Category Archives: Income Generation Methods

Major $$$ Opportunity: Podcast Memberships

The problem with many podcasts is they have small audiences, making them difficult to monetize. But what if you could earn a six-figure income by charging people to be able to listen to your podcasts? Then you wouldn’t need a ton of listeners to become profitable.

That would never work, right? Actually, it’s already working, as proven by at least several podcasters who are doing exactly that.

For example, Farnam Street is a “Like-minded community of high achievers committed to better thinking, wiser decision making and more focused growth.” Memberships sell for $149 annually or $25 per month. Members receive access to premium podcasts, hand-edited transcripts, ask me anything sessions, book summaries, bonus articles, free courses, membership in the community and more.

From the website: Our goal at Farnam Street is to help you go to bed every night smarter than you were when you woke up. Every day, thousands of people turn to us for the kind of multidisciplinary education you can’t get anywhere else. The Farnam Street Membership is for those who want to go a step further and make intentional learning a daily way of life.

The join page is especially interesting because people can choose to pay the $149 or they can pay more, if they choose. This community has grown to more than 9,000 members and is home to CEOs, investors, GMs and high-achievers in all walks of life, making it a great place to find new contacts within the community. In fact, the testimonial at the top of the membership page is from the former GM of the Cleveland Browns. https://fs.blog/membership/

Have you done the math yet? 9,000 members times $149 isn’t exactly chicken feed.

If you’re starting your own podcast, you might want to map out a value ladder first.

For example, your bottom rung is going to be free, whether that’s a free newsletter, free excepts from your podcasts or whatever you choose.

The next rung is going to have a low entry price. Maybe you charge $10 a month for the podcast transcripts or summaries of the podcast episodes.

Next you might offer your annual membership at $99 or $199. This includes all podcasts, written materials and community.

Finally, you have a $1000 offer that could be an annual retreat, one-on-one coaching or whatever your subscribers would like.

Another paid podcast example is The Anfield Wrap, https://www.theanfieldwrap.com/ a Liverpool-based podcast company, with 10,000 paid subscribers as of 4 years ago (the latest info I could find) at £7 – £10 per month each. Take note of their pricing:

  • £7/mo audio only
  • £7/mo video only
  • £10/mo both

I’ll bet you pounds to donuts that most subscribers choose £10 per month because, “It’s only £3 more.”

I love the low price per month model because it’s a low barrier to entry AND most people won’t miss £7 or £10 leaving their bank account each month.

It’s worth noting that some attempts at using a subscription based podcasting model have failed. For example, it didn’t work for Tim Ferriss. But in his case, he didn’t make his content exclusive. He offered benefits such as Q and A’s for the paid members, but everyone could access the podcast content. It seems that it’s more effective to place your best stuff behind the paywall and then entice free subscribers to upgrade for access to the insider info.

I think at this time the best method might be to offer free and paid memberships, with 90% of the benefits going to the paid members. The only purpose of the free membership is to build your list of prospects.

Once you have a prospect on your list, you can repeatedly give them a ‘taste’ of what paid members get and then entice them to join your other smart members and get insider access to the full buffet of goodies you offer.

$2.5 Million Tiny Business in 2-3 Hours a Day

Justin Welsh helped build two companies past a $1B valuation and raise over $300M in venture capital.

Then in 2019, he burned out. That’s when he and his wife quit their high-paying jobs and completely redesigned their lives. Justin now runs a one-person business that teaches creators how to identify, develop and monetize skills they already have, on the internet.

That’s right – he essentially teaches online marketing.

And he’s also an angel investor and a mentor to entrepreneurs.

Justin built his business by writing a few short posts on LinkedIn every day. He’s not interested in fame, in being an influencer, in making hundreds of millions of dollars a year, in taking selfies or in driving a Lambo.

All he wants to do is build a tiny online business that he can create his lifestyle around, optimizing his day for freedom rather than status or being rich. He automizes everything possible, keeps his appointments to a minimum, and focuses on meeting cool people instead of people who can do something for him.

Justin avoids politics, doesn’t watch the news, doesn’t have cable TV and avoids anger. When someone tries to debate him in the comment section of posts, he walks away. He hates hype, clickbait, big egos and drama.

He does something he enjoys for a few hours a week so that the rest of his time he can do whatever he wants. He’s not into alarm clocks, hustle or success habits.

He’s one chill dude doing business and living life on his terms.

The other day in his newsletter he shared his, “8 Questions to Transform Your Week.” These are the questions he asks himself when he conducts his weekly preview.

1: What can I remove from my calendar?

2: What’s on my calendar that can be automated?

3: What’s something that should be delegated but isn’t?

4: Is there anything on my calendar that isn’t urgent and important?

5: Can any important meetings be 50% shorter?

6: How can I get off the computer more?

7: How can I maximize fun time?

8: Is there anything missing?

To read more on each of these, just follow this link. And if you’re interested, I encourage you to subscribe to his weekly newsletter, too.

https://www.justinwelsh.me/blog/how-to-do-a-weekly-preview

Affiliate Blog Monetization Checklist

Posting articles on your blog that either soft sell or directly sell products is a good strategy for increasing sales. But a lot of marketers overlook the many ways you can boost sales by inserting features that sell more affiliate products.

How do you design your blog to maximize sales? By using this checklist. Take a look…

Present a “Featured Product”

The idea here is to create a special section of your blog and present a weekly featured product. Here’s how to make this feature more effective for generating sales:

Continue Reading (only available for IMIT members)

$2,300 Month Case Study Using Just Free Tools

Can you build a side hustle that takes just a few hours a month and uses only free tools? Surprisingly, the answer is yes, and here’s how one enterprising new marketer did it.

Sherry earned her first dollar two weeks after she started, and a year later she is earning approximately $2,300 a month. She’s also the first to admit that if she would invest more time in her business, she would likely be earning more money. But still, $2300 a month for just a few hours of work isn’t bad.

Here’s what Sherry did, and as you read this, see if you can notice the one thing she DIDN’T do that would easily double or triple her income.

1: She went to Clickbank and spent an hour deciding what program she wanted to promote first. She also could have gone to JVZoo, Digitstore24, CJ Affiliate or any other low-barrier-to-entry affiliate network she chose.

In choosing her first product, she thought about what was important to her, what her interests were and what she loves to talk about.

She settled on marketing programs because that’s where her interests lie, and for her first affiliate product she ironically chose a course on how to do affiliate marketing. This allowed her to promote something she was deeply interested in while also adding to her affiliate knowledge by taking the course.

In this case she was able to get the course for free by connecting to the product creator. But keep in mind most product creators won’t give out their product for free unless you can prove you’ve got some experience at affiliate marketing. Then again, it never hurts to ask if you’re sincere.

2: She built a free landing page by going to sites.google.com. She kept the page simple and clean with a very clear call to action that took visitors to the affiliate sales page.

3: She went to ChatGPT to generate content ideas. She wanted ideas to make YouTube videos that were all about how to do affiliate marketing.

Then for each of these ideas, she continued to query ChatGPT as well as doing her own research to create video outlines.

4: She then recorded videos for YouTube, making one video for each topic. She followed a detailed outline rather than a script so that she could sound natural. And she continued to record and post these videos at the rate of 3 or 4 per month.

For each video she pasted her landing page link on the first comment so that her viewers could click the link, and at the end of each video she asked viewers to find and click the link.

She also did plenty of research on how best to optimize her videos to get traffic from YouTube.

5: In addition to the videos, Sherry made posts on Pinterest and Instagram. She did this by going to Canva and using the Pinterest template to make eye-catching visuals targeted to people who wanted to learn affiliate marketing. Again, these were linked to her landing page.

She posted on social media about trendy topics such as new affiliate programs and news, and always used one of her visuals to grab interest and get the click.

And that’s it! Her efforts drove visitors to her landing page, who were then directed to click the link to go to the affiliate sales page. Now then, did you notice what Sherry did NOT do that could have greatly increased her income?

Sherry didn’t capture the email addresses. While she did use the landing page to monitor where her traffic was coming from, all she had on that page was a headline and bullet point list with a button that sent people to the sales page. It works for her and she does make sales.

But I would have instead created an irresistible free lead magnet and given that away on my landing page, directing traffic to the offer only after they signed up for my freebie and corresponding newsletter.

Of course, that is more work because you’ve got to create a lead magnet and write emails, but it’s also far more profitable in the long run to build a list that you can continue to send offers to.

You’ll notice that all of the tools Sherry used were 100% free, so her only investment was her time. And she readily admits her first few videos weren’t all that good. But like anything else, practice allows you to improve, and her income is steadily rising over time.

Oh yes, and she’s creating a dynamite lead magnet so she can start building her list, too.

$6,000 From Ready-Made Oto’s And Bonuses

Now here’s an interesting case study.

It’s about someone who profits from something I’ve bought a lot of in the past, but finding good quality ones today is getting harder.

Which is why a coaching student of mine who makes around $6k a monthly from selling these ready-made, plug in and forget OTO and upsell pages, and bonus packages.

Why do I buy these?

Well I test out a LOT of squeeze pages to see what conversions I can get.

And sometimes I don’t have anything that ‘fits’ as the OTO so I want something I can just ‘plug in’ to collect any sales and help cover my traffic costs

Years back the most common upsell or OTO was a huge bundle of ebooks with PLR rights.

They usually converted pretty well and you could buy a ready-made OTO package that you just put your own Paypal button on and uploaded to your site

Creating the product yourself would have been a NIGHTMARE because you had to find maybe 100 ebooks, make sure you had the rights to sell them, list them all on the sales page with nice graphics, descriptions and the rest.

It could literally take days to build an OTO site like in this way.

Whereas for $97 you could buy the whole thing, rights and all, do a bit of linking and upload it to your server in minutes.

Bung it behind your squeeze page and BOOM – instant OTO sales

You don’t see them much today although the premise is totally the same

Creating a product is hard enough for many people so creating an upsell as well is just too much for them.

But NOT having an upsell in any funnel is crazy because you’re leaving money on the table, I’m sure you’ll agree

The answer?

A ready-made OTO or upsell that you can just plug in at the back of your funnel to make sales from.

Which is what my student does.

He doesn’t mess around with ebooks, he find plugins instead (much higher perceived value) and buys the rights to bundle and resell them.

He usually collects around 8 or 10.

Enough to make it an irresistible deal but not enough to make them look too plentiful

Once he’s found them and bought them he sends the details over to his webbie who builds the sales page for him

He themes them together in different OTO bundles too – social media plugins to complement social media products, traffic plugins to complement traffic products and so on.

He makes around $6k a month from these and from the ready-to-go bonus packs he offers too.

You know the bonus offers you see at the bottom of many sales pages?

Grab this now and get this bonus pack worth $197 or whatever – he makes those too

Simple thing I know but SO popular still. You’ve opted in to funnels from different marketers but found many of them have the same backend OTO offer?

Chances are they’re buying from my student.

Great idea eh?