The Six-Figure Second Income: How to Start and Grow a Successful Online Business Without Quitting Your Day Job (14 page)

you get through advertising, or both. They get to attend a free lunch or dinner where you

describe the product or service and take questions. If the event is constructed property it

can work real y wel to give people a chance to get to know you before they buy.

34. One-Day Seminar

This is the same as Number 33 above, but it is often held on a Saturday. It’s usual y a

good practice to charge people around $99 to attend and then you can either keep that

money for al the value you’l deliver, or you can refund it when they show up. If you’ve

gone to the effort to reserve a room and set up a day-long event, you don’t want people

to sign up for free and then have no hesitation to cancel on you at the last minute or

simply become a no-show. The $99 returnable deposit helps to prevent that situation.

35. Consultation (Paid Version)

After you launch a product or service you should consider establishing an hourly rate for

consultations. Some people not only are convinced that their situation is different from

everyone else’s but they have no time or inclination to go through a home-study course

or live event. They simply want to hire you.

They can turn into great clients if you’re wil ing to do this one-on-one work. I suggest

that at some price you might want to be wil ing. One fel ow I know charges $10,000 per

hour for consultations. You may not start out at that number but it does have a nice round

quality to it; wouldn’t you agree?

I recommend that you get paid up front. If you’re starting in the business and have not

built a reputation, then one way to land more of these consultations is to say, “I know we

haven’t worked together before and you may wonder if you’l get your money’s worth

during our cal . It’s my practice to offer a ful refund at the end of this first cal if for some

reason it was different from what you expected.” You’l find that almost no one wil ask for

a refund.

By the way, the refund concept only applies to the first cal because we can assume if

they hire you for a second cal then they are happy customers.

36. Boot Camp

They’re also cal ed live events, success events, summits, and many other creative

names. I could write an entire book on this topic because I’ve conducted so many of

them, but suffice it to say that boot camps can be extremely effective for both your

students and your revenues.

I’ve already described how students get the chance to hear directly from you for

multiple days and get every one of their questions answered. If they’re on the shy side,

then they can sit back and hear other people’s questions and the responses. They have

a chance to focus exclusively on your content for days and work through case histories,

problems, and maybe even some role-play sessions. They also can network with other

like-minded people.

If you offer a boot camp be sure to video record al your presentations. Then you’l

have the luxury of deciding which pieces to use as video highlights, audio snippets, or

transcripts.

I already warned you in Number 21 about sel ing the whole boot camp on DVD or any

other format, but it’s a good practice to sel portions of the event or just give some of it

away as proof of the quality content they’l get when they come to the next one.

37. Live Tour

I don’t know your target industry but certain ones lend themselves to creating a buying

tour. Certainly in real estate investing it’s common to have people come to a special

boot camp that is not simply held at a hotel. Instead, your students get on a bus and are

driven around a city to look at properties with the intention that they may invest in one or

more of them. It’s an interesting hands-on approach where they can see you and other

experts in action rather than sit in a classroom, though you may also hold part of the

event in a seminar setting.

This same concept is used in the photography business where aspiring

photographers go to a scenic location and watch as professionals tel them how to take

the best photographs. This format could be used for antique tours, woodworking events,

fishing competitions, and so on.

38. Cruise

Some marketers regularly organize mid-winter cruises to warm destinations. They

conduct classes onboard the ship while it travels from one port to the next, and people

can relax and mingle in a fun setting.

As with boot camps and live tours, these events are often conducted not by one

presenter but by a team. You might organize the event but have other people in your

industry help you to teach it. They take some of the presenting burden off your shoulders

and they also may have good products and services to offer the group. You’l get a

portion of the profits from their sales and that can add up to substantial dol ars for you.

THE EXCELLENT CONCEPT OF CONTINUITY

Continuity is one of the sweetest words an info marketer can hear. It means you offer a

product or service in which you are paid by the same customer, typical y on a monthly

basis—for a long time. Let’s look more closely at continuity and the major forms it takes.

39. Newsletter

This is a superb way to build an info-product business. As I said before, your newsletter

might be only 1 page or it could extend to 12 or more pages. The idea is to give

customers regular, up-to-date information in easily digestible form. It’s not a big binder or

daunting set of DVDs but rather an almost chatty overview of what’s new since the last

edition.

Your newsletter should be a combination of new techniques, new applications for old

techniques, questions and answers, common problems and their solutions, and

commentary on the current marketplace. The current topic for tomato growers might be

the new organic insecticide that was a big phenomenon last year and how it’s working

for gardeners. You get the idea.

Don’t concern yourself with making your newsletter look slick—it’s just not necessary.

Many publications already are so slick that in an odd way you can stand out by looking

plain and typewriter-written. I know marketers who run multi-mil ion-dol ar newsletter

empires in just this format.

Another wonderful aspect of newsletters is that, because people are paying you for

them, they pay more attention to your message. Open-minded readers are good

candidates for other products and services that may help them. You can piggyback a

sales message along with your good regular content and it’s likely to be read more and

acted upon more than a standalone sales letter.

It’s a good practice to have your newsletter readers take some simple action in every

edition. You may want them to respond to a survey, submit their entry to a contest, or buy

something that’s offered under a special deal for newsletter subscribers only. Having

them take action every month is a good way to get them accustomed to taking action

when you do want them to attend an event or buy something in the future.

40. Membership Site

If done correctly a single membership site can be your main source for a substantial

income. It combines the regularity of a newsletter with the ability for members to log in

and discuss topics as a group. Some sites also have free services for members only

like online tools, free products to members, and other freebies.

I’m not tel ing you anything new when I say that people enjoy the feeling of belonging to

something. Membership sites can foster a sense of community if they have a wel -run

online forum. By wel -run I mean not the typical online forum, which is a free-for-al for

blabbermouths to shout their opinions on every conceivable topic. Useful forums tend to

have moderators whose regular job is to make sure questions get answered and no one

gets too personal.

41. Weekly Faxes

This is a variation on the newsletter concept. Either as a standalone product or as part of

a larger membership program you can offer a fax to be delivered weekly to the

subscriber. Of course, these days e-mail is every bit as fast as a fax, but e-mail is also

fil ed with so much spam that it’s a chal enge to get through. A fax has the speed of an e-

mail but it becomes a physical object that may be more likely to be read and passed

around. As with everything else in this book, it’s an option you may want to test.

42. Coaching

It’s not uncommon for established coaches to make six-figure and sometimes seven-

figure yearly incomes. It goes without saying that to make a lot of money you should be

providing substantial value, but the beauty of coaching is its efficiency.

At first your coaching might be mainly one-on-one arrangements, but over time that

can change. You may have the occasional private coaching session with someone, but

most of the cal s can be one-to-many affairs with one coach speaking to a group of

people.

This can work wel because each coaching student gets to hear everyone else’s

successes, ideas, chal enges, and questions. The cal s can real y take on a community

feeling as those dozen or so people get to know each other and work together over time.

Coaching is a great product to offer during one of your live events, like a boot camp. It

tends to be more expensive than other products but also is more customized to the

needs of the coaching students. When assembling people into a coaching group it’s

important to have them be at roughly comparable levels of experience. Otherwise, you

run the risk of boring the more-experienced members and overwhelming the less-

experienced ones.

As you real y grow, you can move to the role of supervising other people who become

coaches—they’re often your most successful students. They know your system cold and

also know the chal enges students face. They become walking success stories for your

system and are worth the profits you’l share with them.

I hope I’ve succeeded in overwhelming you not with a sense of work but with the

amount of opportunity that’s at your feet, waiting for you to pick it up.

No doubt you’ve been aware of many of these product formats and ideas but probably

not al of them. This chapter is worth reviewing again and again because it should

become your brainstorm-igniter.

THE OPPORTUNITY ENGINEER

Zen Buddhism believes in the concept of a flash of enlightenment, where the student

meditates for long periods and eventual y—in a flash—achieves a deeper level of

consciousness and understanding.

I don’t want to turn you into a Zen Buddhist but I do want to turn you into an opportunity

engineer. Using the chapter we’ve just gone through and the ones ahead, I want you to

have a deeper awareness of the astonishing opportunity for profit al around you.

While others wal ow in self-pity and claim that their situations are different, you’l be

seeing candidates for info products al around you.

How wil you know you’ve arrived? You’l see other products and services and wil think

to yourself, “Now that was clever but they could make more
money if
they just added this

twist.
. . .”

In fact, you’l see so much opportunity that your chal enge wil be to determine which

one deserves your time and attention. That’s a nice problem to have.

Assuming you have at least one great product idea and you’ve advanced far enough

that you’re ready to market it, the next step is to announce it to the world. You need to get

yourself open for business and that’s exactly what the fol owing chapter is about.

Getting a web site online is much easier than you may have been led to believe. Plenty

of companies want you to think that it wil cost you hundreds of dol ars per month to have

a web site.

Other companies wil assure you that any worthwhile site must be professional y

designed from the ground up and they’re just the ones to do that for you—for an

outrageous fee.

Before reading this book you may have already had ideas about sel ing your stuff

online but were put off by how complicated it sounded to do it right. If that’s the case

you’re going to love this chapter because we’l set you up with a nice web site for a very

nice low price. Along the way we’l dispel a number of myths and set the record straight.

As with al the advice you’l read in this book, none of it is theory but it’s instead what I’ve

used to build web sites and make mil ions of dol ars from them.

THE SEVEN BASIC BUILDING BLOCKS TO A GOOD WEB SITE