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

his site, BradCallen.com (www.bradcallen.com), you’ll see that the entire first screen is taken up with plugs for one of his products and notifications of two others that are in production (Figure 8.7). Choose to ignore those ads—and that’s not easy to do—and when you scroll down the page, you’ll see a list of testimonials, then some solid blog content packed with great information. The first item in the navigation bar leads to products, not content. Brad is focused on selling goods, either software products or information products.

The differences between those information products are interesting, too. SEO Mindset is a physical book delivered by mail. It’s also free. Instead of generating a KaChing from the cover price, Brad uses the book to lead buyers into his search engine optimization membership site. Readers get a month’s free membership but must then pay a monthly fee of $39. They can cancel at any time, even before they’ve made a single payment, but Brad is confident that having tried it for a month, most will stick around.

Figure 8.7On Brad Callen′s web site, information products come first.

His information product then becomes an incentive for an even more lucrative revenue channel.

That’s not true of his other products. Press Release Fire is a traditional e-book that sells for $19.95 and is promoted through a hard-hitting traditional sales page. You can see it at www.pressreleasefire.com.

Elite Sessions consists of 90-minute audio interviews, complete with PDF transcripts, with 11 leading marketers. The discs sell for $147. There was no writing involved here. Brad just sat and talked with a bunch of other experts about a topic that they all know and understand. There’s no easier way to turn information into KaChing.

The only ads on Brad’s site are for his own products. There are no AdSense units and no affiliate links. Instead, his blog posts show off his expertise, enabling him to create a brand strong enough to encourage people to pay for his information, especially after they’ve been persuaded by a powerful sales letter.

BLOOM BIKE SHOP

Brad Callen uses information products as a way of creating large amounts of passive revenue. But that’s not the only way to use information products. You can also produce something very simple and, instead of selling it, use it as a way to market your site, build your brand, and create your e-mail list.

That’s what BloomBikeShop.com (www.bloombikeshop.com) does. The site provides useful information about bicycle repair and maintenance, including tutorials and articles. It monetizes those articles with AdSense units above and below the posts, with CPM banner ads, with affiliate links in genuinely informative product reviews, and with links to shopping sites (Figure 8.8).

It also offers a free e-book to anyone who agrees to register for the site’s e-mail newsletter. That allows the site to keep a list of its visitors and to send deals and offers to anyone who has visited the site in the past, even if they haven’t come back.

Figure 8.8BloomBikeShop.com provides a ton of information about bicycle maintenance... and uses an information product to capture e-mail addresses. Couldn′t be simpler!

The e-book itself is nothing grand. Called 7 Common Bike Repair Mistakes That Most Riders Make, it lists a number of myths that bike owners believe when they try to repair their own bicycles. With little more than 1,000 words of content, it could easily have been put on the site and made available as Web content like all the other articles. Instead, publisher Levi Bloom has turned it into a PDF document and placed it behind a registration barrier. If you enter your e-mail address, you’ll receive a double-opt-in confirmation message from AWeber. When you confirm your address, you’ll be given a link to a page that lets you read the PDF file.

It’s very easy, couldn’t have taken more than a few minutes to put together, and it’s likely to have had a massive effect on the value of the site’s e-mail list.

Subscription Sites

Subscription sites are often relatively complex. They aren’t necessarily difficult to build; the tools available now mean that you have to put in some effort, but you don’t need a degree in computer science or a giant sack of cash to pay a programmer.

What you will need is a community of knowledgeable people who are active on the site and generous with their advice. You also need to be willing to put in the effort to keep the conversations ticking and ensure that the site continues to deliver value for the subscription fee. That can involve anything from starting your own discussion streams to getting rid of people who are rude to other contributors. Subscription fees usually keep out the worst types, but you do want to keep your site a pleasant, helpful place for everyone.

WEBMASTERWORLD

My own subscription site is pretty complex. I’ve packed in a ton of features in my aim to overdeliver. But a subscription site doesn’t have to be that complicated. WebMasterWorld (www.webmasterworld.com) is essentially a forum, and for a long time, it was a free forum (Figure 8.9). When it came to monetizing the site, there was a problem: A forum is a place for open discussion, and those open discussions often involve criticisms of the companies advertising on the site.

Rather than attempt to censor discussions, WebMasterWorld instead chose to ask members to pay a subscription fee of $89 for six months or $149 for a year. The hope was that the value of the sometimes technical information on offer would more than pay for the cost of the subscription.

Some of the older threads can be read for free. They act as sources of information, inviting potential participants in and demonstrating the quality of the knowledge on offer. But to start a thread or to take part in one, users have to sign up.

There are a couple of points to note here.

The first is WebMasterWorld’s simplicity. There are no whiz-bang features. Subscribers are paying for the chance to access each other’s knowledge. That’s all.