Category Archives: Case Studies

Case Study – $7000/mo Giving Free Consultations

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Can you give away something for free and then make $7000 a month without selling anything?

Sounds crazy, I know.

But that’s exactly what this guy is doing, and here’s how it all started.

Bob (not his real name) wanted to enter online marketing but he knew next to nothing about how to get started.

Like many new marketers, he bought a few products, devoured them, and then bought into a high-end group coaching program. The gist of the program was teaching him exactly how to do a major 6 or 7 figure launch.

Bob learned a ton about launching a product, but he also learned that he had no interest in doing it himself.

Yet he’d paid $4000 for the course… how was he going to make his money back?

He didn’t have a clue, but he did know that he wanted to build a list, and that’s what he started doing. And since he knew something about product launches, that’s what his list was all about.

Bob was selling products to his list and knew that if he wanted to make a lot of sales promoting a launch, he’d have to offer his own bonus.

What was the most valuable, personal thing Bob could offer? He decided to do a personal one-on-one consultation on launching a product.

Lo and behold Bob made sales and booked the free consultations with his customers.

And his customers said something interesting to Bob… “You know so much about this, how did you learn how to do product launches?”

The first time this happened Bob simply explained that he took an expensive coaching program and it taught him everything he knew.

But the second time one of his customers asked him how he knew so much, Bob got an idea.

He called the coaching center where he took his class. They have their own call center to sell the coaching, and Bob talked to the guy who ran it.

‘Could he get a 50% commission for referring students to the coaching?’

Yes, he could!

Bob called back his two customers and told them more about how great this coaching program was and asked if they wanted to know more. They both purchased the coaching and Bob instantly made back his $4000 and more.

Long story short, Bob now makes a full-time income by giving away free coaching sessions the talking up the program he took.

This particular program sells for $5000, but when a prospect pleads poverty, they reduce the price. Since it’s group coaching, it doesn’t really matter whether people pay $5000 or $4000 or whatever, since the workload isn’t all that different between 10 students and 100 students.

Things to know if you want to do this:

Choose a great coaching program that comes with a ton of benefits and extras and is sold by professional salespeople one to one over the phone. This way you feel good about promoting the coaching but you don’t have to do the actual selling if you don’t want to.

Take the program yourself. Yes, you need to do this. How are you going to speak intelligently about what the program is like if you don’t take it yourself?

Know that these high-end group coaching programs are flexible on price. When you’re on the phone with the salesperson, plead poverty until they come down to a price you can afford.

Create free content, reports, videos, etc., based on the aspects of the coaching you’ve received and use them to build your list.

Promote slightly higher-ticket products such as software and courses, then offer your free consultation as a bonus. Don’t try this with a $7 ebook, for example, because you want to know you’re speaking to people who are willing to pay real money for information and coaching.

Make your consultation 30 minutes and be prepared to go a little longer if your customer seems like a good fit for the high-end coaching.

Be as helpful and knowledgeable as you can on the call to show what you’ve learned in the course, but keep in mind that building rapport is even more important than showing off what you know.

You might arrange for a discount for your customers, so the starting price of a $5000 program, for example, might be $4000.

Let your customers know there might be terms or special offers available if money is tight, but that they’ll need to talk to the representative to find out what those currently are. You’re letting them know the price might be flexible without immediately giving away the farm, so to speak.

Start creating your own products and offer them at reasonable prices to build a buyers list.

Send an email to your buyers list offering them a free consultation for their business.

Gently find out on the call if they have an interest in coaching. Realize that many won’t, some will and it’s all good. Let’s say that you talk to 10 customers for 30 minutes each (5 hours) and 2 are interested in coaching. One of the two buys the coaching and pays $3000 for it. You earn a 50% commission ($1500) which works out to $300 an hour for your free consultations. Not bad.

What do you tell your customers? Mention how valuable the coaching was for you, how it turned your business around, how it’s the most profitable investment you’ve ever made and so forth. (Assuming this is all true, of course.)

And tell them you can get them a BIG discount if they are interested.

Optional: You sell the coaching yourself, take the credit card info and pass it on to the sales office.

Also optional: When your customer is ready and has agreed, get the salesperson on the call with the two of you.

Don’t forget to listen to your customer, see what his goals are, give him some good information and advice and so forth. 80% of your call should be focused on you helping the customer with only 20% or less of it devoted to you talking up the coaching.

If they are not interested, don’t pester them. Drop it. You’ll never get them interested by annoying them.

Have fun. The majority of the calls won’t result in an immediate coaching sale. But if you’re having fun then the customer is having fun. It’s entirely possible they will be ready for the coaching next month or next year, and you want to leave that door open for them to buy the coaching through you. In other words, be the person they want to talk to again.

If you have a customer who keeps wanting your free advice, let them know they need to get the coaching or start paying you for coaching. That’s right! If they don’t buy the high-end coaching, you could always offer your own coaching services to them. They already feel comfortable with you.

Think of your own personal coaching as a downsell from the coaching program you’re promoting. If they won’t take the expensive coaching, they might be willing to let you coach them if it costs less.

If you do take on your own coaching students, let them know it’s a steppingstone and they may find in a few weeks or months that they are now ready for the high-end coaching.

If you don’t want your own coaching to be the ‘downsell’ to the high-end coaching, have an affiliate program or your own program ready to offer them to take them to the next step. It’s all a matter of evaluating their needs and then offering them the best solution for them.

If you feel it might be worth it, schedule a follow up with them in a couple of weeks. It’s possible they might be ready then for the next step, whatever that might be.

How to Turn Old Magazines Into Valuable New Content

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There’s a lady in the UK who says she is earning 8,000 pounds per month thanks to reading old magazines.

She goes to jumble sales and buys up all the old magazines she can find, the older the better.

Then then finds interesting articles she can turn into her own brand new content by commenting on what she has read.

For example, “I tried this weird recipe from 1932 and here’s what happened”

“14 Life Hacks from World War II that Will Save You 500 pounds a Month Now”

“7 Dating Tips from 1955 That Will Blow Your Mind”

She never copies the content but rather talks about what she read and adds her own thoughts and comments.

And she uses this content to build niche sites on vintage cars, vintage cosmetics, vintage recipes and so forth.

She’s built 20 of these sites and has plans to build 10 more, and she monetizes the sites through advertising, affiliate products and so forth.

Now just imagine if she also used this content to create TikTok and YouTube videos… I think she would make a fortune.

And once she is finished with the old magazines, she sells them on eBay for far more than she originally paid.

The possibilities here are endless. Next time you go to a jumble sale, garage sale or flea market, be on the lookout for old magazines. They might just be worth their weight in gold.

$250,000 a Year Publishing Books

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I was going to title this, “$250,000 a Year Writing Books,” but the fact is that you never ever need to write a book yourself to make this work.

If you can outsource the writing of books, then you can do this.

For that matter, if you can ask 20 people a simple question, you can also do this.

Here’s how:

First, you need books. If you’re a writer, then you can skip ahead. If you’re not, you’re going to either:

A: Outsource the writing of your books. This is almost better than writing your own because you can hire multiple writers to write multiple books at the same time if you like.

The key, of course, is to find good writers who don’t sound like they’re an AI program. Your non-fiction books need not only good information people want, but also personality. It’s the helpful information that will sell the first book, and the personality that will keep buyers coming back for more and more.

If you hire more than one writer, then you’ll need to coach them on having a coherent voice. Ideally all of your books should read like they were written by one person – you.

B: Use other people’s articles. This is a super easy way to put a book together very quickly.

First you choose your topic and then you find blogposts and articles that directly address that topic.

Next, you approach the authors and ask if they would like to be in your book. You’ll have maybe 10 or 20 experts in each book, each with their own chapter. People will say yes to this because they love the extra exposure of being in a book with the other experts. And you’ll give them the opportunity to build their lists by making a free offer at the end of their own chapter, too.

Okay, now that you’re either writing your own books or using one of the two methods above, here are the actual methods one author named Carol uses to make well in excess of $250,000 a year with her books on Amazon:

1: You need lots of books. Unless you miraculously write a super best seller, then you’re going to need a full-sized stable of books that readers love.

If you write one book every 3 months, then in 5 years you’ll have 20 books.

2: Marketing is just as important as writing. If you happen to be outsourcing all of your book writing, then you’ll be at an advantage because you can focus all of your time on marketing your books.

If you’re writing your own books, then you’ll have to decide how much time you’ll devote to writing and how much to marketing.

Carol’s advice is to initially get 2 to 4 books under your belt as quickly as possible, and then devote half your time to marketing those books and half to writing your next books.

3: Short books are better than long books. Let’s say your topic is how to drive traffic to a website. Instead of writing one big book on 10 different methods, write 10 books each detailing one method.

It will be easier to sell any one of these ten because each is tightly focused on its topic. And once a person has one book, and they like it, they’ll naturally be predisposed to purchase more books in the series.

Not to mention the fact that it’s far easier and faster to write a short book than it is a long one.

Recently, Amazon created categories specifically for a type of book called, “Short Reads.” These short books are broken down by the number of minutes they take to read as well as the genre.

And when you write a short, tightly focused book, it’s easier to rank high in your categories and also to get more of your books ranking high in more categories, creating a synergistic effect that sells more books.

4: A series sells better than individual books. Even if your topics are somewhat disparate, if you can find a way to place a block of them under one umbrella, you’ll find it easier to make sales than if each one is a stand-alone book.

Perhaps you’re writing books on all the different things someone needs to know to make money online. Your umbrella might be, “From Online Newbie to $100,000 in One Year,” or “The Ultimate Guide to Starting and Running Your Online Business”.

5: Look at this business model of book writing and publishing as a marathon, not a sprint. Enjoy the process and don’t place too much pressure on yourself in the beginning. This is a method many people are using to earn six figures per year, but it takes time.

It took Carol six months to begin seeing any results and 3 years before she broke $50,000. But the following year she nearly tripled that, and 5 years after she placed her first book on Amazon she is now earning in excess of a quarter of a million dollars per year.

It takes time to build a brand and become known, but once you begin to build your readership, things can really take off.

6: Become a master of book marketing. There are many courses you can take and books you can read to learn this valuable skill. Just placing books on Amazon Kindle won’t cut it, but when you learn how to market your books you’ll find it’s not all that difficult, either.

7: Have a unique voice and story. Assuming you’re writing non-fiction, you’ll want to have a backstory of how you got into your chosen niche. And more importantly, you’ll want to have a voice that resonates with people. Put your personality and your opinions into the books. Just imagine you’re writing to a friend or giving advice to your grown child and you’ll get the idea.

Maybe you never thought of yourself as an author, but since you don’t have to do any writing yourself, this might be a good option for you to begin building toward a six figure income.

10.5 Tips to Earning $360,000 per Year by Blogging?!

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The best bloggers out there are absolutely killing it, earning far more than most people can even imagine.

For example, Ryan Robinson is earning more than $30,000 per month simply from his blog. Not bad, right?

In Ryan’s case, it took him over two years to begin generating serious income from his blog. He launched the blog in 2014, and the first monthly income report he published was in 2018 for $9,322.

Generating traffic organically takes time and patience but it can pay off. Ryan says he doesn’t expect a new post to rank on page one of Google any sooner than after six months, if they rank at all. Blogging will not get you rich overnight, but if you keep at it then you could build to a serious income over time.

Here’s how Ryan has found success:

1: He writes massive 10,000 word posts. These are enormous authority articles that sometimes rank for the most popular of keywords, such as “business ideas” which is a 100,000 monthly search volume keyword.

2: His favorite post is the listicle; huge, exhaustive lists such as ‘101 Business Ideas’ and ‘70 Genius Ways to Make Money Online.’ These posts could easily be Kindle books but he chooses to place them on his site to bring in traffic.

3: His other favorite type of post is the ‘how to’ guide, such as How to Start a Blog and How to Start a Freelancing Business While Working Full Time. These are long, detailed and all-encompassing guides that Google loves to rank high.

4: 92% of his income comes from affiliate sales. His top three affiliate products are Bluehost, Dreamhost and Flexjobs.

5: Ryan writes about freelancing and making money online because he’s worked as a freelancer and because there is substantial affiliate income to be made in this niche. He doesn’t recommend choosing a niche just because you love it unless you know ahead of time how you’re going to monetize it.

6: Ryan focuses on getting backlinks because Google determines your ‘social status’ with your niche via the number and type of backlinks you have. Some of his backlinks come from major sites such as Hubspot, GoDaddy, Yelp, Money.com, LinkedIn blog and Sitepoint.

7: To get prized backlinks from major players, Ryan schedules a call with them, interviews them and then mentions them in his article. He says this dramatically increases the odds they will back link to you, as opposed to simply writing about someone and then telling them they are mentioned in your article.

8: Ryan continually updates his content and then places an ‘updated on date’ tag next to the title. He does this because Google encourages content creators to continually update their content.

9: He uses personal anecdotes and stories in his articles. He likes to open with a story and continue the personal tone and his own thoughts throughout the article, and it works.

10: Ryan stays focused on this blog. He hasn’t started a second and third blog on other topics and he’s not doing anything outside of this niche. He does, however, still do some freelancing work, which makes sense since he writes about the freelancing experience.

10.5 Most of his posts don’t do all that well. Crazy as it might sound, his average blog posts only garner a few hundred views per month. And yet his top 15 posts bring in a flood of traffic that compensates. You never know which posts are going to explode, which is why you just have to keep writing and doing your best. Sooner or later, you will hit upon posts that drive massive traffic, and that traffic will then discover your other, less popular posts as well.

$100,000 in One Week

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If you need a lump sum cash injection, this might be the way to do it. You will need a few assets in place to make this work, but most online and even many offline marketers already have what it takes to do this.

You can only use this method once in awhile, but here’s the thing: You can make significant money teaching other marketers and business people to do this, too.

Imagine you’re talking to Joe the restaurant owner, and Joe mentions he needs a big lump sum of cash fast. You can set this entire thing up for him, and in about a week he can have the money in hand. Charge a 5 to 10% commission and you’ve just made $5000 to $10,000. Not bad.

I learned this technique from Vinnie. He just found the perfect house that he wanted to buy, but he needed a major cash injection for the down payment. Time was of the essence: Get the money or lose the house. Out of his desperation this plan was born, and it’s so drop dead simple it seems almost too easy.

Vinnie is an online marketer and he has a list of loyal customers, followers and subscribers.

Vinnie put together an exclusive VIP club with a one year membership limited to exactly 100 people. In this membership he placed access to every single one of his products, along with the promise that every product he created in the next year would also be given to his VIP members as part of the membership.

Then he added even more perks, like a personal monthly consultation by email. His VIP members could ask him anything privately by email once per month. (He knows that statistically speaking 80-90% of these monthly vouchers would never be redeemed.) He also set up Q and A’s twice per month where people could join the call and ask anything. He added a private room where the VIP members could meet each other, help each other, network and so forth. And he added a couple of other special bonuses, too.

In short, he made the VIP HIGHLY desirable. It was worth probably 10 or 20 times the admittance fee of $1000.

And he did a GREAT job of selling it. He set up a webpage detailing everything members would get. He made a quick 5 minute video walking them through the membership. And he was completely clear that the membership was limited to exactly 100 people and no more. In fact he posted everyone’s first name and their city inside the members area to prove there were only 100 memberships sold, which I thought was kind of clever because who believes these things are limited without some sort of solid proof, right?

Then he put the word out to his lists and on social media…

And he sold out in less than 5 hours.

Start to finish the entire thing took him 3 days.

Of course, he has some work to do over the coming year to fulfill his promises to his members.

But he also had the $100,000 he wanted for the down payment.

Well, actually he told me he just needed another $40,000 for the down payment, so he ended up $60,000 ahead, but that’s not really important.

What is important is that most anyone can do this.

Something to keep in mind is that the better your reputation, the easier it will be to sell the memberships and the more you can probably charge.

Imagine doing this for a restaurant owner. He needs a big influx of cash to make a balloon payment on his mortgage, so you help him put together a VIP club for customers.

This VIP members get free meals on their birthdays, anniversaries and holidays. Every couple of months they get private dinners with specialty dishes not available to the public (great way to test which foods should be added to the menu.) They get all kinds of VIP perks that add up to say, $2,000, and they only pay $1,000.

And better still for the restaurant owner, when a VIP member comes in for their free perks, they bring other people with them who are paying, so it results in more dinners, more drinks and desserts, and more profits.

But what if you don’t have a list? Or what if you’re approaching a businessperson with this idea who doesn’t have a list of customers? Odds are you can still make it work.

The first option is to hit the social media accounts to get the word out. If you (or the business owner) have a large following, then this can work.

The next option is to use affiliates. Yes, they will take their cut, but $50,000 in a week is still a nice payday.

If you’re working with a local business, then local publicity can work wonders. Have the business team up with a local charity and you should be able to get featured in the paper, on the local news and on any local social media accounts such as Facebook and Nextdoor.

Get creative. The more interesting or valuable the VIP package is perceived to be, the easier it will be to make the sales.

You might even offer a discount to the first people who join the membership by letting them refer their friends. For example, they pay $1000 for their own membership but they get $250 back for each friend they refer. Bring in 4 friends and their membership is free. Bring in 8 friends and they’ve made $1000 plus received a free membership.

Of course the $1,000 figure is arbitrary. You might be charging $200, $500, $799, $3,000 or whatever number works for you, your niche, your customers and is commiserate with the value of the membership.

And whether or not you cap memberships is up to you as well. It could be that you sell these VIP memberships on an ongoing basis, or you open up the VIP membership periodically, as you choose.

Then there are the renewals which we haven’t even touched on yet. Maybe in a year you decide to keep the membership going, so you let existing members stay for half price, and allow a whole new batch of new members to come in at full price. The options are endless.

Just imagine that you use this technique yourself and you raise $50,000 or $100,000 in less then a week. Then you approach others in your niche, in your community or anyplace you choose and offer to help them set up something similar for a commission.

And maybe you do this once a week for the next year. That’s going to be some pretty awesome money for something that won’t take you all that much time to do.