by John Pickett

Mary Frances and I have been TKA members since March of 2009. Many of you know us from the forums, and many of you have at least a vague idea of how we got to where we are now. Since I have a few minutes to talk here, let me tell you the full story.

Mary started our main site – www.glutenfreecookingschool.com – back in June of 2007. She started it as a simple blog, and worked on it steadily for a couple of years. We had the idea that we could make money online, and we has a strong desire to quit our jobs and work for ourselves, but we didn’t quite know how to get there. When we joined TKA in 2009, GFCS was making about $80/month. Just enough to tease us, not enough to be really substantial.

In December of 2009, after working on GFCS off and on for several months, applying many of the techniques that we learned from TKA, we had raised the earnings from the site to $500/month, but we seemed to be completely stuck at that point. Nothing we tried seemed to have any effect on our earnings, and we were demoralized and discouraged.

Luckily, I had the opportunity to have a coaching call with Mark that month, and after taking a look at our site, he encouraged us to forget about Adsense and work on selling a product. Although we didn’t know it at the time, that phone call was the catalyst that led us to stop blogging and start running a business.

Over the course of several months, we tried selling a number of various products in our niche, but nothing worked very well. Finally, we decided to develop our own product – an ebook – and sell that to our readers.

We released our ebook in September 2010, and right off the bat, we knew we had something special. We have since seen an increase in earnings from $500/month to over $10,000/month. In December of 2010, we launched a member area of our site, and developed a series of online cooking classes. As I write this, Mary Frances is working on the sales email for our holiday cooking classes and the last part of 2011 should be our best quarter ever.

Why an Ebook?

Lots of people in TKA have seen our success and asked for advice on how to do something similar in their own niche. I would love to help everyone at TKA develop a product for their niche and sell it, but there are a few things we need to clear up before we get to that.

First off, let’s talk about why you want to do an ebook in the first place. Most people that I’ve talked to want to write an ebook to increase the revenue from their site. This is a fantastic goal, and that was the reason that we wrote our ebook.

How do you know if an ebook can help your site? Let’s look at a magic number called CPM (also called eCPM and RPM). CPM stands for the amount of money you make per every 1,000 visitors to your site. To figure out your CPM, take the amount of money you earned last month, and divide it by the amount of traffic you got. Then multiply that number by 1,000.

So, for example, let’s say your website gets 750 hits/day, and last month you earned $850. Your monthly traffic is 750 * 30 = 22,500, and your CPM is (850 / 22,500) * 1,000 = $37.78

So this means you earned just under $38 for every 1,000 people that came to your site.

If your CPM is under $100, and you’ve only looked at Adsense or Amazon for monetizing your site, then you definitely need to think about some different methods for making money. When Mary and I decided to write our ebook, the CPM on our site was right at $12. Looking back, I just have to laugh. It was so incredibly low, and I had absolutely no idea.

With that said, however, increasing earnings is not the biggest reason that you should write an ebook or develop your own product.

What is that reason? Consider these questions. Why do any sort of advanced monetization at all on your website? Why not just throw Adsense on your site, or a bunch of Amazon links, and be done with it? Why go through the pain and stress of gaining an audience, developing a product, and learning to sell it?

Here’s the answer: sustainability.

To illustrate this point, let’s take a minute to consider those misguided souls who think that having a job is the most secure way to produce an income. Most of us here would probably disagree with that idea. Why? Because your boss can end your paycheck by telling you two little words: You’re fired. In other words, 100% of your income is completely controlled by someone else. This is not a good situation to be in.

Now let’s consider a successful Internet marketer who has all of his sites monetized with Adsense. 100% of his income… is completely controlled by someone else. In this scenario, it takes all of 6 words to completely end his income stream: Your Adsense account has been suspended.

And you don’t even have to have your account suspended. What if you never break a single Google rule, but one day you wake up to find that your traffic has disappeared? Would your website make you any money at that point?

Let’s think about this for a second. Are you willing to spend months and even years on a website to make a nice income, and then trust that income 100% to Google?

Really? Google? (I’m looking at you disbelievingly.)

I don’t hate or even dislike Google, but I don’t exactly trust them either. I could spend several paragraphs talking about why, but the fundamental problem is that they make decisions unilaterally, and you have no recourse if their decision negatively affects you or your website. Just like a boss.

Traffic disappears? Rankings gone? Adsense account suspended? Google doesn’t care.

And Amazon? Putting the rather significant issues with their affiliate program aside for a minute, if all your website does is provide links to Amazon, why would anyone visit your site? Why would any search engine rank it above the relevant page at Amazon?

What’s my point? Am I just trying to scare you and tell you that trying to make money online is a waste of time? Not at all. But if you, like me, are looking to do this for the next 50 years, then you can’t just put up a simple website with Adsense on it. That is simply not sustainable.

The Missing Link

Why do I say that is unsustainable? What is the fundamental element in any business? Online, offline, websites, mail order, brick and mortar – what is the one thing they all have in common? Customers.
If you want to do this for the rest of your life, you need customers. If you don’t have any customers, you are not providing sufficient value to anyone.

Let’s take a look at the typical MMO transaction. A searcher goes to Google, types in a keyword phrase, some results come up. Your site ranks #1, so they click on it and become a visitor to your site. Your site looks good, looks authoritative, and so they read the article, and then click on an Adsense link. Score, right? That’s what we want. Right?

Except now that visitor goes to the advertiser’s website where they will find a product or service that really, truly meets their needs. They buy something from the advertiser, and will never visit your site again. Why would they? They bought a product that meets their needs, and if anything else comes up again, are they going to your site? Or to the site of the advertiser with the great products?

Let’s see who has a customer in that scenario. Google does. The searcher probably went straight to Google to run their search. The advertiser does. They just made a sale, and probably signed the visitor up to their email list so they can contact them again.

What did you get? A couple of bucks on an Adsense click. Woo hoo. You’re like the poor little matchstick girl that gets left out in the cold.

You may not agree with me on this issue. That’s fine. If you want to write me off completely, that’s fine too. But understand if you take the other side in this discussion, you are placing your faith in Google. This is the company that unilaterally suspends Adwords and Adsense account and gives no reason why, deindexes websites on a whim, changes their algorithm like a teenage girl changes clothes, and doesn’t seem to care at all about collateral damage.

I know that there are some people out there who might take issue with me on the long term sustainability of Adsense, and I’ll admit that there might be some exceptions to the rule. If you have a very large, very old site with tons of content and authority, then Adsense might be a reasonable long-term solution.

However, just speaking for myself, Gluten Free Cooking School is nearly 5 years old, has thousand and thousands of organic links, over 200 articles on it, and it is one of the top 5 sites in our niche. With all that, I still wouldn’t trust trust Adsense as a long term monetization method.

So to those of you who think along the same lines as I do, or who are at least interested in growing and protecting your income, where do you start if you want to ensure the sustainability of your website? First, stop thinking of it as a website. From this day on, you run a business. You are a business owner, and you run a profitable online business.

Building A Business

The first place to start to grow your business is by figuring out if your niche and website are suitable. I have bad news. Not every niche and website are suitable. If your website has lots of mediocre (and possibly conflicting) information, then it’s going to be hard to build a business on it. Some niches don’t lend themselves to running a business either.

Here are a few questions to consider:

• Can you establish yourself as an expert in your niche?
• Can you provide legitimate, ongoing value to your readers?
• Is the niche something that your readers care deeply about?
• Can you write about your topic for days on end without wanting to claw your eyes out?

Establish Yourself As An Expert

Why do you have to be an expert? Because no one wants to buy a product from another newbie. If I decide that I want to learn to play the guitar, I want to learn from Eddie Van Halen, Slash, Tom Morello, and Jimmy Page. Or at least someone who can play like they do. I’m not going to buy a product from another guy who is just learning scales like I am.

But I’m not sure if I’m an expert, you say. “Expert” is one of those scary sounding words that get tossed around a lot in our circles. I think a lot of people get scared off from trying to build an audience because they don’t consider themselves an “expert”.

To be an online expert, you don’t have to know all of the answers automatically. You do, however, have to be willing to find all of the answers. If a reader asks you a question that you can’t answer, that’s fine. You now have the task of finding the answer to that question.

Which brings us to my next point: Offline experience is key. If the only way you have to research a question is to do a Google search for it, you’re not really providing any value. Your reader can do that just as easily. But if you google the question, find three possible solutions, and then try each one out for yourself, that is providing value. You can get back to your reader and say, “Here are three possible solutions to your question. I tried them all out, and can definitely say that #3 worked the best for me.”

Then you can take the question and your answer, and publish them on your website with some nice pictures of your experiments and results. Doing that will establish you as an expert more quickly than you realize.

Can You Provide Ongoing Value To Your Readers

What is value? In 1964, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously remarked in regards to pornography, that it was impossible to define, but “I know it when I see it”. Value is the same way. It’s impossible to define “value” for any given niche or website, but you know it when you see it.

Let’s not kid around. You know whether your website provides legitimate value to your readers, or whether you are just putting up mediocre content to get Adsense clicks.

If you have a mediocre website that you want to run as a business, go to your pages that get traffic and rewrite them to provide value. Set your standards high. Higher than that. Even higher…. There you go.

Just to set your expectations, turning a mediocre website into a great one is not going to be a quick process. You’re going to have to go through your website page by page, research each topic one by one, and then write a completely new article. If your website has a couple hundred posts on it, the process could take you months. Luckily, if you were afraid of hard work, you probably wouldn’t be here at TKA in the first place.

A related issue here is whether you can provide ongoing value to your visitors. If your visitors come to your website once, make a purchase, and then never come back, it’s going to be difficult to provide them much value going forward. If this describes your niche/website, then it’s not a good one for getting an audience or developing a product.

Is The Niche Something That Your Readers Care Deeply About?

As I’ve said before, you could write the best ebook ever about the pros and cons of the various brands of mechanical pencils, but you’re going to have a hard time selling it. Despite your hours of research, dozens of tests run on different pencils, keeping track of how many clicks you get before the spring snaps… no one is going to buy it. No one cares enough about mechanical pencils to buy a book about them.

Your niche needs to be something that your readers care enough about to pay money to solve their problems. That makes it sound like you have to help people solve a deep, personal issue, but that’s not the case. People will spend money on a lot of stuff. One of the cases studies I’m doing for The Ebook Ebook is a website about knitting and quilting. Not exactly a deep problem, right? But the website is already making some good money, and it has a ton of potential to go further.

This is one reason that personal experience with a niche is helpful. What have you spent money on lately? Other than groceries and essentials, what are the last 10 things you’ve bought? (Don’t count beer, that’s an essential.) Write them down, and then figure out what problem they helped you solve. Can you create something similar for your niche? Yeah, I bet you can.

Can You Write About Your Topic For Days On End?

This is one of the more common complaints I used to hear when the focus was on churning out mass quantities of content. “I can’t write about window shades, patterned bedspreads, or roofing tiles any more… I just can’t take it. I want to claw my eyes out.”

Well, the truth is that to be seen as an expert in your niche, you will have to do a ton of writing about your topic. Blog posts, guest posts, link building articles, email newsletters, it all adds up. If you are thinking up inventive ways to kill yourself with your laptop three weeks into starting your new website, you need a new niche.

But that’s not such a bad thing, really. Who wants to run a business they hate? Not me. Pick a niche you enjoy, and not only will you love working on your site, you’ll get more done and people will realize that you genuinely like your topic.

At this point, you probably have a good idea whether your site and niche are suitable for growing by getting an audience, developing a product and selling it directly to your readers. However, if you are still on the fence, I have great news. There is a simple way to find out if your niche is suitable, and this is made possible through the magic of email marketing.

Email Marketing

It’s a common misconception that you have to do email marketing in order to sell an ebook or a product effectively. This is not true. You can sell effectively online without ever doing any emailing. However, email marketing is the absolute best way to get your content in front of interested readers, so you should absolutely take advantage of this.

Getting started with email marketing is pretty easy, and it doesn’t take all that much to keep it going. I’ve got an entire ebook on my site about this topic so I’ll just hit the highlights here. (The ebook is free. Just visit my site and sign up on my email list!)

Here’s a short overview of what you want to accomplish with email marketing. Being able to send your content directly into your readers Inbox is, hands down, the absolute best way to engage your readers. They don’t have to seek you out. Every bit of content you publish can be sent directly to them. If you start a new project, they know about it. If you launch a new product, they know about it. If you run a sale for Canada Day, they know about it.

The only word for this is fantastic. You can’t pass up this opportunity to gain and influence an audience.

There are two types of people that I can see disagreeing with this: those who have a site in a niche that they do not know much about personally, and those who want to outsource everything so they can lay on the beach and sip piña coladas all day.

The answer to both of these objections is the same: hire a writer to do it for you. The outsourcing craze here at TKA pretty much dropped off right after the first Panda update (with good reason). I’m not suggesting that you hire a foreigner with terrible English for $2 an hour. You need to hire an actual writer, who actually knows how to write, to do your emails for you.

You will most likely have to search for a bit to find the right person. They need to have experience in your niche, and they need to be able to write about your niche effectively. You will need to pay this person accordingly. It probably won’t be cheap, but it will make you far more money in the long run.

One thing you definitely want to do if you have a writer doing your emails is to have them write under an assumed name and persona. This is in case they decide to leave (for whatever reason) and you have to hire a new writer. You want to have your readers to feel like they have a connection to a person, and you don’t want that person to change if you have to switch writers for some reason.

Getting Started With Email Marketing

There are lots of email marketing companies out there: Aweber, Mail Chimp, Constant Contact, and several others that I can’t remember at the moment. We’ve only ever used Aweber, and we have no plans to change to another company at any point. Aweber is the industry standard for actually delivering your emails to your readers. They have worked out numerous agreements with ISPs across the country to ensure that your emails get delivered, and we have always been very happy with the results that we’ve gotten from them.

When you sign up for your Aweber account (or whoever you choose to use), put a signup form on your website to let people subscribe to your newsletter. Prepare a small ebook or report to give away to them as a thank you for subscribing. If your website is already getting traffic, then a PDF of your most popular blog posts can be a great freebie.

Remember how I said that the magic of email marketing can help you decide whether you have a suitable niche for gaining an audience and selling a product or not? If you can get people to sign up for your email list, then you have a niche that you can sell something to. People don’t like to give out their email address, so there is some implied trust when they do it. They also would not sign up for your list if they thought that a 400-word article could completely solve their problems.

Once you have some readers signed up, start sending out an email newsletter. This doesn’t really need to be all that different from your blog posts. Simply talk about and discuss various topics in your niche. If you ever get stuck on what to write, just ask your readers for feedback. They’ll give you enough ideas to keep you busy for a while.

Using Your List For Market Research

One of the reasons why I recommend that anyone and everyone with a website use email marketing is that your readers will tell you what sort of product they want to buy. Or, to be more specific, they will tell you the problems they want solved, and you can then find or create a product to solve those problems.

How does this work? As you interact with your readers, you’re going to hear about problems your readers are having and you’ll get asked lots of questions about issues they are experiencing. These issues and problems are things that your readers will pay to solve.

Let’s look at a practical example from our gluten free website. When someone finds out they have to eat a gluten free diet, the first reaction they have is complete overwhelm. Most people have never heard of gluten, they have no idea what it does to their bodies, they don’t know what foods it is in, and they have no idea what they can and cannot eat for lunch.

After talking to our readers over the course of a few months, we realized this was a big issue for a lot of people. Someone who has just been told they have to eat a gluten free diet for the rest of their life doesn’t want to do an in-depth research project to find out what they can eat for lunch. They just want someone to tell them “Here, eat this.”

So when we developed our ebook, the first couple of chapters cover what to do for the first week or two after you find out you have to eat gluten free. We give them detailed menu plans, and we tell them specifically what foods to avoid and what foods are safe to eat.

This may seem very nebulous and abstract right now, but it will happen naturally as you talk to your readers. You’ll notice common problems that people have, and then you can work to find a solution to those problems. Let’s look at some hypothetical examples.

Let’s say that you run a health and fitness site, and one of the problems that you hear a lot is that people say they simply don’t have the time to work out on a regular basis. What is the solution to that problem? How about a workout routine that can be done in 20 minutes at home with no exercise equipment?

Let’s say you run a personal finance site and you hear from a lot of people who are lost when it comes to saving for their kids’ education. What’s the solution to that problem? How about a detailed, well-researched guide to education savings plans?

These are simple examples, and the reality of market research is going to be somewhat more complicated. For instance, I wouldn’t sell or develop a product that only talked about 1 quick exercise routine. Instead, I would develop a product that talked about all aspects of being healthy – diet, proper sleep, exercise, etc. Similarly, I probably wouldn’t develop a product that only talked about education savings. Instead, I would develop one that talked about stocks, bonds, mutual funds, annuities, retirement savings, budgeting, and being wise with your money, in addition to education savings.

However, identifying a problem and finding a solution is where you start when it comes to finding what your market wants to buy. Find one problem, and then present a solution. Find another problem, and give a solution. You can think about it like building a house, and each problem/solution is one brick. I don’t want to sell one brick. Instead, I want to get lots of bricks, put them together in an orderly fashion to make a house, and then sell the house.

It’s important to not tie yourself to a particular product at this point. An ebook might work well for your site, but maybe a video series would be better. Don’t be so focused on a particular type of product right now that you miss a great opportunity to develop something else.

Product Development, or How I Learned To Love Info Products

There are two important questions that you need to answer before you start developing a product:

• What problem(s) does this product need to solve for my readers?
• What is the best medium to use to solve that problem?

Your readers will answer the first question for you, as we just discussed. They’ll tell you what problems they want solved. The second question is one that you’ll have to answer for yourself, but I can help you narrow things down.

When you think about developing a product, there are lots of ways that you could proceed. However, let me focus your attention on information products, like an ebook or a video series. Info products are fantastic because they can be developed cheaply, and pretty much anyone can make a professional quality info product. In no particular order, the info products I recommend the most are an ebook, a video series, and a membership site.

Before we talk about the specifics of each product, let’s talk a bit about product development in general. There are a few things that you definitely need to keep in mind before you start.

First off, no matter your niche, no matter what you think people will buy, no matter what your buddies or some MMO guru tells you, you need to make the absolute best product you possibly can. In fact, aim to make the best product available in your niche. If you try to make an “OK” product, you’ll end up making a mediocre one, and mediocre products are harder to sell and more likely to be returned.

Second, you need to charge a good price for your product. I often hear people say they’re going to develop a small ebook and charge just a couple of bucks for it. This is not a good plan for several reasons. First, you have to sell a lot more cheap products to make the same amount of money that one expensive product would make you. Second, selling lots of cheap products is going to generate a lot of customer service requests. This is going to cost you either time or money that would be better spent on some other aspect of your business.

Third is the issue of perceived value. What is perceived value? Buyers assume a value for a product based on what they think it should cost. Then they compare their assumed value to the price that you set for your product.

To illustrate this concept, let’s say you are looking to buy a new car. You find a 2009 BMW 525 with only 20,000 miles on it in the paper. This is your dream car and you’re pretty excited about the possibility of getting it. Now since you’ve done your homework, you know the Blue Book value for this car is around $33,000. But after you test drive it, the guy that’s selling it tells you he’ll sell it for $10,000.

How do you respond to that?

“What’s wrong with it?”

The price is too good. You don’t assume you’re getting a great deal; you assume there’s something wrong with the car and you’re about to ripped off.

The same thing will happen if you charge a really low price for your product. People will assume that there is a reason you’re only charging $4 for your ebook. If it’s only worth $4 to you, why is it worth their time?

The underlying issue with all of this – making a small product, making a mediocre product, charging only a couple of bucks, etc – is fear. Fear is whispering in your ear saying that you can’t make a great product. It’s saying that you’re going to spend months working on your product, and then no one is going to buy it. Won’t that be sad, Fear says. No one is going to buy your product, and then all the popular kids are going to laugh at you.

The funny thing about fear is that once you realize that it’s talking to you, the voice goes away. So be ambitious. Make the best product available in your niche, and charge a fair price for it. What is a fair price depends on your product and your niche. But I will give these guidelines. I would never release any product for less than $20, and I would aim for at least $50. If you want to sell your product for $5, you need to make a better product. Either grow it bigger and cover a broader range of topics, or dig down deeper into your topic and cover it in more detail.

When Mary and I first released our ebook, we sold it for $9.95 at first. Then a few months later, we raised the price to $20. We are selling more books at $20 than we did at $9.95. Don’t be shy about pricing your product.

Info Products for Product Sites

If you have an ecommerce site, it might be tempting to think that you’ll never have a need for an info product. It’s true that info products work best for informational niches, but a product-oriented site could still receive great dividends from developing an info product. What I would do in this situation would be to develop an ebook that gave expert advice about choosing between the various products available in the niche. Then I would give that ebook away to every person that I possibly could.

For instance, let’s say that I run an ecommerce website that sells TVs. I would write or develop a fantastic ebook that tells the average consumer exactly what they need to know about buying a TV and getting the product that they want with confidence. What are the latest and newest TVs available? Are there different types of flatscreens available, and what are the differences between them? Is HD worth it? What cable provider should I sign up with to get the most channels in HD? How do I hook my new TV up to my DVD player? What about my tivo? Can I hook it in to my new TV?

Those questions are just off the top of my head. If you know your niche well, you could come up with a lot more that the average visitor to your site is likely pondering. If you can answer those questions for your visitors, they are more likely to become buyers.

Ebooks

Why would an ebook be right for your site?

An ebook is more or less the basic information product. Unless there is a good reason to develop a video series or a member site (see below), then an ebook will most likely do the job for you. If you have a niche big enough to support a blog or a good website, then you can write an ebook to help people.

Specific reasons to write an ebook are that you find you are unable to really explain topics in your niche well enough in blog posts, or that you find you have months (or years) of archives on your site. Most readers would rather pay a reasonable price to get all of your thoughts in one book, instead of having to page through months and months worth of archives on your site.

If you want to make an ebook, the place to start is by planning. Writing is easy; planning is hard. I’ve found that if I can get a detailed outline and table of contents written down for a book, then writing the book comes very naturally. If you start writing now before you have a plan, chances are good that you’ll either go off topic or get stuck because you don’t know what to write about next.

Start by getting your thoughts out and written down. I’ve found mind maps to be very helpful in this process. You can scribble your thoughts down on paper, or you can sign up for a free account at www.mindmeister.com and use their online app.

If your topic is big enough for an ebook (and since you’re aiming high, it’s going to be) you’re going to have several different topics and sub-topics to cover. Start broad and then work your way down. Start by getting the book divided into sections, and then work on the chapter titles.

Once you have a detailed outline, you can start actually writing the book. Congratulations, you’re now a writer! To quote Thomas Mann:

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Don’t expect your book to be written over night. I can tell you up front that it’s going to be a long, drawn out process that will be painful at times. This is a good thing though. The more pain you go through in this process, the better your book is going to be. Writing a book is a lot like having kids. If you’re not experiencing pain and frustration from time to time, it’s because you don’t care enough.

The particular program that you use to write your book doesn’t matter too much. For our first ebook, we used OpenOffice, which has the added benefit of being able to publish to PDF. It’s also free! For The Ebook Ebook, I’m using Evernote to write the book, and then I’ll put it all into OpenOffice when it’s time to do the final draft and proofreading.

How long should my ebook be and what topics should it cover?

The answer to these questions is simple. It needs to be long enough and cover enough topics to be the best product available in your niche. There is no magic length for an ebook to be “done” or successful. There’s no professor out there who is going to give your ebook a D if it is 14.9 pages long or runs over one sentence onto the 16th page. Length is much less important than quality.

Just to give you an idea, our first ebook was roughly 35,000 words. If we were to go back and re-write it now (which is a potential project for us), I think we could hit 50,000 words easily. But those numbers are just for illustration. Your project will vary in scope and size, so don’t think that it has to compare to our book.

How do I sell it? How do I collect the money for it?

If you have an ebook, I think that it’s important to make sure that your content is protected. Don’t just put your ebook on your hosting server and send people an email with the URL in it. Most people are honest, and I don’t think that digital theft is something that you need to spend a great deal of time worrying about, but there’s no point in tempting people to steal your content.

The solution to this is to use a file delivery system like E-Junkie. EJ will host your file on their servers, send your buyers a temporary URL to download it, and it does everything automatically and securely. Best of all, EJ plans start at only $5 per month, and they don’t take a cut from every sale you make, the way some guys do. (I’m looking at you, Clickbank!)

The next thing that you need is a payment processor to take payments for you. Paypal is the best known payment processor and they are the one that we use for our payments. You can sign up for free and link your Paypal account to a bank account. Paypal does charge a small fee per transaction, but it’s not a large amount.

Paypal and EJ integrate completely, so all you have to do to use both of them together is to input your Paypal email into your EJ account. Then all of the sales you generate via EJ will automatically be deposited into your Paypal account. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

What about copyright issues?

I may be an anomaly in the internet marketing world, but I don’t worry too much about people stealing the content in our ebook. We put a copyright statement at the beginning of the book to let people know they couldn’t re-sell or give away our book themselves, and we use EJunkie to protect the actual file itself. Other than that, we really haven’t done much to protect the book. Remember, most people are honest and chances are that you’ll never have a problem.

With that said, if we were to come across a copy of our ebook available somewhere online, we would definitely take the necessary steps to have it removed. But the last thing you want to do is spend your valuable time looking for problems that are probably not there.

Mary and I worked briefly with another blogger in our niche on a joint venture a while back, and he was so paranoid about people stealing his content he almost didn’t want to sell his book. He told us that he spent at least a couple of hours each week combing through websites and forums in the GF niche, looking for recipes or pictures from his book that people had put online.

You don’t want to be like that guy. He was difficult to work with, and he expends more energy trying to keep his content protected than he does in trying to make sales. If he focused on making sales, he would be making a lot more money.

Video Series

If your niche or product is visually oriented, then you might benefit from doing a video series. However, a lot of internet marketers are shy and they don’t necessarily want to appear on camera. Plus, to quote Keanu Reeves:

Acting is hard.

Ok, I made that up. But there are a lot of people out there who could sell a video product that simply don’t consider doing a video because they don’t want to appear on camera. I can sympathize. However, after watching my wife do a great job on our video cooking series, I think there are a few things that anyone can do to make a great video product.

First, energy is huge when you’re on camera. You need to be excited and pumped up before you hit the Record button. I usually try to make Mary laugh a lot before we start recording a new cooking class to get her into the right mindset. If you need to watch some SNL clips or Seinfeld reruns to pep yourself up, feel free.

If you’re thinking about doing a video product, watch some people on tv and pay attention to their energy. Think about Rachel Ray or Jimmy Kimmel or any of the anchors on Sportscenter. They’re not laughing or giddy or hyperactive, but they are generally upbeat and high-energy. They’re not tired, depressed, or down.

Second, rehearse what you’re going to say but don’t memorize it. Memorizing your talk word-for-word will make you sound like a robot, and it will make you nervous if you skip a word or forget what to say next. Be familiar with what you want to say, but don’t be afraid to go with the flow. If you think of something on the spur of the moment that you want to include, mention it and talk about it. If you forget something that you wanted to include, either omit it completely or work it in naturally when you think about it.

Third, if you’re familiar with your subject material, once you get started you’ll find that your nervousness goes away and you start to discuss the topic naturally. Getting started is the key. Mary has started introducing each new cooking class in the same exact way:

Hi, this is Mary Frances from Gluten Free Cooking School, and today I’m going to show you how to make [food item]. So let’s get started…

And then she leads right into the cooking instructions. It works like a charm – once you’re going it’s easier to keep going than stop.

Lastly, if you’re still nervous about appearing on camera, try doing a screencast first. You can do a free one at www.screencast.com (I think it’s limited to 5 minutes), and release that screencast to your readers. The only part of you that will appear on camera is your voice, and that’s a simple way to ease into doing video on your website.

Why would a video product work for your site?

As I mentioned above, some topics lend themselves well to visual demonstrations. Cooking, exercise demonstrations, mythbusting, the list goes on. Think about what you would want if you were going to buy a product in your niche. Would video help make the subject clearer? Would you expect at least some video? If yes, then think about how showing your readers something could make it easier for them to grasp than telling them about it.

You can always consider including a video or two as a bonus or as a freebie as well. It takes a lot less time to record the equivalent of a 5,000 word article than it does to actually sit down and write it.

How do I go about developing a video series?

Developing a video (or video series) to market to your readers is probably easier than you think. We use a little Flip video camera that records in HD, and the only video editing software that we use is the software program that came with the video camera. We don’t do any extensive editing, sound production, or anything else that you might need to contact WETA about.

Flip has now gone out of business so you can’t buy any of their video cameras any more, but fairly inexpensive video cameras can still be found. I definitely recommend getting one that records in HD because the picture quality is so much better, but you really don’t have to have a whole lot more than that. You could also look on eBay for used cameras if you want to save some money.

When you’re filming, I can’t over-emphasize how important lighting is to the production quality. If you can get the light right in the scene you’re fliming, then you’re halfway to making a great scene. Since we film most everything in the kitchen, we turn on all of the lights in the kitchen and surrounding rooms, we bring in 3 or 4 lamps from our bedroom, and we unscrew the lampshade from the overhead light. Altogether that makes it bright enough to film in.

When you are putting the videos together, I recommend breaking them up naturally by topic. Shorter videos are generally better than long ones, but you can gauge your audience’s attention span for yourself.

If you still don’t like the idea of doing a video yourself and a screencast sounds better, you can check out Jing or Screenflow for a more professional screencast.

How do I sell a video series and collect the money?

There are a couple of ways to go about selling a video series. First, I probably wouldn’t make the videos themselves available for download. Any decent video series is most likely going to be several hundred megs in size (if not a couple of gigs), and asking your customers to download that is asking for lots of customer service issues. In addition, giving your customers access to the movie file itself may mean that you end up having to take user-uploaded copies of the video down from Youtube. Like I mentioned earlier, most people are honest, but there’s no need to give your customers access to something they don’t need to have.

I think a better option is to host the videos and let your customers view them online. There are several options for video hosting, such as Youtube, Vimeo, Wistia, and others. Some of the factors that you want to look for in a video host are the ability to protect your content, ease of use, and pricing.

Youtube is the first option most people will think of, but it is not a good choice because you cannot protect your videos. You can hide your videos from visitors on Youtube, but Google searchers can still find them as well as the fact that your customers can share the URL freely. Youtube is easy to use and is completely free, but not being able to protect my content strikes it out in my book.

Vimeo is the next option for video hosting. Their free plan doesn’t give you the option to protect your content, but the Vimeo Plus plan does allow for protection and it’s a good deal at only $10/month. We used Vimeo Plus for several months for our video hosting. The pros of Vimeo Plus are the price and it will do most of what you need. The cons are that their TOS actually forbids business video hosting (we didn’t realize that until several months after we signed up). So there is a possibility that you could sign up for an account, and then have all of your videos deleted a few months later.

Additionally, we received a fair number of customer complaints from people who said the videos would not work correctly. For the first couple of complaints, we assumed it was some Granny trying to watch the videos on dial-up, but we got more complaints than could be explained away. Finally, we decided to look for another option.

(Quick side note: The day we deleted our Vimeo account, they launched Vimeo Pro which is targeted directly at business video hosting. It costs $199/year so it is a reasonably cost-effective option, but I can’t speak to the quality issues we had with Vimeo Plus.)

Wistia is the video hosting we currently use, and we’ve been very happy with them. They’re also the video hosting that SEOMoz uses, so we’re in good company. (Or maybe I should say that SEOMoz is in good company!)

Wistia costs a bit more than Vimeo – the basic plan is $80/month – but the quality is great and I don’t wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat wondering if all of our videos have been deleted. We haven’t had any issues at all with Wistia so far, and I don’t foresee us changing video hosting any time soon.

So once you have chosen a video host, the actual method you’ll use to let your members watch the videos will depend on your particular product. Our cooking classes come with several articles and recipes bundled together in a PDF that our customers download. We embed the videos onto a password-protected page on our website, and then give the URL and the password in the cooking lesson article.

You could also set up an email auto-responder to send your customers the URL and password automatically, or you could use a membership program to protect the pages with the videos (see the next section).

Membership Site / Subscription

Why would a member site work for me?

Membership sites are generally regarded, from a marketing sense, as the best way to make money from customers, since your customers are in a subscription and the money is automatically drafted from their Paypal or checking account. Plus, to quote Mark Butler:

Membership sites are awesome! I give them two thumbs-up!

Ok, I made that one up too. But there’s no question that having your customers commit to a regular payment is a great way to create a business. However, there are responsibilities that are unique to member sites.

The big thing is that you have to provide value on an ongoing basis to justify charging your customers regularly. This means that your niche or topic has to lend itself to being taught or discussed on continual basis for an indefinite period (or the length of the subscription period). If your niche is a one-time thing like helping accountants pass the CPA exam, you’re going to have a harder time getting people to sign up for a member site. An ebook would probably work better for a one-time topic or niche.

The next responsibility unique to member sites is the question of how exactly you are going to produce that ongoing value. If you are planning on producing new content (of any sort) each month, you need to be aware that you are going to have to do that every single month for the forseeable future. What are you going to do if you want to take a vacation? What if you are busier than normal one month and don’t have the usual amount of time to prepare a lesson?

Mary and I ran provided our cooking classes in a membership format for one year, and then we got tired of having to create a new class every single month. We hadn’t fully considered the questions in the above paragraph, and that became a problem. We are now phasing out our member site, and have begun selling our class as stand-alone products.

If the value that you provide to your members depends on you creating new content, then that is something you need to consider. An alternative is to have something else that you offer to your members that is not dependent on your time. A tool or web appplication is a great addition to a member site. Mark does regular webinars, but he also has PostRunner which is there and available at any time. Fraser’s keyword tool is another good example. His website is really a member site, but the main value is the keyword tool which provides constant value regardless of how much work Fraser does month to month.

What software should I use to make a member site?

There are two popular membership programs out there that allow you to use your existing Wordpress installation: Wishlist Member, and Amember. We used WLM on our member site. It did its job adequately, but it was fairly difficult to work with and use. If I ever start a new member site, I don’t think that I would use it again.

Amember is the other option, and while I’ve heard good things about it, I’ve never used it myself so I can’t comment on options, features, or ease of use.

Amember costs $180 and WLM costs $100.

Running a Forum

If you are looking to build a community on your site, a forum is a great way to start discussions, get your readers involved, and really get to know your niche better. Forums can also be helpful in increasing the web traffic to your site, as your readers can create their own content that you can monetize.

The negatives to running a forum are the amount of time you’ll spend fighting spam and moderating the discussions. If you open a forum on a popular website and let anyone join your forum, you will spend a good deal of time deleting spam threads, and you will have to be vigilant about weeding out trolls and moderating discussions to keep them on subject. That can potentially take up a good bit of time.

The alternative is to charge for your forums, but this can limit the number of people who sign up and use the forums. There are few things sadder than a forum area on a website where no one is starting new topics or discussing things.

Despite the drawbacks to running a forum, you only have to look at TKA to see the potential value of having a central place for all of your members to discuss your topic. If you are thinking of setting up a forum, I would strongly recommend that you make sure you can hire a moderator to police things, even if it is a part-time position. You don’t want to have to spend your time on grunt work like that.

What forum software should I use?

There are a number of options for making a forum on your website. BBPress is popular because it integrates automatically with Wordpress. This means that people can sign up for an account on your Wordpress blog, and the same username and password will work on your forums. You also can’t beat the price which is free.

However, BBPress doesn’t seem to be updated with any regularity, support is practically non-existent, and there are no built in defenses against spam. Having used BBPress briefly, I definitely don’t recommend anyone else using it.

The two options I would recommend are Simple Machines Forum and vBulletin. SMF is a much better option than BBPress, and it is free, so you can’t beat it there. SMF also has custom skins that you can install to change the look of your forum, and support is fairly decent (especially for a free product).

Vbulletin, on the other hand, will cost you money, but it is generally regarded as the standard for forum software. Vbulletin is the software that Problogger uses on his forums, and the one that Steve Pavlina uses on his. If it’s good enough for them, it’s probably good enough for me.

vBulletin will also let your readers set up their own blogs and feeds, so if you really want to make a thriving, active community, I would go with vBulletin. There are several different packages if you’re thinking about purchasing vBulletin – the basic package is about $200, and the deluxe model is around $470.

Conclusion

Mary and I are incredibly blessed to be able to do what we do. As our Facebook friends know, we recently started a multi-year RV trip across the US. We’re traveling around with three kids in a camper trailer with no real schedule, goals, or destination. I definitely want to see the Grand Canyon, and Niagara Falls, and maybe we’ll head up to Canada at some point. Our online business is what allows us to do this instead of having to work 9 to 5 jobs in some cubicle.

I think the bottom line in creating a successful online business is that you have to really give the searcher what they are looking for. That phrase – give the searcher what they are looking for – gets tossed around a lot in internet marketing circles, but it really is the truth. If you can consistently meet the needs and expectations of your readers, then you can make a whole lot of money in just about any niche, and rest assured of the sustainability of that income.

But what the people who just say “give the searcher what they want” aren’t telling you is that it takes a whole heck of a lot of work to find out what the searcher really and truly wants. You have to know your niche backwards and forwards. You have to be talking to people in your niche to find out what their problems and issues are. You have to be researching things first hand. It takes time and effort and a lot of commitment. It doesn’t just happen, and it’s almost never solved by a 400 word article.

Despite the amount of work that is required though, I don’t see any other way to create a successful, sustainable business. Can you imagine a brick and mortar business built around the concept of purposefully doing mediocre work so that your potential customer leaves to find another option? That idea is laughable. Yet, for some unfathomable reason, some people think that this will work for them online, simply because they run a website.

This concept – that serving your readers better will help them and you both – has played out in our business very clearly. When we were running only Adsense, we were making around $500/month. Once we took the time to really learn our niche, talk to people, and find out the core issues and problems, we were able to create a product that not only increased our income dramatically, but has become one of the foundations of our business.

As you grow your business, just about everything should happen organically. You shouldn’t ever have to force something – 9 times out of 10, your audience will tell you what you should be working on. The “what” will almost always be clear, especially once you learn how to listen to your readers. The big questions that you’ll have come from the “how”. How do I help my readers more? How can I ensure that the product that I’m going to spend months developing will sell? How can I effectively Google-proof my business? How can I create a consistent income stream from one product?

When you have an opportunity like this to not only grow your income remarkably but also to ensure the longevity and sustainability of your business, that just seems like a no-brainer to me. So let me know what questions you have. I love to hear from people and I’m always willing to help out.

If you would like to learn more about how to turn a website into a profitable, sustainable business, visit John and Mary Frances Pickett at www.theebookebook.com. John is currently writing The Ebook Ebook which will teach you how to build an audience, create a fantastic product (like an ebook, for instance), sell it successfully, and run your business without having to spend all of your time on it. Until The Ebook Ebook is complete, John will be blogging about these same topics on his site. You can sign up for his email list and get all of his updates sent to you for free.