How To Enjoy Making Money With Your Passions
My favorite quote of all time was coined by late great Zig Ziglar.
He said, “You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”
One way that I’ve found to help others is by teaching. In fact, I’ve been fortunate enough to build a 6-figure online business by teaching people about my passion.
Let’s say you are hanging out with your best friend. The one you tell your secrets to and loves the same stuff you do. What do you talk about? What do you love talking about with, well, anyone?
Mine is “business”.
I’ll admit to a fault, I LOVE to talk casually about growing businesses and latest trends. Sometimes all I care is that someone is listening as long as I’m talking about it.
If that other person is equally as interested then we are having one hell of a conversation.
There’s something that is like that for you. Something you just LOVE to talk about.
THAT topic is YOUR passion. And there are thousands of other people out there who share your passion.
But how to your turn that passion into money?
In the information marketing business, online content rules and big bucks are paid out to those who bring great content to a community of passionate people.
What you are doing is teaching.
You are teaching others about what you love. Just talking about it with text, video or audio.
Simply creating content.
Emails. Blog posts. Ebooks. Short Reports… All of them just talking about the thing you love most.
You are sharing with others something they are ALREADY interested in learning. People who share your interests.
Who better to have as a customer base than a passionate group of peers who enjoy your interest.
My passion is online business. I love talking about it. I love teaching it. I love learning about it. I love it and I work hard because it’s mostly fun.
And I’ve brought a full-time living for over 7 years single-handedly providing for my family of 4 with information and digital products.
But I also get to help others who share my interest.
You need only two very basic and inexpensive tools to run an information product business (for any niche).
You need a blog website with hosting and an email autoresponder (like GetResponse, Aweber or MailChimp).
Both are super cheap and equally important.
Your website is separated into two things.. Your main blog. And your sales funnels.
The blog is your “free content” that you just write on a regular basis cool stuff about your topic.
Content could be a standard written blog post, a video, an audio recording, an ebook, etc.
These pieces of content serve as what I call “value bombs”.
They educate your readers and help build a rapport so they will know, like and trust you (people spend money with people they trust).
Tip: It’s better to have a handful of extremely high-value posts than a thousand not-so-valuable poorly written posts.
The goal of this content is not only to educate your readers but also to give them an opportunity to subscribe to your email list.
An email list is THE ultimate asset to have in your business. It allows continued communication to prospects and customers at will.
For example, I have around 8,000 subscribers on my email list. Some of those subscribers have been on my list many years and continue to buy from me.
With an email list, you have an audience and traffic on demand. You can send them emails about new products you have for sale (more on that in a moment) or affiliate products that are related to your niche. You can get valuable feedback when you need it. You can build life-long relationships with people in your industry. There are so many benefits.
So how do you turn your content readers into email subscribers?
Fire up Word and write up about 7 or so pages on your subject. Just cool tips and fun stuff. If you are into guitars, maybe you’ll write “How to read tablature.”
Save it as a PDF and give it away as a short report on your blog using an optin box linked to your autoresponder. This is easily done with the autoresponder platforms I mentioned above.
The best way to present it is by first writing a blog content article directly related to the information in your short report. About half-way down your post (when readers are then engaged in the article) you present them with a link to a free ebook to learn more on the topic.
That link should lead to your “squeeze” page that offers the book in exchange for their email address.
Since they’ve already been warmed up to the content and looking to learn more, this is an easy step for them (as opposed to sending cold traffic directly to an opt-in page).
Your article built up a little trust.. they said to themselves “Wow, that was a great article, I want more!” Giving their email at this point is a small hurdle in exchange for more value.
But we don’t just want the email, we also want to monetize.
This is where you build an info product. The product should be designed to deliver a more in-depth training course on the subject.
For example, lets say you are teaching how to play the guitar.
Your blog article might be “The 7 Basic Guitar Chords for Beginners.” Then your free lead generation short report/video, the one they opt-in for, might be “How to Assemble Chords to Play a Song.”
Then your info-product, the one you sell, might be “The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Learning the Guitar.”
This product could be in the form of a 20ish page PDF ebook. Or perhaps, like the guitar instructor, your content is better suited for video. In this instance it might be better to record 10 or so videos that provide the training.
A good rule of thumb is “5/5”. Break your training down into 5 main sections and in each section have 5 sub sections. This allows you an easy way to organize your content into a step-by-step format.
For example, if you were teaching “how to write an ebook” the 5 top sections might go as follows:
- Gather research
- Write your outline
- Expand from the outline
- Proof-read
- Save as PDF
Then you would break each section into 5 steps of how to accomplish that goal. 5/5 is a general rule, you can make it 4/4 or 3/3 or 5/3.. whatever works, but I’ve found over time 5/5 works great for breaking down just about anything.
Once you are done, zip up all the files and upload them to your webserver so that customers can download it after they purchase.
Now you need a sales page.
You can download a free 12 step fool-proof sales letter template here. That template will help you write the sales page using fundamental copywriting techniques proven to work.
You’ll take your sales copy and place it on a new page on your website and stick a buy button on it.
There are several platforms you can use to facilitate transactions on your website. One being Paypal using a simple Paypal buy button.
Others I recommend are JVZoo.com, e-junkie.com, and Clickbank.com.
Those platforms will allow you to link up your Paypal or bank account and provide you with a buy button to place on your website to take payments. They also facilitate the download part, so that when your customer buys, they will be redirected to the page where they can download the product.
Now you are in business.
After people are on your list then you send them an email about your product and you’ll see the sales come in.
Other ways to monetize that email list is to send out affiliate promotions.
This is when you recommend someone else’s related product where you earn a commission of the sales on. There are affiliate products in every industry. You’ll see many on Clickbank that you can promote but also go to google and type in “your industry affiliate”.
From time to time I send emails that is recommending a tool or info report that I use or think would help and earn hundreds, sometimes even thousands of dollars from that single promotion. And your subscribers will actually be “happy” to spend money with you.
This business model has supported me & my family for years. My list pays my bills and has supported us from day one.
If you are subscribed to my newsletter, thank you, I love you. If not, you can go here and sign up (when you do I’ll send you a free audio discourse expanding on the topic).