in order

for your download to play in his car? You better not assume al your prospects are tech-

savvy or you’l be greatly disappointed in the response.

For the time being you’re safe to ship CDs. Consider it the minimum requirement but

you’re free to have alternatives where you give customers or prospects the choice of

CD, USB drive, or download. It’s more work for you but more convenient for customers.

Besides, any competitors you have wil not bother to do the work, thus giving you yet

another competitive advantage.

18. DVD

DVDs share many of the same characteristics as CDs but here are the distinctions:

DVDs are only slightly more expensive than CDs and they hold a lot more information.

The bigger issue with DVDs is that only a fraction of cars on the road have DVD players.

Even if al the vehicles on the road had DVDs they’re not as user-friendly as CDs

because you can hardly expect drivers to peer closely at the tiny screen to see what your

mouse is doing on the web page you’re showing. Even if you have Hol ywood-quality

video on your DVD, again you have the distracted-driver matter to contend with.

It doesn’t get too much better at home, unfortunately. After the novelty of DVDs wore

off, marketers realized that many customers just can’t be bothered with sitting in front of

a computer or DVD player for hours, watching video. They’re so accustomed to great-

quality video via television that al but the most devoted fol owers get bored and turn off

the DVD somewhere in the first disk.

Here’s the bottom line for you: Don’t rely solely on DVDs to deliver your content, but

make sure that you give people options to hear just the audio portion of the DVD via CD,

or perhaps get a transcript of the session along with printed screenshots of any

important visuals.

19. Interview Series on MP3

I touched on a version of this earlier in Number 6. You can add value to a series of

interviews by making them available not only in transcript form but in both MP3

downloadable form and even as CDs to be shipped to the customer as wel .

20. Free Video

Online videos have become wildly popular in recent years, what with YouTube and

hundreds of other places to view free videos. Therefore, the fact that they are free is

about as impressive as saying, “Congratulations! You’ve won the right to make a free

local phone cal .” Big deal. We’l talk more about free video in the lead-generation

section, but here I’l just say this: If you make sure that your video gives some real y solid

or real y entertaining content, it can be a major boost to your online efforts.

21. Live Event Videos

This can be a great product to give to people who don’t have the time or money to attend

one of your multi-day live events. However, here’s a major warning: If you take an entire

live event and reduce it to videos, you run a major risk of cannibalizing the sales of your

live event.

Here’s what happens: Joe is thinking of going to your three-day event in Chicago but

isn’t sure he can swing the cost. If your event is compel ing enough, he just might get

creative and cobble together the money and vacation time so he can go.

Now you come out with a DVD set of your last event, and three bad things happen.

Bad Thing Number One

Joe decides: Hey great! I don’t need to go to that $4,000 event after al ! I can just sit at

home and watch the DVD set for $500. I’l buy it. In some cases, Joe couldn’t ever have

gone to your event so you made $500 on him rather than zero. You can also be sure that

in other cases you would have had Joe at $4,000 and now you’l get only $500.

Bad Thing Number Two

The DVDs sit in Joe’s office and he never watches them. Oh, he wanted to and hoped

to, but there always was something more pressing than to glue his butt in that seat and

study the DVDs. The less Joe gets into the DVDs and learns the system, of course the

less benefit they are to him, which means he’s more likely to refund the product

purchase.

That’s one of the great benefits of getting people to be at a live event—you have their

ful attention, more or less. They get caught up in the enthusiasm of others and hear al

the other peoples’ questions and then the answers. They get immersed in the subject

matter in a way that is extremely rare for the home-study course person to accomplish.

You wil indeed find some people who real y do grab the bul by the horns and extract

value from every page of a home-study kit, but it’s less common.

Bad Thing Number Three

Mary just went to your live event last month and thought it was pretty good. She met a

number of valuable contacts and got al her questions answered. Then she went online

and discovered that the videos of her event are sel ing for $500 and not the $4,000 she

paid to attend live.

What should Mary conclude? She should think to herself, “That’s okay. If I got the home

study videos I probably would have never watched them and certainly would not have had

al my questions answered. Besides, I wouldn’t have met those people from Missouri

who wil be great to do business with.”

That’s what she should think, but this is what she does think: “How dare they sel the

event videos for 500 bucks! I paid 4 grand for that event and now most of it is right there

on DVDs. I got ripped off!”

Whereupon, Mary goes onto every blog she can find and announces how you’ve

ripped off her and the other seminar attendees with your new DVD set.

I would be extremely careful about offering the ful set of videos from an event. It’s okay

to sel highlights of the event so people get a mixture of content and also the awareness

that they missed out on a lot of stuff.

The only other situation where you might contemplate actual y offering the entire thing

on video is if you’re certain that you’l never hold it again. Even then I’d wait a while after

the last live event so you don’t have angry customers who recently paid much more for

the live version.

22. Toll-Free 24/7 Recorded Line

I’m a big fan of this method of presenting information. Years ago it was about as

automated as things got, but it’s another under-used method today.

Some people learn best by reading. They’re cal ed visual learners. Others learn best

by hearing, in which case they’re cal ed auditory learners. Stil others like to have

information sink in by doing, and they’re cal ed kinesthetic learners.

If you only send people to a web site, most likely they’l be most influenced if they’re

visual learners. Yes, you can have audio on your site, and I would recommend that, but

also keep in mind that many people are stil more comfortable with the telephone than

they are with a computer.

That’s where the 24/7 prerecorded line comes in. On your web site, business card,

and any other kind of advertisement you should give out the phone number for that line.

Be certain that you state clearly that the line is prerecorded. Otherwise, people may think

they’l be grabbed by a slick telephone sales shark when they cal the number and wil be

made to buy something they don’t want. The prerecorded nature of the line is very

nonthreatening for people who want to know more but don’t want to engage with anyone

just yet.

When people cal the number, be sure to give them good solid information, just as I’ve

recommended for special reports. Here’s where it gets real y interesting. After your initial

message, now divide your audience by saying, “Press one if you’d like to hear more tips

about how to instal window burglar sensors, press two if you want to hear more about

how to instal garage door burglar sensors. . . .”

The great thing is that by the numbers they press you wil gather further information on

the topic that most interests them. That’s valuable because you can then give them more

of that specific topic later. If you notice that lots of people press number five, wel , what

products do you have to satisfy that targeted need?

At the end of each message, no matter which button they pressed, you should have an

option for them to press “0” to get to someone live. You wil find that a certain number of

people are ready right now to take action and buy your stuff. Do not let them cool off by

shunting them to a recording!

Even if you cannot personal y take the live message any time of the day or night, you

stil have choices: You can hire answering services to do the order-taking for you, or

perhaps you know people who work from home and would be delighted to make some

additional money by answering occasional cal s and taking orders.

If you want to find out my current recommendation for companies that offer this kind of

service quite inexpensively, just go to www.sixfiguresecondincome.com and type

“recorded line” into the search box.

23. Consulting Hotline

Could it work for both the vendor and the customer to provide a little bit of help for a little

bit of money? Yes, it can and one way is through this type of phone number. I’ve seen the

system work where someone buys a consultant’s time in 15-minute increments—even

just one 15-minute block. Then they schedule a cal and deliver the advice.

An entire industry is growing around this concept. Check out www.liveperson.com. It

has over 30,000 experts in its database and each one sets a price for the consultation. It

might be a per-minute rate or some kind of flat rate. You can either have an online chat

session with the expert or communicate via e-mail or by phone.

Natural y, this might not be the very first revenue model you choose to try out because

you may or may not be expert at anything right now. If you are, then this service might be

something that could make you money and get you immediate exposure without even

needing to put together a web site or look for clients because
LivePerson
does al that.

If you aren’t yet expert at something you should consider using this service as a way of

paying to interview experts for an info product you’re building. It’s a clever service.

24. Teleseminar/Webinar

I cannot stress strongly enough what superb tools teleseminars and webinars are for

building an info product business.

With a teleseminar you get a group of people on the phone for between 45 minutes

and 2 hours to listen to you either interview someone, be interviewed by someone, or

make a presentation. A webinar is the same thing except you give people the option of