The Six-Figure Second Income: How to Start and Grow a Successful Online Business Without Quitting Your Day Job (6 page)

pool. If he had insisted on instant mega-success, he’d have lived his life in Liverpool,

England.

Let’s now talk about the many types of info products you can create, and we’l do it in

the context of a series of simple but extremely powerful questions.

What Problem Have You Solved?

Guys are accused of never asking for directions and never reading the owner’s manual.

Though that may be true, it’s also true that most owner’s manuals are terribly written. I bet

you’ve been frustrated with tiny print in 16 different languages, not to mention the

nonsense warnings that some attorney inserted along the lines of: “Do not operate

toaster in bathtub.”

People want to know the straightforward, quick, easy way to operate things. I’m not

suggesting that you rewrite toaster owner’s manuals, but rather that you think back to

what has frustrated you in the past. Maybe you figured out a novel way to organize al

your model train parts, fishing gear, or quilting supplies. If you are a big fan of some

hobby, you’re intimately aware of the frustrations that most fans suffer and you’ve maybe

even solved some of them. That can make you money.

No, it’s not revolutionary, and maybe only 10,000 people worldwide have that problem.

Hey, if you can reach them efficiently and at low cost, might a fraction of them be so tired

of the same problem that they’d be wil ing to pay you for an answer?

Start with what physical thing frustrates you or someone you know. If you’re frustrated

by senseless violence or modern society, sorry—this is the wrong book to fix that. Now

think of a solution that either you have found or someone you know has found. We’l talk

later about how to turn that solution into an info product.

What Can You Demonstrate?

My (Jon’s) daughter, Christina, loves to do the fabric art of tie-dye. Though tie-dye was

popular with hippies in the 1960s, even in the twenty-first century that art form has a

fol owing. If you go onto Amazon, you’l see at least one person who set up a camera in

front of a table and demonstrated tie-dye techniques. The DVD costs almost $30, even

though DVDs can be made for about a buck each.

Do I care that the person is making an absurdly large profit margin on this DVD? Not

at al . I simply want to see how Christina might benefit from it and how good the Amazon

reviews are for that product.

Now consider the maker of the DVD. He didn’t even have to create a web site or buy

traffic to come to it. He posted his DVD on Amazon and I went there, looking for good

tie-dye stuff. Amazon wil take a hunk of his profit but so what—he’l stil make a

percentage profit from the DVD that’s better than any Fortune 500 company could ever

achieve.

What can you demonstrate? Is it how to sharpen lawnmower blades? How to spin yarn

made from yak fur? How to retrofit a chainsaw to run on nitrous? How to play music with

the tones from your Apple
iPhone
?

Yes, sometimes even the crazy and nonutilitarian stuff like techno-tricks wil sel wel .

Imagine guys hunched over at a bar trying to impress each other—or a girl—with the

things only they know how to do with their
BlackBerry
or
iPhone
. Don’t you suppose a

guy would pay seven dol ars for a way to impress the lady at the other end of that bar?

“But that’s too little to charge for a product!” you say. I would reply that you’re fal ing into

Uncle Moe thinking. I agree that you might not be able to make a fortune from a seven-

dol ar product, but you don’t need to make a fortune off something that takes you an

afternoon to create. Al you’re aiming for is a little stream of income that over time wil

combine with other little streams to make your Mississippi Money River.

I know a guy who’s made as much as $30,000 in one single day from a series of short

reports he’s written and marketed. We’re talking usual y fewer than 10-page reports.

Sometimes he’l write one as a passenger in a car while driving to a relative’s house for

dinner.

I know another guy who does his best writing while watching mindless sitcoms on

television. They relax him and he just types away at an idea on his keyboard when one

floats through his brain. He’s a multimil ionaire now.

Maybe it would take you a week to write your first 10-pager, using bits and pieces of

time. Maybe two weeks. So what?

What Have You Researched on the Web and Discovered?

One guy has made a fortune with a kidney stone remedy online. He’s not a doctor, nurse,

or any other kind of medical professional. Think about that for a moment. Lots of people

would stop dead in their tracks and never consider writing about the kidney stone

treatment they stumbled upon. They’d think, “
Oh
I’m not a doctor so who would listen to

me about kidney
stones?
”

Let me tel you—as someone who’s had them (Jon), kidney stone sufferers are highly

motivated to look for remedies. Besides, some of the doctor remedies involve surgery,

nasty drugs, and some very bad side effects. If someone discloses up front that he’s not

a doctor but he’s col ected a series of possible folk remedies that involve stuff as

harmless as asparagus and watermelons—you can bet I’l try his stuff in a New York

minute.

It’s important not to pretend to be something you’re not. Otherwise you’l have many

refunds when people discover the truth, not to mention the Federal Trade Commission

coming down on you.

But sometimes you can use the outsider perspective to your advantage. In the case of

the kidney stone treatment, it could be “I went to the doc and nothing seemed to work.

Then I started to ask my friends and found out that several of them had remedies that

had been handed down for generations. . . . ”

If you look in those newspaper mini-magazine inserts that come before the weekend,

from time to time you’l see reports like Hydrogen
Peroxide—the Miracle
Worker, or 101

Uses for Cider Vinegar. I doubt that those authors are chemists who toiled in the lab for

years to discover many uses for vinegar or hydrogen peroxide. They probably scoured

the web and talked with lots of friends.

This is a good time to discuss plagiarism—don’t do it. Not only can it get you into al

sorts of legal hot water, but it is also simply unnecessary to copy someone else’s words

to be successful. Even though I’ve seen the cider vinegar report, I could come out with

another one and be completely safe. For instance, I’d use my own words and do a piece

on Cider Vinegar for Athletes, which might describe a dozen uses just for them, or I

might do Top 25
uses for Apple
Cider Vinegar.

Would some of those applications be the same general nature as what was in the

booklet I came across? Of course they would. But think about the so-cal ed original

author
—we al have grandmothers who’ve used vinegar for generations to do things like

clean windows or soothe bug bites. That original author didn’t invent these uses, but

simply compiled them in his or her own words.

When you free yourself from the arbitrary and unnecessary requirement to be total y

original, think of the vast possibilities that open up in front of you! An enterprising person

—you?—could sit down and make a list of al the other types of common home

ingredients like lemon juice, tomato juice, salt, rubbing alcohol, baking soda, and so on.

Then you could spend the time yourself—or hire relatives, kids, or senior citizens—to

look far and wide for al sorts of uses.

You could then compile smal paragraphs about al the uses for lemon juice, for

instance. One secret would be to include many pictures. So if you’re discussing insect

bites, show a nasty red mosquito bite.

You could either take those pictures yourself, or simply go to one of the stock-photo

agencies on the web to buy them. You don’t know about microstock agencies, as they’re

known? Oh, let me digress. Here’s another great example of people making money in

this new economy.

The lousy old way of getting photos for your products was to hire a professional or you

had to go to a big, arrogant stock-photo agency. They would charge you hundreds or

even thousands of dol ars for a single solitary photograph. And they wouldn’t stop there

—they then would require you to pay them a royalty every time that photo was published!

I can see that if you took a special photo of Marilyn Monroe you might want to capitalize

on it forever. But a picture of a watermelon patch? Give me a break.

Along came the Internet and some enterprising people who decided to cut out the

middlemen—in other words, cut out the big arrogant agencies and photographers. Now

it’s no longer a monopoly but a marketplace. Tens of thousands of photographers can

upload their pictures to these sites, which classify them by phrases like watermelon, or

people having fun, or frustrated. When you go to the site and type in “frustrated,” you’l

see hundreds of photos of people pul ing their hair out, grimacing, and so forth.

Better yet, you can buy the photos for as little as one dol ar each with no continuing

royalties. It’s a true win-win-win—you win because you get a great picture out of many

variations you reviewed; the photographer made a few pennies on the photograph; and

so did the microstock agency.

Before you think this is ripping off the photographer, think again. I recently read about

a graduate student at Brown University who—in his spare time between studying

—makes six figures per year just taking photographs of things around town. He only

makes pennies per photograph, but some of his pictures are bought by thousands of

people, and he’s uploaded thousands of photos over the course of a few years.

Isn’t that incredible? You or someone in your family could do the exact same thing.

This guy could have made al sorts of excuses like I’l do the photography when I have

more time after
I get
out of school, or I’m not a professional photographer, so who would

buy my pictures. Instead, he uses his spare time to make more money than do the

prestigious professors who teach him.

If you want to know more about microstock agencies, simply go to

www.sixfiguresecondincome.com and type in the term “photo.” I have a list of the most

current and best agencies I’ve come across. Rather than print the list in this book and

run the risk of it being outdated, you’l get a current list by going to the site.

Back to my original point: Stick pleasing or descriptive pictures in your smal report

about lemon juice and it wil sel better. People are highly visual creatures and they find

documents with pictures to be more inviting.

How long does the report have to be? I’ve seen special reports of only two typed

pages written simply in Microsoft Word—with no pictures or other formatting—and they

successful y sold for 10 dol ars. If the content is valuable, often the length isn’t too

important. There are exceptions to that rule, and we’l cover them later in this book. But

remember that you’re not writing for your English teacher who demanded a 10-page

essay in high school. You’re writing for people who don’t have much time, probably don’t

love to read, and just want solutions quickly.

What Are the Best Resources You’ve Found?

A friend of mine is a successful, high-profile marketer. He made a point of being on

television and in newspapers. I guess he was after that fame we discussed earlier.

Anyway, one day he was home with his family and two armed men busted into his home.

One stayed with his wife and kids downstairs while the other ordered my friend upstairs

to clean out the jewelry and other valuables.

It turned out they were messing with the wrong guy, because my friend is a world-

ranked expert in martial arts. He disarmed the attacker, who ran downstairs and out the

door with his accomplice.

Needless to say, my friend was rattled by the experience. Rather than complain or

withdraw into a shel he decided to do something about it. As you may know, tools like

Google Earth make it simple to find addresses, and other tools can scour motor vehicle

registries and other sources to put together files the CIA would be proud of. That’s what

his attackers must have done.

Now, instead of wanting a high profile, my friend wanted the money but no longer the

fame. Over a period of months he was able to assemble a group of people with different

talents to erase much of the publicity and contact information on the Internet about him.

Wel , wouldn’t you suppose that other wealthy people might want to know what my

friend discovered through months of research? Now he has turned a real lemon—the

home invasion—into lemonade by sel ing his knowledge for thousands of dol ars. Here