Your Internet Pie. Jerry Holliday
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Introduction
The Internet offers a fantastic opportunity to sell your passions, skills and expertise to the world 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
People all over the world are constantly searching the web for information and are willing to pay to get instant access to it.
This information can take the form of printed books, ebooks, videos and audio files that can be paid for while you sleep and delivered to the customer with a minimum of fuss and effort on your part.
Publishing information has fantastic potential for high profits with very low start up costs compared to starting an offline business. With information publishing there are also much higher profit margins; you can sell as many ebooks, audio podcasts and video courses as you like!
The world of publishing is currently been turned on its head with the rise of the Apple iPad, the Amazon Kindle and other content delivery devices. More ebooks are now sold on Amazon than hardback and paperback books combined. The ease of pressing a button and getting instant access to any book on a mobile device has obviously struck a cord with many book consumers.
A technology now exists called publish-on-demand enabling you to write a book and have it available for consumers to buy on all of these mobile devices. You can also have a physical book version available on Amazon, the Ingram book distribution network and Barnes and Noble where copies are only printed when someone orders your book.
This has a powerful effect on reducing costs helping more people publish their content to a wide mainstream audience. This book was created using the very same method.
More and more people are getting fed up with being stuck in a rut or in jobs that they hate. The Internet throws open a myriad of possibilities for your ebusiness to be open 24 hours a day and 7 days a week to the entire world. You can essentially run your business from anywhere with just a connection to the Internet.
There are all kinds of people are making a success of their online business from housewives to ex-teachers, teenagers and the retired. There are not many careers that can give you a six or seven figure salary yet information publishing has provided this for many entrepreneurs.
There’s a lot to learn, but this guide focuses on the fundementals such as demand for your type of product, building a list of prospects and buyers that you can resell to and getting a steady stream of traffic to your product or service offers.
Many infopreneurs fail because they get bogged down in technical stuff or don’t research whether there is a demand for their product or worse still, they jump from one idea to another never giving any one the chance to actually start working.
This guide has been created to help you start with the basic building blocks to getting your piece of the Internet Pie as well as showing you how you can turn all your expertise, passion and hobbies into a sellable asset.
Even if you don’t have a clear idea on what you want to do this book will show you how to find a suitable and lucrative niche to tap into.
By building a business on the Internet you are not only securing your future (remember a job for life anyone?) but you will be immersed in doing something you love day in day out! Imagine that feeling of jumping out of bed every morning because you want to - not because you have to.
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t easy. There is no magic push button solution to making a success on the Internet, despite what you may have heard. But if you follow the basic principles outlined in this book you will have your piece of the Internet Pie!
Case Studies
There are tens of thousands of examples of people who have created a successful online business from their passions and expertise. Here are some case studies, from super lucrative examples to the more moderate success stories.
Making Money from Wine Gary Vaynerchuk took his passion for wine and helped turn his father’s liquor business from a $4m to $45m in 8 years. He used his personal branding and the viral power of social media and new media to revolutionize the wine industry with Winelibrary TV, a video blog of unconventional video reviews on wine without the stuffy approach of the wine tasting industry. Wine Library TV reinvented the concept of wine tasting for a new generation.
Vaynerchuk raised his profile and received recognition from the business world for both his business acumen and the fresh personal branding approach by leveraging social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter and using new media to deliver his content.
Gary’s viewership swelled to over 80,000 a day and led to numerous television appearances, features in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and consultant for Fortune 100 companies, and a keynote speaker around the world.
Gary points to his extreme passion of wine, but more importantly was willing to work “super hard” to make his business succeed.
For more information visit:
http://dailygrape.com/
Choose Cars Alborz Fallah actually started three different blogs whilst working a full-time job based on different passions. There was a blog focused on the Windows Vista operating system which was still to be released at the time. Another blog focused on going out in Brisbane, Alborz’s hometown and lastly a blog exclusively about his biggest passion - cars.
It was the car blog that Alborz chose to focus on which was eventually valued at $5 million, as well as earning substantial monthly advertising revenue.
The blog focused on car road tests and reviews and captured an audience hungry for car content in Australia. He regularly posted content, on average two posts a day, and captured traffic from Google with SEO techniques. Initially reluctant to put advertising on the site, Alborz was eventually presuaded by friend and mentor Yaro Starak to start testing Google adsense ads which brought in a healthy revenue stream and became the bedrock of the blogs’ eventual income growth.
For more information visit:
http://www.caradvice.com.au/
Travel Blog Success Dave Lee has used his love of travelling as a base for a whole new online business. Dave blogged his way around the world for 20 months and publishes the Go Backpacking Blog (http://www.gobackpacking.com) which has been syndicated by Lonely planet and receives 120,000 page views per month.
Dave also publishes more niche focused travel blogs like Medellin Living (http://medellinliving.com) and even runs a membership website that helps others launch their travel blogging careers.
Travel Blog Success offers travel blogging lessons grouped into modules as well as the opportunity to ask questions and get blog critiques. Premium members enjoy access to audio interviews with blog experts offering practical advice and monthly group coaching calls.
The product is available on the clickbank platform that handles credit card payments as well as affiliates who can promote the site for a commission, all of which will be covered in later chapters.
Dave’s earnings from his blogging ventures have recently reached a healthy $5k a month enabling him to live anywhere he wants. He currently resides in Medellin, Colombia.
He is currently planning to build on his expert status in this area and publish guides for the Amazon book market.
Dave says, “All my blogs, and the membership site are built on WordPress, which I’ve been using since January 2007. I recommend bloggers buy their own domains, self-host their blogs through a web hosting company (like Hostgator), buy premium themes (to present a professional appearance) or have their own designed if they can afford it and use email lists to help build their readership. I use and recommend Aweber.”
This is a great example of someone taking