This is my third post in this series and I thought it would be useful to hear from some people who really are succeeding with their online digital products. Now the Grant’s sent me these stories but two of these people are actually friends of mine so I can vouch for their stories personally. In fact, I know that they are doing even better than than these short stories indicate. Enjoy!

Annette Welsford from Brisbane has done an awesome job with her book on how to grow juicy, tasty tomatoes. It’s worked so well she now provides it in hard copy as well as downloadable, and offers her readers other products too, such as a tomato recipe book. She’s gotten loads of free publicity on TV, radio and newspapers, and has built an effective (and automated)way to get wonderful testimonials from her readers. Annette made $50,000 from her tomato book last year, and is on track to make $75,000 this year. And she spends just 4 hours a week on it!

Andrej and Karen Brummer first met us at a seminar. They’d been trying lots of other investment strategies with no luck. In fact when we met, they’d just lost everything doing some share trading. But they knew they wanted financial freedom. So they applied everything they learned in our ebook pack, and after running a few survey sites, settled on the topic of “salt water aquariums”. They launched it about 2 years ago, and it’s made between US$300 and US$850 a week every week since, on autopilot. They’ve now grown it into an even bigger business, supplying aquarium products -which they get drop-shipped so it also happens on autopilot. And they’ve set up a membership site to get continuity income as well.

Duncan Capicchiano, a naturopath from Melbourne, was flat broke when he started the ebook process. He spent his last few dollars on promoting his ebook, which he developed using our system. According to Duncan, he tested a few topics with survey sites-which helped hugely, as some of the topics he thought would be winners weren’t. So focusing on the ones that the research showed would work, he followed the system and put together his first ebook. The first one took him about 3 months. These days he says it takes him about 6 weeks to get a new book up from idea to cash. He’s currently making a monthly profit of $10,000, and with the new books he has in the pipeline he’s planning to double that shortly.

Liz Raad (who’s recently moved up to Queensland)is making over $5,000 a month from her ebook, despite a rocky start. Liz launched her “knitting for profit” site in January 09 -only to find there were NO sales. But to her credit, instead of giving up Liz followed the process, doing the monitoring and fine-tuning. She got her first Clickbank cheque on 1 March for $1,402.47. (Yay!!)After some coaching as part of our program, she’s increased her sales to over $5,000 a month. She’s branched out and is now using other traffic driving methods, including Web 2.0 and teleseminars, based on what she’s learned from us. Liz says her keys to success are “keeping going and staying focused despite the distractions of a young family, BSOs (bright shiny objects!), and the site not converting initially”.

Jody Anderson (who also has a craft business but in a different market to Liz’s)came to our 4 day Sydney workshop 2 years ago.  She was totally blown away by our session on Membership sites and completely reshaped the direction her business was heading.  Says Jody, “It was at that event that I had my big ‘a-ha’ moment”.  My business has now grown into a very exciting craft-based global membership site with over 300 members, turning over nearly $10,000 per month.  It has taken a bit of work to grow it -we launched just over 1 year ago, but we have grown each month (even when we lost a few with the ‘global financial crisis’)”. Jody now works from home part-time, and the business allows her to spend quality time with her two small children.Â

Anyway, if you want to find out more about how these people actually did this, then I’d suggest you attend the Grant’s 4 day workshop on the Gold Coast. Just go to http://www.ourinternetsecrets.com/aff/?p=jspain&w=4dayws197

Until next time

Julie

PS. If you do go to the workshop, drop me a line and let me know what you thought.

Last post I told you about the upcoming 4 day workshop that the Grant’s are holding. Now you may be asking why I am writing about this? Well, simply because I have been and I honestly found it one of the most informative workshops I have ever been to. In fact I was so impressed that I went on to be personally mentored by Andrew and Daryl.

Today, I thought I’d give you some basic information about getting started with ebooks. Again, if you want to have a look at one that we did just go to:
www.thrivingalifecrisis.com

And, yes it does make money while we sleep.  Still not as much as we would like but this is where the final step outlined below of “test and measure” is so important.

Step One: Pick Your Topic

If you expect people to buy the information you sell, you need to select topics that people are hungry and passionate to learn about.  Think about it – people who are passionate about something are much more willing to spend money on it.  Finding out what people are passionate about is a matter of looking around – what magazines are people buying? What television shows are people watching?  What hobbies do you or your friends or family have?  These are all potentially good topic areas that may make for information products people want to buy.

Step Two: Create Your Information Product

Once a topic has been selected, it’s time to create the product!  Information products are downloadable, and are text, audio or video – or some combination of these things.  There are a number of options for creating information products, including:

• Record yourself talking about the topic and then sell the mp3 audio file
• Have the audio file transcribed into text to include with the audio, or to turn into an ebook
• Get someone else to write your ebook or report
• Interview an expert on your subject matter and record the conversation with audio and/or video

Step Three: Create Your Sales Page

The sales page is the website that asks visitors to take action (and buy the information product).  Sales pages typically follow a formula that you can duplicate.  Visit www.clickbank.com (the largest supplier of downloadable products) and view sales pages for popular products.   You’ll see that each site follows the same basic structure:

Headline:  you have about 5 or 10 seconds to grab a visitor’s attention with your headline, so make it a good one!

Hook:  you need a good story so people are emotionally involved with your product.  A hook sets you apart from others and makes people realize you are an expert on the topic matter and someone they can relate to.

Proof:  you’ll need to prove your product is what you say it is through testimonials, research, before and after pictures or statistics.

Product Description:  people won’t buy anything if they don’t know what they’re going to get.  Describe what the product offers in terms of benefits, not just the features.  Use bullet points to list the benefits of the product.

Offer: make a no-brainer offer that people can’t refuse through bonuses and extras.

Guarantee:  people only buy from companies or people they trust.  Since they don’t know who you are, you’ll need to provide a guarantee that makes them feel secure in providing their payment details online.

Step Four: Create the Website

Selling information products requires a website with a process to collect payment from the buyers.  Use simple graphics, a professional banner across the top, and your sales page content.  Having a 3D graphic of the ebook cover, or other product image to represent the information product you’re selling will improve your sales.

Collecting payment is easy when you use Clickbank to sell the product.  They handle all of the payment transactions, and each month you’ll receive payment from Clickbank for your sales

Step Five: Get Visitors to Your Website

If you want people to buy from your website, you need to get visitors to the site.  At first, using Google Adwords is an effective way to bring targeted visitors to your website within 30 minutes of setting it up.  When someone clicks on your advertisement in Google, you’ll pay Google a few cents and the visitor is taken to your website to read your sales page.

Step Six: Test and Measure

Once your website is set up and receiving visitors, you can start to test and measure your sales conversions.  If you notice you are getting a lot of visitors but not many sales, you can probably make small adjustments to the content on the sales page to improve the number of visitors who buy your product.  There is split testing software available to help you tweak the content and measure the results of each change.

Areas to test include the headline, customer testimonials, the wording of your offer and the price.

These are the six steps that Andrew and Daryl Grant and myself use to create money-making websites that run on auto-pilot

If you’d like step by step training from Andrew and Daryl in how to do this yourself, book in to their next workshop – here’s the link.
http://www.ourinternetsecrets.com/aff/?p=jspain&w=4dayws197

Here’s an overview that Andrew and Daryl sent me of what the 4 day workshop entails:

DAY 1 -Friday 4 June.  Today you’ll be learning all about making passive income on the internet.  We show you step-by-step exactly how to find a lucrative niche, as well as some quick, clever ways to research that niche so that you can beat your competition. We’ll also show you how to write a winning sales letter. You know we have one sales letter that’s made us over a million dollars? We’ll show you how.

DAY 2 – Saturday 5 June.  We continue with the steps to creating a passive online income. You’ll learn how to quickly, easily and cheaply build downloadable products. We then show you the ways we drive loads of eager-to-buy people to our websites. We’ll show you how we use Google Adwords, email marketing, teleseminars, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and loads more to quickly find hungry customers.

DAY 3 – Sunday 6 June.  Today we finish off the process of building a passive online business by showing you how to build a website that sells, and how to tweak it to get the most income out of it. That website that’s made us over a million dollars -would you believe we nearly canned it in the first few weeks? It wasn’t until we tweaked it (and we’ll show you how) that the money started flowing. Then we show you something REALLY exciting -how you can supercharge the process, and create a 6 or 7 figure business in as little as 90 days. Over the last 2 years we’ve been involved in 9 of these businesses -at the workshop you’ll see why we think they’re the best thing since sliced bread!

DAY 4 -Monday 7 June. We know that none of this works without a success mindset, and a plan to make it all a reality. On this last day we show you the “secret sauce” that we add to all our internet businesses that makes them so successful. We first show you the techniques we use to identify and eliminate our subconscious blockages to being successful (yes, we’re still weeding them out!). Then we show you how we plan any new internet business so that we get the outcome (and the income!) we want from it. You’ll walk out at 5pm with a mini business plan, ready to start on Tuesday!

Just click here if you want to know more about the workshop and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did
http://www.ourinternetsecrets.com/aff/?p=jspain&w=4dayws197

Until next time

Julie

Imagine waking up every morning, turning on your computer, checking your bank account and experiencing that thrill when the balance has increased by another few hundred dollars. Sounds like a dream? Not for one Queensland couple. It’s a daily reality.
You may remember some months ago spoke about Andrew and Daryl Grant who made US$250,000 in the first year of their online business a couple of years ago. (Yes, Daryl is a woman – Andrew’s wife!) They’d literally wake up every morning and log into their bank account to view the hundreds of dollars which had arrived overnight. Every night, every week, every month. And they’re still doing it. Only now it’s as much as a few thousand dollars a night, and climbing every week.
I’m now being trained by Andrew and Daryl to create my own money making internet business. Some time ago I attended one of their 4 day workshops and I must say it was mind blowing. They literally showed us behind the scenes of several of their businesses and told us exactly what to do to set up a similar business. The research, the technical stuff, the marketing – everything you could possible want to know.
Now I’ve got some great news for you. They’re running more 4-day workshops this year, 4-7th June  where they’re going to share the same information.
I’m telling you about the workshops because I think you would find them as fascinating as I did.
Here’s the link to find out more and to register if you decide to go:
http://www.ourinternetsecrets.com/aff/?p=jspain&w=4dayws197

Now here’s two really great bits of news.
Firstly, the tickets sell for $1997 each, however as I’m now a client, they’ve offered me limited seats at special price of $197, and all the proceeds of these limited ticket sales are being donated to their favourite charity – www.kiva.org. This wonderful charity provides micro-loans to budding entrepreneurs in developing countries.
Secondly, the discount ticket also entitles you to bring a friend along – so why not find someone to take and share the price of the ticket! You just need to register them when you purchase your ticket. They don’t let anyone in who hasn’t registered online.

So, now that the admin stuff is out of the way, here’s what they’ll be covering.
Over the last four years or so that they’ve had their internet business they’ve learned loads of different ways to make money online. They believe that it’s really important to have MULTIPLE STREAMS OF INCOME, so they’ll be showing you all the ways they use to make money.
They’ll show you everything, from powerful little money-earners that are so simple you can set them up on a Saturday afternoon, to a massive business that makes millions of dollars a year.
They provide practical, in-depth, how-to’s. What’s really nice is they deliver all this information without any hype and teasers that leave you wanting more.

Anyway, no need to take me word for it, just check out this link for a number of other people, just like you and me who have gained so much out of the workshop:
http://www.ourinternetsecrets.com/4dayworkshopfeedback2009/index.html

Over the next few weeks I’ll keep you updated on the workshop and maybe some more tips about building an online business.
You may like to have a look at one of my ebook websites that is chugging along nicely and this is using the Grant’s teachings. www.thrivingalifecrisis.com

Until next time
Julie
PS – Last time I checked there were already quite a number of bookings for the next workshop, so if I was you I wouldn’t hesitate to register. It’s one of the best workshops I’ve ever been to. Here’s the registration link again:
http://www.ourinternetsecrets.com/aff/?p=jspain&w=4dayws197

In marketing, emotional engagement is all about connecting with the client. In fact, connecting with them to such a point that you:

• Have a strong emotional connection
• Understand what the client’s problems are
• Offer to solve that problem for them

People buy on the emotional benefits of the product but they also buy based on the relationship that is formed with the seller – how connected they feel towards you the seller. Now the seller can be you personally or it can be your staff and if it is your staff then you need to be conscious of the emotional engagement that your staff have to you and your organisation.

I’ve seen studies showing real estate people increased sales by 250 – 300% while insurance sales people doubled their productivity – this at least makes you stand up and take notice.

Here are a few factors that when applied have the potential to skyrocket your sales:

1. Establish rapport. It is possible to form the beginnings of a positive relationship within the first few moments of contact. Issues of safety and trust are paramount
2. Approach with a position of genuineness. Can you smell a fake a mile off? Well guess what? So can most of the world’s population. Whatever you do, do it with congruence
3. Understand the importance of women in sales. Women are responsible for 70 – 80% of the decisions about purchasing. Studies show that in marriage the most important component for happiness is emotional connection with their spouse. Do you think this emotional need could cross over into their purchasing relationships?
4. Convey enthusiasm and if possible, passion, for your product
5. People buy on benefits, not features. That is, “what is in it for me?” If you understand this then you will be looking to solve the customer’s problem
6. Listen. Sounds simple? Yes and no. You are on a mission to listen to the deepest needs of your client and there are skills involved.  Listen with an attitude of care and empathy and you cannot go wrong
7. If you have staff that sell for you then you need to cultivate emotional engagement between your organisation and your staff. It really is unrealistic to expect your staff to conduct themselves with emotional connection to their customers, if you yourself do not foster that within the place they work.

Obviously, there are skills involved in achieving these factors and I will be sharing these in another post so keep tuned.

In the mean time, let me know what you think of this approach to selling. Would you like to hear more about how to follow through with emotional engagement and online marketing?

I conduct training in the area of “Increasing Sales Through Emotional Engagement” so if you have any questions for me just use the “contact us” tab above.

Until next time – happy connecting

Julie

“Most organisations spend their time marketing to the crowd. Smart organisations assemble the tribe” (p. 30) Seth speaks of how we need to belong to something or some sort of cause that inspires us. As humans we are social animals and actually need to connect with other human beings. So much so that we are waiting for someone to lead us. To show us the way. We are looking for innovation and initiative.

Now to achieve all of this we need leaders. People who want to inspire, influence and encourage. I have always maintained that we all have within us the potential to influence, inspire and encourage. It’s just that some of us do not want to take the time and make the effort to do this.

But what if you do? Then this is your key for growing a successful organisation either online or offline. Now this made me think about my career to date and I realized something profound (at least for me), that I had already been doing this very successfully offline and that really it was a small jump to do this online. Same principles really:

- have a cause that you believe in and want to share with others. For me I have spent a lifetime working with people in the worst possible situations. I often thought that it would be great to get the message out to 1000’s of people that there are a few principles in life that if you follow, life will be more successful and not so tough.

- have a vehicle to spread the word. Today we have the perfect vehicle with our communications revolution.

- believe in yourself. Have the convictions that you can lead, inspire and influence.

- live the life you are preaching – be congruent between your speech and your actions because if you are not people will see it.

- genuinely care about your tribe. In fact, leaders truly care more about their tribe than they do about their own gain and people will respond to that genuineness.

I hope these thoughts inspire you as they have inspired me.

Until the next time
Julie
PS. I really would love to hear your thoughts about this idea of tribes. Send me a line or two!
PPS. If you would like to know a little bit more about what I do have a look at a couple of my websites:
www.secretstoemotionalhealth.com
www.thrivingalifecrisis.com

I thought alot about this conversation that afternoon and decided that I actually liked this description of myself. But at this point you may be wondering what it has to do with online business success?

I have heard of some people who have made it big online quickly. They were in the right spot at the right time with the right product. I have met many more who are more like me – hard working, making lots of mistakes and passionate about what they do.

Some of these people have given up. Unlike the bulldog, they decided that it was just too hard. You know what, sometimes, that is exactly as I have felt but there is a difference between feeling a certain way and giving in to those feelings.

So what exactly, is tenacity and why is this quality so important to the success of an online business? One online dictionary describes it as – “persistent determination – the quality of being determined to do or achieve something”. Other words used by the Thesaurus are: doggedness, perseverance, determination, purpose and persistence.

Yes, you need:  technical knowledge (if not your own then at least someone else’s), a good product, customers, marketing but if you do not have tenacity you simply won’t kick the ball through the goal posts. You will become fatigued long before that and simply give in.

Someone challenged me last week to get off the comfy couch and get doing – learning, working, connecting, experimenting.

I’d like to pass this same challenge on to you. If you are serious about an online business, then you will have to keep at it. You will have to learn and grow from your mistakes and failures. You will have to be the bulldog hanging on for your strength and one day you will start to see the trickles and then the floodgates coming rushing in.

If this post encouraged you then send the link to others who you think may benefit: www.diaryofanonlinebusiness.com

Until next time

Julie

Now if I was you, the first question I would be asking is why? Well that’s exactly what I also asked Google and to date (10 days later) I have not had any sort of answer.

Google Adwords have told me that I have broken some unforgivable rule but I really do not know what.  Since learning of this we have:

• audited all our websites

• talked with Hostgater to see if any nasties had been put on there that we weren’t aware of

• talked with our email service to make sure we are receiving all messages
• contacted a number of people in the business including the adwords expert Mike Rhodes
• read other people’s stories who have had the same thing happen to them -and there seems to be a few
• reread Googles rules and regulations to see if we could identify any rule we may have unknowingly broken – and couldn’t identify anything

And at the moment we are no further advanced on why this has happened to us and how to fix it.

As you can imagine this is time costly.

The thing that I am really having trouble with is that Google Adwords is telling me that I have not acted ethically (my interpretation).  My whole professional life has been governed by the ethics of caring for others so I not only see this banning by Google as a very large threat to my business but also to my reputation.

I am an optimist and definitely believe that when one door closes another opens. We’ll just have to work out other ways of driving traffic and certainly people are telling me not to worry about this as there are other ways to do it.

I think though I’ll give it a few more tries appealing to Google as I really want to believe in the good Corporate culture and spirit that we hear so much about today. I will choose to believe it is alive and well

I’m really needing some support, advice and information with regards to this one so please leave your comments about anything you feel would be helpful to me and others like me in this difficult situation.

My advice for my readers – check your websites against the Google Adwords regulations. Obviously, this has not been enough to save me a lot of confusion and distress but I really hope that it will be for you

Until next time

Julie

Just arrived back from our holiday in beautiful Coffs Harbour (that’s in New South Wales Australia for those not local). We had a great time but unfortunately I probably had a better time than Will as he had the flu, so he is happy to be safe and sound in his own bed.

This post begins a six part series from Andrew and Daryl Grant on how to sell your ebook online. We originally started in their ebook mentoring program – see the banner on the right hand side or simply click this link to have a look at this website:

http://www.ourinternetsecrets.com/aff/?p=jspain&w=mp09-4

We then progressed into their Our Internet Secrets program. I will be writing a review of this program later on but if you cannot wait to find out more just follow this link to find out about their amazing 4 day workshop. It truly was the best workshop I have ever been to:

http://www.ourinternetsecrets.com/aff/?w=4dayws197&p=jspain

These are the steps that we followed to write our first two ebooks. If you want to look at our ebooks them go to:

www.copingwithlifecrisis.com

www.guidetoonlinedatingtips.com

Step One – Identify A Potential Topic

You are after a topic which lots of people are looking for, and where people “must have” (rather than “need”) the product.

You also want a “niche”, ie a topic which is not too general. For example, “health” is far too general, but “melanoma” is specific enough.

You don’t necessarily need to know anything about the topic, but it helps if it’s something you are interested in.

The tool we use to determine how popular ideas are is http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html.

Click here for a list of the 204 best selling topics on line.

Once you have come up with some ideas, search for the key words you think people interested in a topic might look for. You are looking for words or phrases which total more than 30,000 hits per month on keyworddiscovery for your topic. For example if you type in “skin cancer” you get over 53,000 hits per month.

Next do a search on Google for the same words. You are looking for:

• The number of websites on the topic (you want this to be in the millions)
• Existing ads. You don’t want a topic where someone is already using a good sales letter and selling an e-book. You also don’t want heaps of ads, otherwise you end up paying too much per click to get in the top three.

The Grants talk about using the keyword discovery tool but there is a much easier way now with the Google Keyword Tool. Just go to: https://adwords.google.com.au/select/KeywordToolExternal

This is only the first step. Stay posted for the next 5 steps. I cannot stress how useful this information has been to us in getting started with our online business and I hope it helps you also.

Until next time

Julie

I didn’t think so! What human being has not suffered from some form of self doubt in their lives? Will she accept my offer of a date?  I don’t think that I’m going to be offered the job. Why is it that everyone else in the world is smarter, prettier and more successful? Or, here’s the big doozie: “Why does everything have to be so hard for me and so easy for everyone else?”

Come on now, be honest, surely I am not the only one who goes through this painful experience of self doubt?  The question here could be why write about this on a blog designed for online business success? For one reason only: self doubt could rob you of any opportunity to be successful with your online business – hey, even with me and my online business.

Most success coaches (that’s me believe it or not) would tell you that success is determined 90% by what we think and only 10% by what we do. There was an interesting experiment some time ago that looked at coaching success for basketballers. They took three groups: the first group was only allowed to think about shooting hoops, the second group was only allowed to practice shooting hoops and the third group was coached in both mental and practical basketball skills. Which group did the best? Group one and three both succeeded to the same level. In other words, the actual action of shooting hoops made litttle difference. It was all about training the mind.

Occassionally this self defeating blockage of self doubt pops into my head so what do I do about it? This is what I do and maybe it will help you:

1. Remember the dream. We have a dream book and I like to remind myself of exactly why I started this online business in the first place. It is a powerful motivator.
2. Allow myself a little pity party but after a short time of feeling the feelings and feeling sorry for myself, I take a deep breath and tell myself to get back on with the job.
3. I recall all the things in my life that I have already been successful with eg. raising three daughters and for part of that time on my own, completing two degrees, having  a  private practice for 15 years, managing a 140 staff successfully in the program that I run currently, surviving a terrible divorce and best of all finding the love of my life later in life. If I can do these things then I can continue to face life’s challenges and win
4. Mix with people who will pull you up, not pull you down. We all need encouragement. I truly hope that my blog is an encouragement to you and that in some ways I can be a mentor to others in need.

Let me know what you do to deal with an attack of the self doubts. I know that it will be of help to others who are reading this.

I’m off for a weeks holiday to beautiful Coffs Harbour tomorrow so no post for a week. I really am a firm believer in the need for self care and nurturing.

Until next time

Julie

If the report is not enough then Yaro also offers that extra added boast of a membership site to provide some hand holding while you are in the important process of getting up and going. To find out more about his membership site simply click on this link:
http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com

In my research I have come up with two distinct models for membership sites:

(1) The community type based model. With this model there is no step by step process that the customer goes through rather it is about role models and offering information on a topic in such form as interviewing experts in a particular area. The members themselves often contribute to the community based models and alot of ownership can be generated in this manner.
(2) This is a step by step outcome membership model on a particular topic eg “How to Build a Membership Site”. Members learn something extra each week until they have finally achieved their outcome.
When deciding which model you want to use it will really depend on the topic you have chosen. Ask yourself “which of these two models fits best with my topic and with what I am trying to achieve”
Don’t forget to check out the banners to Yaro’s free reports and products, particularly the new one Membership Site Masterplan.
Until next time
Julie
PS. Please let me know what you would like me to be writing on. I really want all this to be relevant and to help people build their online business as others have helped us.