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

subscriber list and send the magazine to all of your subscribers automatically. Once the number of copies printed reaches 20, the cost falls by 20 percent. You’re billed for the printing costs, but if you’re collecting the subscription fees automatically anyway, that shouldn’t be a problem. You’ll have the cash.

The result will be a magazine of, say 24 pages, that costs $3.60 plus shipping to produce.

Those are just the printing and production costs. The real work comes in writing, design, and layout. Although a printed publication and a blog are just two ways of delivering information, the format of the information is very different. Readers have less patience online, so they’re more likely to read short posts of 1,000 words or even less. Magazines tend to have three different sections, each with content of different lengths. The front-of-book section might have an editor’s introduction, then news summaries describing events in your field. It’s supposed to pull readers in and spark their interest before they move on to the features.

Those features are the meat of the magazine, the place where subscribers will really feel they’re getting their money’s worth. The articles there can be longer than the kinds of posts you might be placing on a web site. They’re likely to be more detailed, perhaps include feature interviews or provide clear step-by-step instructions to achieving a goal. Your model will be the kinds of articles you can read in magazines rather than the kinds of posts you can see on web sites.

Finally, the back-of-book section might include columns or reviews—additional content that subscribers might find interesting. Of course, these are just guidelines. It’s always possible to mix things up and decide how you want your publication to look.

As for the writing—the most important part of your magazine—creating an entire magazine by yourself is likely to be too difficult and take up too much of your time. You will need to outsource the writing to members of your team, to professional freelance writers, or to guest contributors who are experts in your field. You should find that many people are willing to contribute for free, as a way of putting their own name and expertise in front of your readers, but it’s not difficult to work out how much you can afford to pay for regular contributions of features or columns. It’s still best to hand over the general management of the publication to someone on your staff. Creating the kind of magazine that actually contains the value it appears to offer is a pretty demanding job.

Even that is not as demanding as bringing in subscribers, to both the magazine and your membership web site. Because part of the value of the site will often be the community and its networking opportunities, the site will need a critical mass of members before subscribers will feel they’re getting their money’s worth. The best option is to focus first on building the community through your blog, Twitter timeline, and other social media channels; only after your traffic reaches a reasonably high level should you open the elite version of your subscription-based community.

Your magazine will be particularly helpful in making the conversions. The standard tactic for bringing in subscribers is to create a low-cost trial that automatically triggers the subscription fee if there’s no cancellation. I usually offer a trial of the Top One Report for $1, and I make the offer in various locations. It appears at the end of my e-mail newsletters; I tweet it occasionally in my timeline; there’s a giant button on my web site that leads to my TopOneReport member page; and, as we’ve seen, I also talk about it whenever I give away a free information product to help build my mailing list.

The community site tends to appeal more to people I meet and address at conferences. They like the idea of being able to continue talking and exchanging information even after they have left the hotel and headed back home. Much depends on where you’re doing the marketing and whom you are marketing to.

Membership sites can be huge revenue generators. If you can set a high monthly fee and bring in enough paying members, you can find that you’re running a club that’s bringing in tens of thousands of dollars every month and a handsome six-figure income in subscription fees alone. Although the mechanics of creating that site may no longer be difficult, it will require work and expense to build and maintain.

When subscribers are paying a regular fee, they expect to receive full value for those fees every month. Otherwise, you’ll find that the number of your subscribers will fall off pretty quickly.

While the writing, editing, and printing are all things you can outsource, a membership site does not offer the same kind of passive revenue as a page of content with an affiliate link or an information product sitting on ClickBank and being promoted by affiliates. New content has to be commissioned, created, edited, and published regularly. And because the time lag between writing, printing, and delivering is so much longer than it is online, the printed publication will need long-term planning and a lead time of at least a couple of months.

Even maintaining the membership site itself, where the members themselves will be doing most of the work, will need plenty of attention.

On the other hand, being the head of a community of paying members can be both incredibly rewarding and remarkably satisfying.

7

Coaching Programs

At the beginning of this book, I made a confession. I confessed that the success I’ve enjoyed online wasn’t all due to me. Sure, I like to tell myself that even though I might not have invented the Internet, at least I invented Internet marketing, but that’s not true, either.

My growth has come by working hard, spotting opportunities, testing different strategies to see which bring the best results, and through determined implementation.

But it’s also come by learning from others. Right at the beginning, I hired a business coach who helped