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

Because you’re being selective, and because you’re prepared to give more to your students—more time, more attention, more of a guarantee even (it’s not unusual for top-end coaching programs to promise an ROI of perhaps “$5,000 or your money back”)—you get to charge a giant amount of money.

You can be really bold here and base the fee on the actual returns you think that the students will see. That’s not the amount they might see if they bothered to implement your ideas. It’s the amount they will see when they do.

Sure, a high price will put people off. You want to put those people off. You want to coach only those people who have the confidence, drive, and energy to succeed. They don’t expect you to do it for them. They expect you to tell them what they need to do so that they can go out and do it themselves. They really will understand that spending $5,000 (or whatever it is you’re charging) is going to be a great investment.

There are a couple of models for this kind of high-end coaching.

The first is an enlarged and selective version of your regular telephone-based coaching programs. The spaces are limited; you choose only applicants you want to work with; and there’s more contact each week.

This was the approach taken by John Taylor (www.johntaylorsblog.com), a marketing consultant and publisher. John has produced several information products and is active on WarriorForum (www.warriorforum.com), a meeting place for Internet marketers. He used the forum to announce a special coaching program about Internet marketing. The spaces were limited, the fee was $697, and in return, he would provide two 30-minute Skype calls each week and answer up to five questions per day by e-mail.

To be accepted into the program, applicants had to jump through a bunch of hoops, which included stating the amount of time and money they were prepared to invest in their success each week, describing the objectives they wanted to reach, and writing a 200-word article on their best Internet marketing achievement so far (Figure 7.4).

This isn’t a coaching program aimed at just anyone, and John isn’t trying to make as many sales as possible. He’s advertising his coaching on a site where he knows he’ll find dedicated students, and he’s weeding out anyone who isn’t completely serious about achieving success.

Figure 7.4John Taylor lays down the law in the WarriorForum.

But the format of the coaching is still very simple. The students themselves won’t need to do more than take part in a Skype chat twice a week, and John can remain in his office in Scotland, talking to students around the world.

The second model is to make your coaching more intensive. Instead of working with someone over a period of a month—or several months if you want to renew the coaching program—you cram the entire program into one packed weekend.

For that period, you’re going to be completely dedicated. It will be a little like organizing your own miniconference, so students are going to need room and board as well as instruction. You might well spend more time preparing for the program than you’ll actually spend conducting it.

However, the returns can be enormous. Paul Hartunian, a professional speaker and publicity expert, used to train other potential speakers to create a career for themselves on the lecture circuit. His three-day workshops took place at his ranch in New Jersey and cost $4,995. Classes were limited to just 15 students at a time, which meant that three days of coaching would bring him as much as $74,925.

Clearly, only a small fraction of the community you build through your blog, your information products, and your social media networking will be interested in paying a four-figure fee and spending a few days at one of your workshops. Those are the people who are most dedicated to their success though, so charging a relatively high price will increase your chances of seeing your students achieve their goals.

When it comes to promoting this kind of coaching program, value is going to be critical. Even the most ambitious and confident students will think twice before handing over several thousand dollars. They are not just betting on their ability to achieve success; they are also gambling on your knowledge and your ability to communicate.

There is no greater test of the power of your brand and the amount of trust that your community places in you. You can make that test a little easier to pass by making clear that in addition to knowledge, students will also be picking up lots of bonuses that are worth at least as much as the cost of the workshop itself. Paul Hartunian, for example, places the bios of speakers who have passed through his workshop on his web site at www.hartunian.com/speakers, thus giving them some valuable advertising. He also supplies the actual contract he uses when taking bookings, allowing students to adapt it for their own businesses. That costs him nothing, but saves his students a small fortune in legal fees.

These kinds of workshops aren’t likely to be regular events. The high costs ensure that they will appeal to only a tiny fraction of your community, which means that finding new leads could take awhile. But at these prices, they don’t need to be regular events. You’d have to do only one or two a year to give your income a very loud, extra KaChing.

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Case Studies

You’re not the first person to want to make money online. That’s good news. The pioneers had a lot of work to do. They had to figure out which tools worked the best, how to use them, and what sort of content they needed to serve in order to build audiences that they could monetize. They had to decide how to build the web sites, lay out the ads, and format the articles. They had to create the Internet that we take for granted today.

It was a process that took time, lots