And if you get to the root cause of the fear of making offers, that in turn comes from the fear of people unsubscribing.
A lot of us are scared to sell stuff, make offers, because we think if we sell stuff, people will unsubscribe, they will mark our emails as spam, they will hate us, they will trash us on social media.
In short, a lot of marketers fear the sky will fall on their heads if they make offers to their list. And they are so terrified of people unsubscribing. Trust me, that included me as well at one point, and such thoughts do pass through my head even today. So it's not unusual for marketers to worry about the dreaded unsubscribe.
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Since Episode #69, I've continued to wind-down my Facebook group. I still post there occasionally, but everyone in my group knows that I've moved the community to my own website and most have them followed me to my new forum. You can check out my new community by going to Forum.SubscribeMe.fm .
And on this episode, I also talk about how I use Slack, how I use my Online Forum, When to use which tool, and How I'm using Scarcity, Exclusivity and Urgency to Build My Online Community
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One of the common myths that a lot of content creators have, in this day and age of crowdfunding, is that if you have a large enough audience, then you can earn a decent income using donations from your listeners.
90% of creators, will not be able to make even a few hundred dollars a month from their show, and I'm going to show you why.
First, I'm going to play you a clip from a podcast called RadioLab, a super-popular radio show and podcast with millions of listeners, where you will hear a really shocking revelation about the ability - or should I say, inability - to raise funds through donations even when you have a super-successful podcast, which, according to their media kit, they get 1.6 million weekly radio listeners.
On a cold morning in January 2007, a violinist wearing a baseball cap was playing some beautiful music in a Washington DC subway train station.
1,097 people passed him by, but only 7 of them stopped to listen to him. He had a mat spread out in front of him to collect donations.
For his 43-minute performance, he collected a whopping $32.17 from a total of 27 passersby.
Listen to the show for the rest.
And if you need help growing your business, check out my coaching program at https://SubscribeMe.fm/coaching/
It doesn't matter if the ad is like a pre-recorded ad from a third-party, or a show-halting, host-read ad. Yes, I agree that those ads are not the same, and people are generally more receptive to host-read ads, where the host of the podcast, or the YouTube video, or the author of the blog post, are themselves reading out the ads.
And it gets more interesting when you throw in affiliate products. And the creative and organic host-read ads.
If you know someone who tells you that they love ads, or they like ads, they're either lying to you, or something is wrong with them and you need to tell them to get their head checked LOL!
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My AdSense earnings would fluctuate between $500 to $1500, most of the time averaging about $1000. But I never averaged more than that through AdSense ads. This, despite being #1 on Google, getting tons of traffic, targeted audience, despite buying every course on AdSense and SEO and list-building and optimizing every darn part of my website, constantly creating traffic and on and on and on. The work to stay at the top of Google as relentless, but all of that work didn't payoff as much as it should have, given that I did reach #1 on Google and built a list of more than half a million email subscribers at one point.
You know why it didn't work? Because ads generally don't work for most people - not for most publishers and content creators, anyway.
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3 bold predictions for the next 5 years: Subscription Overload, Loss Leader Overload and Lifestyle Aggregators.
I predict that by the year 2023, everything we use today in day-to-day life, will become subscription based.
And because there's going to be an explosion of subscription-based services, there will be what I'm calling Subscription Aggregators. or Sags. And one step up from Sags, will be what I call Lifestyle Aggregators, or Lags.
Finally, there's going to be an explosion in Loss Leaders.
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After I got back from speaking at Podcast Movement 2018, I was thinking about all of the positive things that have happened for me in the last 2 or so years.
I've been getting a lot of traction with my efforts in the podcasting space. Which is why I'm going All-in on Audio.
I have 3 podcasts now - one of which you're listening to right now - https://SubscribeMe.fm .
And then there's my 2nd podcast called "Cut To The Chase", which I had put on the back-burner for a while, but I'm moving it to the front-burner now.
And then a few days ago, I launched my THIRD podcast, which is really an Alexa Flash Briefing first. See https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07GLP1KV1/
That is also available as a podcast at https://CutToTheChase.fm.
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"To Have Great Power, You Need to Take On Great Responsibility".
That's my new "Reverse Spider-man" quote, a cool twist on the original Spider-man quote.
I actually came up with the idea for this as I was preparing for a presentation that I'm giving next week, at Podcast Movement 2018, in Philadelphia.
But as I was creating the slides for my presentation, I have a section in there, where I talk about building your own platform, owning your platform, owning your domain, building everything on your own website, vs building it all on a third-party platform.
As I was doing a comparison table comparing third-party platforms versus your own WordPress site, I came up with the idea for today's episode.
Do you remember Uncle Ben from Spider Man? He is Peter Parker's uncle who gets killed by a burglar who is trying to escape after a robbery. So in the movie, Peter Parker, aka Spider Man, lets a burglar get away just a little bit earlier, and that same burglar ends up shooting and killing his Uncle Ben. And a dying Uncle Ben tells Peter, one of the most famous movie quotes ever. He tells him: With great power, comes great responsibility.
It's an amazing quote, no doubt.
But guess what? Uncle Ravi has a quote for you today, that's going to put Uncle Ben's quote to shame.
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Part 2: Product First? Or Audience First? I talk about Strategy #2: Building an Audience First and THEN creating a product (ideally, productS) for that audience.
Which is WAY easier said than done.
And I'm also going to let you in on a little secret... that Strategy #1, which is Product First, Audience Next, and Strategy #2, which is Audience First, Product Next, are actually not mutually exclusive at all. You DON'T HAVE to choose just one or the other. You can actually do both. In fact, you MUST do both. But only in a certain order. And I'll talk about that in a second.
Now to give you better context, I have to say this real quick about Strategy #1. The cool thing about Strategy #1, is that once you've accomplished that, then Strategy #2 - which is building an audience first - becomes kind of moot, because now you already have an existing audience who have already bought your first product. So creating additional products for an existing audience is going to be a lot easier than finding or building a new audience.
I actually have a name for this: Go Deep, Then Wide.
So when you find a niche where you have already created a product and you're starting to build up an audience in that niche, it is a lot easier to go deep into that niche, than to go wide, and start coming up with new niches that are unrelated to that product.
Almost every single successful entrepreneur or company, almost always tends to go deep, before they go wide.
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Product First or Audience First? A burning question for anyone starting an online business. And as much it might seem similar to the complicated "Which came first, the Chicken or the Egg" discussion, it's actually not all that complicated when it comes down to the core nature of these two strategies.
There is no simple one-size-fits-all answer here, so I'll try to break it down as best as I can, given my own experience selling a number of products online since 1998, and then add to that my experience coaching and consulting with clients since 2003.
There are basically two schools of thought when it comes to creating an online business. Each one involves a completely different strategy.
Strategy #1) You create a product first, and THEN find an audience for that product
Strategy #2) You build an audience first, and THEN create a product
Strategy #1 is basically to start with what skills and resources you have and create your product or service first based on your own knowledge and experience. And then you find an audience for what you've already created. And then you keep improving the product and extending it and then creating other products and services around your core product or core niche, as you get more feedback from current, past and future customers.
Strategy #2 is basically to first build an audience, that is hopefully big enough, hungry for a solution to a pain, can actually afford to pay for it, is easily reachable, and easy to work with. And then create something FOR that audience.
There are a lot of tangents I can go in when talking about some of these things - like how big of an audience do you really need? That really depends on what kind of a product or service you're selling.
If you're selling something for 1000 dollars, and your goal is 100,000 dollars, then you only need 100 clients. If you're selling something for 20 dollars, and your goal is the same 100,000 dollars, then you need 5000 clients. So I won't get into that discussion today, as I have that planned for a later episode.
For the purposes of today's discussion, I'm just going to stick to the two strategies: Build Product Then Audience, or Build Audience Then Product.
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Should you create a Facebook Group? Or an Online Forum on your own site, your own domain, on your own hosting account?
This episode is for you if you have a Facebook group that doesn't have too many members, or has many members, but not enough engagement, or maybe you're planning to start a community, but you're torn between a Facebook group and creating your own Forum.
And even if you have a successful Facebook group right now, and have absolutely no plans of starting your own forum, I would still urge you to listen to the entire episode, because I hope - actually, I know - that there is going to be something in here that you may not have thought of before.
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What Shark Tank has taught us about getting some skin in the game, why you must pay to play in order to get the best, and fastest results, and how you can come up with the money to pay for promoting just about anything!
You've probably heard the saying "Put your money where your mouth is". Which basically means: Stop TALKING about things, and start putting in some money into whatever you're trying to accomplish. If you just TALK about how passionate you are about something, and TALK some more about how much you care about something, then if you have NOTHING invested in it financially, then it makes it that much easier to just walk away from it. Which shows a lack of commitment.
So, don't TELL me, SHOW me that you care - about your online business, or your online course, or your audio course, or your Kindle book, or your podcast.
(listen to the show for the rest)
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Do you want to take your online business to the next level in 2018?
Here are 13 things that will help you reset, refocus and reprioritize by revisiting everything - starting with your goals, your priorities, your web site, sales offer, content marketing, lead magnet, website performance and more.
Likes and Comments won't pay the bills. You have to build a business, you have to market and monetize your content, create offers, make sales, and work on attracting your 1000 true fans.
(listen to the show for the rest)
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