Exploding Websites for Fun and Profit
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I am jealous – a little.
Okay, a lot. But it will pass soon enough.
My pal @elizabethpw remodeled her website. I’m sharing some of the pertinent insights to my audience on my direct sales blog, but today, I wanted to share the discoveries that are pertinent to you.
See I created that site eons ago, when I was just a fledgling online person. I shunned WordPress (not one of my better decisions, I’ll admit). I was creating pages by hand (still do sometimes). I thought I was doing well.
Then the other day, I got an email from Liz Pabon, where she wrote this:
Our inner knowing is like an attic filled with great treasures made up of our knowledge, experiences and wisdom. And sometimes those treasures are blocked or hidden by the cobwebs of self-neglect.
And I got to thinking about all the “stuff” that’s crammed into that site. 2 years of teleclasses (yes, 2 freakin’ years worth). Classes, courses, downloads and handouts. All of it muddled, mixed around, and hard to navigate.
I was making it difficult for people to buy from me.
Now don’t get me wrong, I like earning my keep. I enjoy getting paid for the contribution I make. I think I do a pretty good job of sharing what works, and it’s important to my family that I’m compensated appropriately for my “genius work” as my coach calls it.
But buried within layers of links, pages and other subterfuge, it wasn’t easy to do business with me. And the irony is, I tell people time and again to make it easy for customers to do business with you.
I’m accessible. I’m probably too accessible. If someone sends an email, a tweet or a facebook post, I usually respond – and pretty quickly when I’m able. And I answer questions, provide tons of advice and strategies to help my clients and strangers who may never be my clients.
But on more than one occasion, I’ve had people say the very same thing that I read at the top of Elizabeth’s blog post (except that my name’s Lisa and not Elizabeth).
But in my own head, I thought I was being really clear. I was following all the “rules” about building an opt-in list, creating info products, doing launches, and sharing “free content” with my followers (you know, “the what” but not “the how” stuff we’ve been fed).
So I’m blowing it up – for fun AND profit.
I’ve had this vision for an entire training program much like a college curricula for direct sales pros that want to run their business like a real business. But it’s built around small group coaching – classroom style – and that violates “the rules” of online marketing.
See, according to “the rules”, I’m supposed to create content once, get paid to do it, and then re-package it into an info-product I can sell over and over. It’s a great way to produce “passive” income, but if you follow “the rules”, the bulk of that revenue comes during the product launch, and then trickles in over the lifetime of the product. The more affiliates you have promoting the launch, the more money you stand to make when it launches. Which is why you hear a LOT about people that have multi-million dollar launches, but then you never hear how the product does on the back end.
Things that make me go hmmm…
I’ve been doing this “info marketing thang” for a couple of years now, and when I was green, I was following “the rules” religiously. Step-by-step, cranking out teleclasses, setting up continuity programs, etc. And in the last three weeks it hit me that I wasn’t being authentic in my business.
For as much as I enjoy “passive” income. I had become a slave to “the rules” – and they really didn’t fit me or the way I wanted to do business.
Here’s the truth I’ve learned in the past two years in my online business:
- People will buy info products, but they’ll pay more to work directly with you.
- Info products by themselves are mostly worthless. They sit on shelves and collect dust. I think it was Dan Kennedy that said 20% of your customers will never even open the product. And to get USED to that. Um, sorry. That does not compute for me.
- My business is seeing a shift towards hands-on help that guides people through the info products. And that’s because…
- People get better results with hands-on help.
- Small groups rock. The synergy, the energy and the masterminding that goes on is exponentially better than self-study, and bridges the gap between info products and live events.
- The biggest payday happens at product launch. BUT…
- Big launches leave big gaps in your cash flow.
There’s nothing wrong with helping people and getting paid to do it, folks. That’s what teachers and mentors have been doing for centuries. The catch is to price yourself accordingly for the services you perform. There’s always someone who thinks you’re too expensive, and someone that sees you as the bargain basement extra meal deal. The key is to find your own value in that mix and be fair with your pricing. There’s NO disputing the fact that hands-on help is worth more than info-products all day long.
That’s why you’re seeing a surge in live events, big ticket “masterminds” and ultra pricey one-on-one coaching programs – complete with swarming, affiliate-driven promotional launches.
But you can’t feasibly launch a big ticket item every month to keep cash flow consistent.
Even the “guru’s” are filling those gaps with smaller ticket product launches, generally joint ventures in a teleclass (small group) format. They can launch them every couple of months, and both partners benefit. In fact, one multi-million dollar guru has already launched 6 products in the first 3 months of the year. Talk about bombarding their audience!
But between affiliate and JV promotions, the cash flow keeps coming in.
Take a look at who’s doing what this year. You’ll see most of them moving away from continuity-based models (especially in light of the new California legislation), and towards more mid-price ($300-500), “one-time-only” tele-series and product launches. It serves the same purpose, but at a higher price point, and with fewer customer service issues.
My own business is taking a similar stance – albeit at a much lower price point in most instances. We’re blowing up HomePartySolution.com – and the entire online community that goes with it – to create a more streamlined user interface, and a more lucrative business platform for the direct sales portion of our coaching business.
In short, I’m going to make it so easy for people to do business with me that my clients will wonder what happened.
It’s not an easy process, by any means, and we’re considering documenting the process to help YOU shorten the learning curve if you ever want to do this in your own business. I estimate the entire site will be down about a month to test everything and make it all operational again – with all the new content we’re adding to boot.
The only thing that will still be live on that site is the home page opt-in for new ezine subscribers. I still plan on sending out the weekly ezine, and generating content behind the scenes. But we won’t be selling anything for about a month over there.
So how am I going to keep the employees paid and the family fed?
With a GI-NORMOUS product launch over here. 
Tickets for The Renaissance Mom Experience are slated to go on sale April 15. You can sign up for the advance notification list on that page. You have been warned.
The cool thing is that I’m able to continue to do what I love in a way that I truly enjoy. I am able to connect with the very people I enjoy helping and they are seeing better results because of it. I’m able to leverage myself as well (more on that in another post), and continue to grow both segments of my business (both here and on the direct sales side of things). I can’t wait for you all to see what new things we have in store this quarter.
What about you? I’d love your thoughts and feedback on this. Share your comments below, or send me a note on twitter.
Sorry Seth, I Have to Disagree…
One of my favorite authors in my known galaxy is Seth Godin. He’s a proliferate pontificate on marketing, life, and other good stuff.
Today marks the first day in my LIFE that I think the man is stright up wrong and needs a brick upside his head.
And that could just be because my life experience is markedly different than his. Who knows.
In a recent post about why you should, or shouldn’t write a book, Seth makes a fatal generalization.
He says “Out of context, a 140 character tweet cannot change someone’s life.”
WRONG and WRONG.
I have never felt my skin crawl faster. And I LOVE Seth’s work. Really. I do!
I have read brilliant tweets. Short snippets from friends and strangers that have made course corrections in my own life.
Some had only the context of knowing the author (thank you @unmarketing, @chrisbrogan, @lkr, @elizabethPW, @tomziglar) – so by knowing them to some degree, I suppose that changes the “context” of things.
But others (because I occasionally DO read my ‘all tweets’ stream) were random people that I may or may know have any inkling of that said something funny, emotionally charged, or just made a life-altering statement.
Usually in 120 characters or less, because that way you can re-tweet.
And dear Mr. Godin, if you ever USED twitter, you might understand that.
I guess the thing that irritates me is also the salve to soothe me. See Seth has never used twitter, so his sideways assessment makes sense. He’s a writer/blogger at heart, so of course he’d make the assertion that blogs impact lives.
But to summarily write off a medium you’ve never used (except to broadcast his posts – I’ll get back to that in a minute), is a disservice to his readers.
One of the things that set me apart early on as a coach was that I didn’t spout off about things I didn’t understand. If I didn’t have wordpress experience, I didn’t talk about how great it was to my clients. I stuck to what I knew. When I fell in love with twitter, I shared with my clients how I was picking up THOUSANDS of dollars in my business because of it – and HOW I was doing it.
But NEVER (at least not that I can recall) have I ‘coached’ someone to do something that I hadn’t tried myself in some way.
And sorry, Seth, but I think this is a place where you have no leg to stand on. You’ve never used twitter as more than a placeholder or a broadcast mechanism for your blog – which is like being part of the twitter counterculture.
That said, I also want to point out how your one tweet (which was nothing more than a broadcast of your latest blog post), which included a link DID change me. your shiny veneer isn’t quite what it once was. Now, you could assert that because it was a blog link, that there’s a context to it, and that’s true. Perhaps if you actually used twitter, I could comment more accurately.
But there are other folks, like @ThomScott or @sundaycosmetics, @retrobakery who I either barely know or don’t know at all that just happened to post a thoughtful tweet one day, intrigued me, and pulled me into their universe. That’s the grand design of twitter. How can you say that DOESN’T change your life? I purposely linked to these folks because chances are good most of my readers have never heard of them either. Heck, I just read my first post by @retrobakery this morning. But it was enough to engage me and change me.
And yes, you could say that I’m spouting off about the value of my medium (twitter), just as Seth is spouting off about his medium (books). The difference is I’m not slamming his – even incidentally. And I HAVE written books. Working on two new ones now.
Seth is correct that “you must create enough leverage to make things happen” But it’s erroneous to assume that everyone needs a counterweight the size of Mount Olympus to move the load. Some of us can get by with less than 140 characters.
It depends on your definition of “enough”, I suppose.