KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays by Comm, Joel (most important books to read .txt) 📗

BECOME A STAR WITH DVDs AND WEBINARS

For many of the people looking to earn from their knowledge online, selling their expertise isn’t new. In addition to setting up web sites that explain how to invest wisely, write computer programs, or build better gardens, they also teach courses. Those might be small private workshops, or they could be evening classes at a local adult education center. Certainly, when you can build an audience at a class like that, you can also build an audience online and earn from it.

Once your site is up and running, and once it has regular readers enjoying your knowledge, you should find that many of your readers will want individual, one-on-one learning opportunities. They don’t just want to read the articles you’re putting on your web site, they want to see you presenting that information in person. They want you to have the time to go into detail, and they want to be able to ask questions as you teach. When I asked my followers on Twitter what I should offer as a prize for a competition giveaway, the most requested item wasn’t an iPhone, a new laptop, or even a lifetime’s supply of pizza. It was a one-on-one lesson.

Again, this is something that works well across every subject. Just as you can pay for classes on everything from flower arranging to zoology, so you can create a visual information product based on your expertise and sell it online.

The easiest method is simply to record one of your classes. If you teach regularly, just put a video camera at the back of the room and let it run. You can always edit it later. If that approach is good enough for C-Span, it’s good enough for you. If you don’t teach regularly, just hold one class. Put on a seminar for people in your area and record it. Pack it with practical information, and you’ll be able to burn it onto DVDs and sell it online as an information product. You’ll make money once from the people who attend your seminar, and you’ll continue making money from the DVDs that you sell.

There are plenty of DVD fulfillment companies around that will handle the copying and printing for you. Prices vary according to the design of the cover and the number of copies, but you can expect to pay no more than around $5 for each DVD. When LearningGuitarNow.com (www.learningguitarnow.com) can sell a six-DVD slide guitar course for $99, you should be able to pick up a big KaChing with every sale for discs of your classes.

Filming yourself teaching and putting the footage on DVD does mean selling a physical information product. That’s very useful when you’re giving talks or putting on demonstrations. But when you’re selling online, of course, it’s not necessary. You can also create webinars and make them viewable for a fee, using PayPal or E-junkie to allow access. There’s plenty of software around, such as Glance (www.glance.net) and GoToWebinar (www.gotowebinar.com) that make the whole creation process very simple. The best way to learn how to use them is to do it. Try them out, practice, and you’ll soon discover that creating webinars really doesn’t demand any great skill at all.

The same principle holds true for webinars and information products: They have to contain solid, practical information. Watch other webinars to see how other people do it, then slot your expertise into their models.

One neat strategy is to use the information webinar not as a product itself, but as the free sample you use to sell a different information product. The post explaining the FTC rules that I put on my blog, for example, was very popular. But it was also light. The rules were horribly complex, and it’s very easy for online sellers to make a mistake that could cost them dearly. So my lawyer, Kevin Houchin, got together with a bunch of other legal minds—people who specialize in contract and commercial law—and produced a 230-page toolkit that explained exactly how the new rules worked. Buyers also received modifiable legal documents and regular updates as the rules were applied in the real world.

Figure 4.4The Site Compliance webinar provided solid information and helped Kevin sell his FTC toolkit.

I know that a lot of work and expertise went into creating that information product, and I also know that the risks involved in not following the FTC’s guidelines—even accidentally—could be massive. So at $97 for 230 pages of legal advice I was certain they’d need some pretty big servers to handle the demand.

Kevin’s a good friend and I wanted to help him, so to bring in buyers, we put on a free one-hour webinar (Figure 4.4). You can see that webinar at www.sitecompliant.com/webinar.php. You’ll see that first we used the webinar to capture e-mail addresses. Again, we don’t sell those e-mail addresses. Kevin just uses them to send potential buyers information about the legal aspects of doing business online. If they don’t want to receive that knowledge, they can unsubscribe. Kevin’s challenge is to make the information he supplies so interesting that no one wants to unsubscribe and that people who didn’t buy his FTC toolkit the first time they saw it do so in the future.

Users then receive a confirmation e-mail containing a link to the webinar itself. We tried to pack as much vital information as we could into that webinar, but we didn’t think that people would want to watch for more than an hour. To discover the rest, they’d have to buy Kevin’s kit, which is advertised at the bottom of the page.

So you can put your information on DVDs and sell them online like any other product. You can create a webinar and sell access to it. And you can use that webinar as a free sample of the information that you have available in your premium information product.

Is all of that stuff easy? Moderately. As with anything, when you know how, it’s a breeze. Creating