KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays (17 page)

Read KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays Online

Authors: Joel Comm,Mark Victor Hansen

BOOK: KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays
11.17Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
However, you do have a measure that tells you how much interest remains after someone has read your post. Your ad stats don’t just reveal how well your ad units have been optimized, they also show you that having read your post and looked at your page, your readers still want to learn more. They’ve clicked the ad to continue their education. That tells you there’s a demand that still hasn’t been met.
 
When you’ve listed the posts and topics that have attracted the most views for the longest amounts of time, add the pages with the highest click-through rates.
 
All of these figures will give you a sense of the demand for your expertise. But they won’t give you an answer to the question, “What should I create an information product about?” They’ll give you areas to think about. They’ll inspire you. But you still have a couple more things to throw into the pot.
 
Your information product should be on a topic you know well and can talk about intelligently. There’s no point in choosing a subject that you think your audience would pay for if you don’t actually know more about it than they do.
 
And it has to deliver results.
 
That’s the really crucial bit. When you’re asking people to pay you money for information, they’re only going to reach into their pockets if they believe that money is going to come back to them. That doesn’t have to be in cash form—although you can certainly find plenty of information products on the Web that promise to help people earn giant stacks of cash—it can also be money saved.
 
Create an information product that explains how to build a deck, for example, and you’ll be able to tell people that they’re saving the labor costs involved in hiring someone to do the work for them. As long as you’re charging less than the amount that a buyer would have had to pay, you’ll be offering a bargain. Your buyers need to feel that they’re swapping the cover price for a later return of money or some other benefit.
 
I wish I could tell you that there’s a fail-safe formula for coming up with ideas for information products. I wish I could walk you through the process of reading your server stats and ad stats until the opportunities leap out and grab you. And I wish I could claim that if you do all of these things, check the market, and outline the value your product brings that you’re guaranteed to make a profit.
 
But I can’t.
 
When you’re creating information products, there are no guarantees. There are gambles of various odds and risks with different levels of reward. But there are also ways of reducing the risk, and there are so many opportunities available that the biggest risk you can take when building an online business is not creating an information product at all.
 
Creating the Product
 
What kind of product do you want to create? A book? An e-book? A set of DVDs? Or how about a subscription-based virtual classroom that, over the course of several months, teaches your customers everything they need to know to complete their goals?
 
There’s no one way to create an information product. Instead, there are a number of different ways of transforming the information you have into a format that can be sold online. For the buyer, the format itself doesn’t matter. As long as the information is able to flow efficiently from you to them, they’ll be getting their money’s worth. But what the different formats can do is affect how that information is transferred,
how much
information is transferred—and how much you have to invest in creating the product.
 
E IS FOR EASY... AND E-BOOK
 
The easiest approach is to write an e-book. This is how I started creating information products and the result just blew me away (
Figure 4.1
).
 
After I’d seen what AdSense could do, I got in touch with a few friends and told them what I’d discovered about optimizing ad units. A day after trying out some simple strategies for himself, Chris Pirillo, creator of blog network
Lockergnome.com
, got back to me with the single word: “Dude!” Dave Taylor (
AskDaveTaylor.com
) and tech guru Bob Rankin (
TheInternetTourbus.com
) were also enthusiastic, and soon I was telling everyone I met that they needed to be shaking up their ads, blending them into the page, and testing different formats.
 
Figure 4.1
The first edition of my AdSense Secrets e-book was about 60 pages long ... and I sold thousands of copies at $77 each.
 
At that point, someone suggested I put the results of my experiment in an e-book and share it online.
 
I didn’t know anything about information products then. I’d never created one, and much of the content on my web site was being provided by volunteers and professional writers. I was contributing only occasionally, so the idea of sitting down and writing an entire book didn’t appeal to me a great deal.
 
But I wanted people to know this stuff. I’d wasted a lot of time and lost a lot of money by not optimizing my ads, so the sooner people understood what AdSense could do, the sooner they could earn real cash, too. Of course, I wasn’t completely altruistic, either. The more people who used AdSense, the more advertisers would like it, the more ads there’d be online, and the more money there’d be available for everyone. That’s one of the great things about AdSense: The larger the competition, the greater the opportunity.
 
I was also going to charge for it. If people were going to take my research and make money, then I was thrilled for them, but I couldn’t see why they should object to paying me for helping them make that money.
 
So I did it. I took the same approach to the book that I take with anything that I put up on my sites: I forgot about being literary and trying to talk like a newspaper, and wrote the way I speak. It seemed the easiest way to do it, and I couldn’t really see myself doing it any other way. I pretended that I was on the phone with one of my friends explaining the results of my AdSense testing—something I’d done many times.
 
What Google Never Told You about Making Money with AdSense
came out in February 2005. It was about 60 pages long—short for a book, but plenty long for an e-book. Most important, it contained everything I had then learned about AdSense, so I wasn’t too concerned about the length. I knew that if readers implemented the strategies in the book, they’d make money. Those strategies had made money for me, and they’d made money for friends who had used them. I didn’t think that buyers would care that they had to read only 60 pages rather than 300 before they could improve their income.
 
I priced the e-book at $77.
 
For a book, that’s a giant amount of cash. The only books you’ll find for that sort of money in your local Borders will be double-sized, limited edition photo books with hard covers and glossy pictures. Most of that money will be spent on printing.
 
My e-book was digital. I didn’t have printing costs and I didn’t have distribution costs. I would have affiliate costs, though. Sellers could be taking as much as half of the cover price as a commission, but that would still leave me with almost 40 bucks for every sale, which seemed like a nice amount. For strategies that had improved my income from a buck a day to 1,000 bucks a day, it was a steal.
 
I had no idea what was going to happen when I started selling. My guesstimate was that I might make an extra $1,000 a month. For an e-book that was meant to help other people make money, that would always be fine by me.
 
Of course, I didn’t just put the e-book on a web site and tell my own web site users about it. I also got in touch with some big affiliate marketers and offered the book to them. One of the first to sign up was Paul Myers, whose
TalkBiz.com
web site had already made him famous as an affiliate marketer. Paul mentioned the book to his subscribers ... and sales, helped by this network of affiliate sellers, rocketed.
 
That $1,000 a month that I’d been expecting turned into $10,000 in just two days.
 
An e-book priced at $77 was flying off the servers. Not only was it clear that it was possible to price even short documents far higher than you could get in the stores, it was also clear that affiliate selling helped move them and that people were prepared to lay out real cash for a book that promised to return that money if its strategies were implemented.
 
It also proved to me that creating e-books really isn’t difficult. The book itself hadn’t taken me very long at all to write, placing it on the servers was a breeze, and best of all, once the setup was complete, the money rolled in by itself.
 
Since then, I’ve updated the e-book four times, adding more information, discussing more strategies, and extending those original 60 pages to more than 200. I even raised the price to $97 for the second and third editions! These days, having made tens of thousands of dollars from that e-book, and with much of the information contained in it now being shared among Internet marketers, I give it away for free. You can pick it up at
www.adsense-secrets.com
.
 
When I say “free,” I don’t mean entirely free. To download the e-book, you’ll need to supply your e-mail address. I don’t sell those addresses or let anyone else use them, but it does help me to build up a list of people interested in creating an online business. In return, I also send readers my weekly online business newsletter, another way to deliver value and to let entrepreneurs know about any other products I have to offer that might help them.
 
Creating an e-book is simple enough. The document should be in PDF format, which makes it easy to distribute while still offering plenty of formatting options, an attractive, booklike appearance, and a relatively small file size. While you can—and should—pack pictures, graphs, and images into your e-book to break up the text and make it inviting to flip through, remember that all of those extras will increase the book’s weight. That means that it will take up more space on the server and take longer to download. You really want to keep the weight below five megabytes. If you go over that, start looking for pictures to take out.
 
You can create the e-book using Adobe’s own Acrobat program. That’s probably the best way, and if you were to hire a designer to lay out the book for you, that’s probably how he or she would do it. But even the simplest version of the software costs about $300, and since you’re only going to be using a fraction of the features you’ll be buying, it might not be the best move. Instead, you can write up your document using Word (or even a free word processing program like Open Office if you’re really strapped for cash) then convert it to PDE Adobe itself lets you do that from its web site at
www.createpdf.adobe.com
. A subscription that enables you to convert as many documents as you want costs from $9.99 a month, but you can start with a trial run of five documents.
 
In other words, you can create PDF versions of your first five e-books for free. Once you’ve burned up those five samples, you can either pay 10 bucks for your next e-book ... or download PrimoPDF, a free program that does much the same thing.
 
The book itself doesn’t have to be anything too complex. While pictures and graphics will make the book easier to read and appear more professional, they’re not strictly necessary. If you can do it, then your readers will appreciate it, but if you’re no designer and don’t want to pay for one, then you can skip those extra bits and focus only on the text. Your customers will be paying only for the information and, more important, what that information is going to do for them. If a design element looks good but doesn’t actually contain information that will help buyers achieve their goals, then you don’t have to sweat too much about leaving it out if you’re struggling to work it in.
 
What you should include are a table of contents so that people can see what the e-book contains, page numbers so they can find the information they want quickly, and a footer with a link to your web site.
 
That’s crucial. In theory, no one should be able to read your e-book without having paid for it first. In practice, your e-book is going to fly around the Web and be seen and used by all sorts of people who didn’t pay for it. The more popular your book, the more valuable it is to your market and the more people are going to pass it to their friends. While you should send rude e-mails threatening legal action to anyone
selling
your e-book without your permission, you’ll gain very little by raging against those who share your file for free. Including a link to your site on every page will let you offer more products, and ads, to every reader—even the ones who didn’t buy.

Other books

Beth Andrews by St. Georgeand the Dragon
The Sea Beggars by Holland, Cecelia;
What Happened to Lani Garver by Carol Plum-Ucci
Into the Heart of Evil by Joel Babbitt
Stolen Pleasures by Gina Berriault
Falling for Rain by Janice Kirk, Gina Buonaguro
Virtual Prophet by Terry Schott