This trend lately has been steering droves of Internet Marketers and aspiring newbies to turn their passions into profits, but just how can you do this? I for one agree with this approach and I believe it’s the future of doing business on the Internet. As the Internet grows and more people join in on it, competition will increase and it will be harder to breakaway from the crowd and really be noticed. This increased competition, of course, makes it more difficult to earn a living or any sort of income online.
Do you remember how years ago there were “Mom and Pop” shops everywhere, on every street corner? What happened to them now? They have almost all been essentially replaced by big, brand name stores. The same thing is happening on the Internet right now and it’s becoming harder and harder to create the successful Internet dream business unless you know what you’re doing.
Becoming an Expert Online – Is Being an Authority The New Trend?
Step 1: You must actually understand the Worth and the Value of what you know. Be honest. Are you a rock star AdWords guy that wants to teach others what you know? Are you a Real Estate maverick that understands the business in and out, through and through? Perhaps you are a health nut that wants to share your vast knowledge of dietary and recipe information… Whatever it is, you must prescribe a value to your knowledge for the next step.
Step 2: Here is the blueprint that I would follow in order to turn my passion into profits. This is, in fact, the example blue print that I DO USE in all of my businesses online:
- Setup your website, learn basic internet marketing, SEO and keyword researching skills. You have to stand out above the crowd. Many times, you have to understand that it is you – it is your skills, talents, knowledge, abilities etc that is forming the backbone of your new business and/or website. Therefore, you must showcase and flaunt your knowledge. You have to demonstrate what you know and let others soak this information up. Prove that you are who you say you are and that you can do what you can say you can do. Build your tribe and your audience and get to know them extremely well. You must understand their problems so that you can provide legitimate solutions to those problems.
- Once you have your website going, you can look into quickly monetizing your traffic with ads, affiliate programs etc. However, I would suggest that if it’s possible, you should move right away into doing Consulting work or some kind of Training, Coaching or Mentoring program ASAP. This is where you can really flex what you know and leverage it into bigger profits. This is why you must know your worth and your value. If you truly know a lot, then you can charge a lot, as long as it’s justified. Do you think it’s fair to charge a client $3,000 for one day of consulting if you knew that if he implemented that tip, it can probably make him $300,000 in a year?
I’m not saying that you should try and take a basic knowledge of a subject and charge thousands of dollars for it – trust me, you won’t last. You need to find a price point that works for you to charge (and that’s fair to your clients based on what you truly do know) and the more you do this, the more you will be building a healthy client list with a proven track record of results that you can later use to justify higher price tags with. Eventually, you can and will leverage your client list and successes to network with and acquire larger and more influential clients in the future.
I also recognize that many people are in specific niches that can provide certain types of Services. I’d say you’re in luck because not only can you offer training/coaching/mentoring/master minds etc but you can actually take on client work. I did this while growing my SEO business and I still do it to this day if the right kind of client comes along.
The key is in understanding this: you are compensated for the types of problems you are capable of solving for other people and businesses. The more you know and the more knowledge you have, the more types of complex problems you can solve and the more people will trust you and flock to you to solve their problems. People who need complex problems solved usually will pay for it, however, if they pay you out the wazoo to solve their problems and you can’t deliver – then your business won’t last!
Step 3: Here is where you should begin to understand another fundamental limitation in your business model that you must overcome. Up until this point, your business is really focused around you. You are doing all of the work, you are trading your time and hours for money. The important thing to notice is the fact that your business is essentially focused around your TIME. Your ability to generate an income is focused around your ads/affiliate programs and your coaching etc programs. Coaching programs/training/mentoring specifically drain your time because you must be physically present in order to conduct them. Having search engine traffic coming in and regularly buying products from you and clicking ads doesn’t require you to be there which is great – we need to investigate this mentality in a bit.
Here’s the problem – you only have so much time because there are so many hours per day. What you need to do is now begin to leverage your time and your efforts by beginning to create your own products for other people to benefit from. Remember how I have just encouraged you in Step 1 to sell other people’s affiliate products/programs through your website? Now you will take all that you’ve learned from writing articles, doing client work, selling products and interacting with people one on one or in groups and then create products and programs that solve these problems that are easily able to be downloaded.
Just like when you sold other products and had search engine traffic coming in to click your ads – you now have your own products that you have created and sell exclusively that are doing this while you are sleeping, working and eating etc. We have basically moved up the ladder and slowly developed a system that begins to leverage our time more efficiently as we develop a better proficiency in our business. The goal with this, however, would be to begin focusing your time on finding other people with websites that are similar to yours to sell your new products… Just as you have done while first starting out when you sold the products of other people.
It’s silly to think that you should just focus on growing your own traffic through the search engines or through PPC (paid-advertising). These stories you hear about “gurus” making big bucks online come from the fact that they have THOUSANDS of affiliates selling their products. They run contests, offer prizes etc. It’s a huge game to them and with every successful launch, they get more people then they can fathom signing up to sell their products and coaching programs etc. All niches have the ability to do this. While some are obvious more profitable then others, we will have to save that for a more advanced post sometime in the future 
Increase Your Income Online While Working Less Hours
Viola! There you have it. This is my business model in a nutshell and I don’t recommend spreading yourself too thin by working too many different niches at once. I basically just focus in on my passions and natural strengths and MAKE them work for me.
So what are you doing? You are basically spending all of your time in trying to figure out the various problems that your market has, and then you are creating products and programs that help them legitimately solve these problems and/or reduce their learning curve while they try to solve them on their own.
I can’t say this any other way – this is how you combine all of the many facets of Internet Marketing & SEO and make them work for you. We begin basic and simple and gradually we move through more complex ways of doing things. We’ve incorporated all of the various types of Internet Marketing strategies and have consolidated them into one long-term and highly sustainable business model that you can work and reap the benefits from for years.
My Closing Thoughts
I can easily see a lot of people asking, “Well Steve, my Niche (for whatever reason) just simply doesn’t allow me to do consulting/coaching/training etc (for whatever reason). Now What?”
The answer still is to be found here, in this word:
Leverage, leverage, leverage
The answer is still the same. You must focus on ways to remove yourself as the primary backbone of your business’ income as soon as possible. If you can’t really do training, consulting or whatever, then what I’d suggest is amassing an entire army of writers to write for your site.
How do you do this?
You don’t even have to pay them. As you build your site out in a legitimate fashion, you are going to become an authority/expert and leader in your niche. You can simply advertise as someone who accepts guests post etc – you can even solicit them. I don’t even care about revenue, I would personally offer 100% revenue to writers offering expert articles to my site. They will attract backlinks, social signals and more subscribers/traffic etc in the long run and it’ll be more then worth it. Giving them 100% revenue is nothing compared to what I will receive back. I know this.
You can include code that rotates your ads 50% of the time and theirs the other 50%. You can even go the route of just hiring ghostwriters and paying them a fixed amount for each article and then monetizing them 100% on your own. Remember that we are growing a business and we don’t want to be in a position where our income is entirely dependent upon our time and efforts only. We must expand and grow.
However, if you remember one thing from this article, and one thing only… Let it be this:
Your efforts are best concentrated on finding affiliates to sell your products. It doesn’t matter what they are. If they are informational products, physical products etc there is no concern here – we will get the best returns by leveraging other people’s traffic, email lists and websites rather then trying to build our own website to capture every fish in the sea.