This message is brought to you by . . .

One of the strategies for making a living via the web and passive income is to build an email list and then develop a relationship with that list around some niche or interest.

I have a colleague who has built a 10,000+ list over the course of several years. She did it initially by offering a free report on the niche area. It was a good report and lots of people wanted it and told their friends about it. They traded getting on her list for the free report.

Next she did a series of free teleseminars. That got her even more people. Gradually she began to offer some things free (more free reports and live teleseminars), but if you wanted premium stuff, like the ability to download and listen to the teleseminars whenever you want and to get professional continuing education credits for them, you had to purchase them. She has several people who work for her. She pays their salaries and for health care policies for her full-time people. She has a dedicated server. She works her buns off night and day to deliver high-quality, great offerings. And she makes a good living at it. During a time when many similar businesses are in danger of failing, her business is thriving. I’ve learned a lot from her that has helped my business.

She sent out several emails about each offering. And then some people complained. “You are sending too many emails.” “It’s all business and marketing.” Stuff like that. [Of course, the people who complain are a minority; more people write and say they appreciate her offerings and generosity.]

I was fascinated by this. I have gotten a few (very few, really) of the same kinds of emails when I began to email my list more than once a month.  The comments were similar. My response: I give people on my list a bunch of free stuff every month. And this is largely how I make my living now-over the web and with passive income. How hard is it to unsubscribe if you don’t want the emails? Or if you don’t want as many from me, how hard is it to use your little finger to delete the emails you don’t want? (That is why God – or Bill Gates or Steve Jobs – invented the Delete key, right?)

I was thinking back to when I grew up. Watching television was free. Only it wasn’t free. You “paid” for that free service by watching some ads. Enough people bought stuff from those ads that the TV stations could stay in business and create more new stuff and broadcast it. The ads paid for the equipment and personnel to deliver that free stuff. In the UK and some other countries, I understand, one has to pay a license fee for TV. It’s not “free.”

Same thing with radio. Radio seems free but you contend with ads. AND . . . drum roll, please . . . the same thing with those of us who offer cool free stuff to our groups, email subscribers, communities, “target market.” Those pitches we send out pay for the servers and services, our time, the research we do, the emails we answer, the training we get, the books we read, the time we take to create the free and paid offerings, etc. etc.

I have answered thousands of questions about my work, about getting published, about becoming a speaker, about web-based marketing by email. I have put out lots of free valuable training and information to people on my list. I get a crushing amount of email each day, week and month. I pay lots of money each month to have the support systems in place to do all that. I spend hours of time on it. All unpaid.

I love giving stuff away for free. It makes the dopamine squirt into my brain. It’s more and more possible in this age of digital products and the Internet. My impulse is that when I learn or stumble across something new, cool and valuable, I want to tell everyone about it and get them to know about it or learn to benefit from it too. I want to continue to do that and make a good living doing it.

I know many of us are too busy and get too many emails and we don’t want any more. I know it’s a slight inconvenience for some.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not whining or trying to be snarky. Just upfront about this issue. I am incredibly grateful to people who have chosen to sign up for my email lists (about 7,000 so far). I feel blessed that my work is so widely known and read. That I got on Oprah. That my 30 books have been published and gotten out into the world. That I have been invited to speak in so many countries (27, I think, since someone counted them one time from a list of my workshops).

But, about the commercial aspect of things, I say: Get over it. Get used to it. This message was brought to you by . . . all the stuff I sell online that gives me the time to write these posts, write and give away free ebooks, handouts, slide programs, inspiring quotations, cool video links, book recommendations, music recommendations, useful research summaries, etc.

I’d be interested in your response to this. Please leave a comment below in the Leave a Reply box. [Hint: If you don’t see the place to comment, click the Comments link just below this post.]

New Marketing R.A.P.

Here’s a short summary of what I think is the new reality in marketing, summarized by the acronym R.A.P.

Advice on getting started building an email list and generating online income

Some in my advanced coaching group was having trouble getting focused and figuring out where to put her energy/time and what to do first.

Here were my suggestions. After I wrote them, I made them a little more generic and thought some of you might want to read them. Could they apply in your situation?

I would put together a free report on your topic. About 15 pages, written in Word, spruced up with some graphics and turned into a PDF. Put another free offer of an audio someone will record interviewing you on your topic. Mention this audio in the report so even if people forward it to others, your name, contact information and your offer will be in there.

Send the offer of the free report out to anyone you can think of that you have permission to email and ask them to forward it to anyone they think might be interested. Announce it on your Facebook feed; your Twitter feed; etc. Put up a YouTube video on your topic area and put a live, clickable link to the free report on the YouTube description box.

To do this, you’ll need:
1. To have set up a mailing list management service (like AWeber or Constant Contact or iContact or MadMimi) to capture emails, manage them and send out autoresponders.
2. Write the free report, get someone you know to edit it and check for errors. Then get some graphically-oriented person to fancy it up and turn it into a PDF.
3. Start thinking about what products or services you want to sell once you gather a list and get more well known. Begin to create those products/services; create a page that describes each one somewhere on the web (on a blog or website); set up an online shopping cart and set up the product or service you are selling on that shopping cart; then get the code for that product and service and put that on the sales page you set up.
4. Start thinking about what additional services/products you would offer people who bought anything from you (this is called “the upsell” in marketing/sales). It could be a more advanced course (audio, video, online) going more in depth on the topic, etc.
5. Set up another page to describe and sell your upsell and arrange to send people to that page after they have purchased your initial product.

Turning webinars or webcasts into passive income

The way to turn a webcast or webinar into passive income is to record it and offer it for sale afterward.

To do this, you either need screencast software (Camtasia for Windows; Screenflow or Screenium for Macs) or you need to have a webinar service that allows you to record the webinar/webcast.

You could also put the recorded webinar/webcast up on YouTube or similar video hosting service to develop your platform or reputation and indirectly profit from the increased exposure.

You could, of course, also offer the webinar as a bonus or free gift to get people to opt-in to your list or buy a product.

Uses for webinars

There are a number of main uses or purposes for webinars:
1. To build your email list. To do this, ask people to sign up and capture their email. The webinar could be free, low-cost or it could be standard price. But all should be offered with great content (no holding back and saving the “real stuff;” people are paying with their valuable time and attention if not their money). Try all three and find out which works best for you.
2. To generate location-free income. You can do webinars from anywhere you have high-speed Internet access, so you can charge for your information or expertise on webinars.
3. To generate reputation and good will. People will discover who you are and how valuable your information is. They may want to know more (or buy more).
4. To save people travel time and costs.
5. To add a live component to a membership site or mastermind group.
6. To show people how to do certain computer- or web-based tasks or projects.
7. To close a sale.
8. To market a product or service.

Oops. I don’t have a business.

I had a startling revelation some time ago. I listen to a lot of audio books (as well as read lots of print and electronic books). Well, I was listening to Gerber’s The E-Myth Revisited and my stomach started to gurgle with anxiety.

Why? Because Gerber was lecturing people like me telling us we have deluded ourselves into thinking we are entrepreneurs and business owners when, in fact, we merely offer professional services. What makes a business and an entrepreneur, he said, was having a business that had systems and could operate independently from any one person. It had to be something that could be sold at some point without losing its value.

Gulp. I earned much of my income from speaking at the time, with some coming from my book royalties (which were driven in large part by my speaking; letting people know about the books or “back of the room” sales of them at my workshops and speaking engagements). If I got ill or injured; if I died; if the planes stopped flying due to some pandemic or attack; I was going to take a big hit in my income.

When I wanted to retire, there was little income that would come in without me putting in direct time or effort or showing up. My business was me. He was right. I wasn’t an entrepreneur or business owner. I was doing very well in my business, much better than I had even dreamed abut when I started it. I had been on Oprah when one of my books was featured. I was speaking all over the world getting paid lots of money per talk. Things were going well. But Gerber’s point hit me hard.

Right then and there, I resolved to make a business with systems that would carry on without me and that would have automated marketing, sales, order fulfillment and income. Thank God for the Internet because I didn’t want to have a lot of people working for me and take the time to manage or supervise them. I set to work on creating online and digital products, affiliate income and automated “back office” systems like an online shopping cart, autoresponders, websites, blogs, online articles, online videos and audios, etc.

Now, several years later, I can look Gerber in the eye and call myself an entrepreneur.

What would happen to your income, you family or the people who depend on you if you became incapacitated or the country or the world suffered a crippling blow? Plan ahead now. Set up Your Life of Freedom before it’s too late.

A wonderful and terrible teacher

I was talking to a friend of mine today who does a lot of internet marketing in her business. We share ideas and are a mini-mastermind group for each other. She told me she had gone out with an offering and had gotten a very lukewarm response after getting a really good response from her previous similar offerings. She wanted to know if I had any ideas as to why. I did but I made a comment: “I don’t really know. I only have opinions and ideas. The marketplace is really your teacher. The marketplace is a wonderful and terrible teacher.”

Wonderful because the marketplace can teach you what works and make you money. Terrible in that the marketplace doesn’t always tell you why things work (or worse, why they don’t work). That’s why it’s a good idea to try lots of things. Take action. Notice the results. Measure things.

I recently switched to a new email/autoresponder service because I looked over this same friend’s shoulder while she was checking her email statistics. Hers were way more detailed and valuable than the ones I was getting from my current service (which were good and I’ve learned a bunch about what works and what doesn’t from having it).

So, use the marketplace as a teacher. Get services like Google analytics and AWeber (http://www.aweber.com/?221339), which gives you useful statistics.

And take action, stay open and flexible and change based on which this wonderful and terrible teacher shows you.

Creating and growing an email list Part 2

I recently checked my online income from the first of the year. So far (late April), it is about $17,000. That’s a little over $4000 per month. Two years ago that number was $0.00/month. I have made a deliberate effort to increase passive income and online income because it fits with my goal to develop a work life that doesn’t require my time or presence. This is location-free and time-free income (or passive income as I called it above). Some initial effort and time is required to set it up, but if you do it right, not much other time or ongoing effort is involved.

One of the main ways I do this is to have and grow an email mailing list. My list is about 6,000 people. About 30-40% of them (about 2,000) open each email I send. That means I am making about $2.00 per person who reads my emails a month.

So, it behooves me to increase my open rate and to grow my email list.

How do you increase your open rate>
1. Make time-limited or quantity-limited offers and train your recipients to open the email quickly. I have offered significant discounts to the first X number of people to respond to an offer. Some have opened their emails days or weeks later and written to complain that they missed the deadline or the limited number of discounts. I write back and tell them to be sure to open their emails more quickly next time.
2. Add more value. I use an email tracking service that tells me what links people are clicking on in the emails. By far the largest number of clicks are for videos. So, I began adding more video links into the emails and, when I send out an extra email or several emails in a row, I add new video links to it to reward people for opening and reading the email.

I also add funny or profound quotations, poetry, free handouts, free research summaries of interesting and personally- or professionally-relevant studies.

How do you get more signups for your emails, thereby growing your list?
1. Bribe people to sign up. I give away a free set of handouts if you sign up.
I also offer a free ebook (http://www.billohanlon.com/LazyMan/ebook.html) that doesn’t require signing up but has information about how to sign up. You could have people have to sign up to get your free ebook or audio or other value-laden item.
2. I put a link to sign up on my home page and on my email signature and on all my handouts I distribute at my workshops.