Category Archives: Product and Content Creation

That $5,000 a month figure only took him about 7 months to achieve, by the way.We’ll call our guy Mark (not his real name) and here’s what he did.

Mark was desperate to stop working. Long story short, he hated his job, hated his boss, hated the commute… you get the idea.

One day Mark decides he’s going to do online marketing but he doesn’t have a clue what to do or how to get started.

To fill in his knowledge gap, Mark takes a course at one of those online course sites like Udemy. Only instead of learning online marketing, Mark realizes the guy giving the course is no smarter than Mark is.

That’s when Mark decides to emulate the guy giving the course rather than build himself an online business.

Mark spends a couple of days on every course site he can find, studying what’s selling the best and why it’s selling.

He makes a list of 22 topics he thinks he can teach that interest him and that he thinks will sell well.

He chooses his first topic, does deep dive research on the topic for 10 days, and creates his first course.

Then he repeats the process.

In six months he’s created 18 courses and his income is approaching that $5,000 a month mark. That was some time ago, and his income is even higher now.

A few things you need to know about Mark:

• He never taught anything or talked in front of a camera prior to doing this.
• He’s an introverted, shy type of person.
• He didn’t know very much about any of his topics before doing his research.

As you can see, Mark had no prior training for this. In fact, he was camera shy and didn’t have a lot of confidence in himself, either. And yet, look at what he achieved.

What else you need to know about Mark:

He’s capable of becoming super excited when he’s talking about something he’s passionate about. That’s why he chose topics that interest him, and his enthusiasm really comes through in the courses.

He’s one heck of a researcher and takes great notes. He learned everything he could in the time he allotted, made a detailed outline, and then started recording. He didn’t wait until he “felt ready” because in his words if he had waited, he never would have recorded a single course.

He was terrified to do this, but even more terrified of staying in his job. Hence the motivation to leave his comfort zone.

He initially did no marketing of these courses. Remember, he didn’t know anything about marketing. But what he did do was research his topics to find out what people wanted to learn. Then he created awesome course titles that made people want to take his courses. And he initially charged a pittance for the courses just to get his first students.

And that’s about all there is to it. Maybe it sounds too easy, but sometimes it’s just a matter of putting in the work and doing something before you feel ready.

The bottom line is pretty obvious: If Mark can do it, so can you.

One more thing… after four months of creating courses, Mark quit his job and never looked back.

I’ve seen this done before but this time it’s a little different because of the total inexperience of the person (we’ll call her Pam) who did this.

Pam had zero experience at online marketing, zero experience at list building and zero experience at creating any kind of a software program.

She’d read enough marketing materials to know that building an email list was paramount to finding success in online marketing, but she didn’t want to bother with slow, traditional list building methods.

Nope. She wanted to do it fast and with as little effort as possible.

And so, she created a software program for laptops and an app version for phones.

Her software is in the self-help niche, but she’s asked me not to give out any specifics because it would be super easy for someone else to come along and create a look-alike product.

I can tell you that her program provides guidance and help for some very real-life issues. While it’s not a therapist in your pocket, it almost feels like it.

She was torn between wanting to get this program into as many hands as possible, and only letting paying customers have it. She knew from her research that one paying customer is worth ten or even 100 freebie seekers. She also knew that there could be some customer service issues to deal with, and if she had only paying customers then she could hold the number down enough to be able to handle it herself in the beginning.

Here’s what Pam did to get the software into as many paying customer’s hands as possible: She gave it away with the purchase of any other self-help product or coaching that sold for more than $45.

In other words, other people in the self-help niche who were selling products could offer her software as a bonus to purchasers. This helped them to get more sales and it built a list of buyers for Pam.

Pam now has a list of over 10,000 people who pay for self-help products and services, as well as several dozen new connections and relationships with players in her industry.

She’s already working on joint ventures with several of those marketers. She’s selling affiliate products to her list. Her list continues to grow with buyers with almost no effort on her part. And in less than six months she is now earning over $5,000 a month.

She credits her success to finding out what people want, hiring someone to create the software and app for her, and giving away something super valuable to people who are actively working on making their lives better.

I asked Pam if she might open up the software to the general public to build her list massively bigger and she said it’s not really a consideration right now. The people on her list are all buyers and her list is crazy responsive. She only sends out three emails and one offer per week and yet she’s earning over $5,000 a month. She does plan on creating more of her own products to sell to her list and she has two of them in the works right now – one is a course and the other is another software program.

I love this because her list building efforts are minimal, her list consists of nothing but proven buyers and she spends only about 10- 15 hours a week on her business.

Could this be duplicated in other niches? Absolutely. I know of one person in the online marketing niche who has built a list of over hundred thousand business owners by giving his software service away for free, and I’m sure there are many others.

The twist here is giving it only to buyers of other products. Those product owners – who already have substantial credibility with their followers – become her best marketing tools as they rave about her software to their prospects.