Pamela Wilson coaches people in mid-career to build profitable online businesses. Apply to work with Pamela in her Offer Accelerator, learn more about her books, and read reviews of the tools used to run this site and business.
If you’re on a mission to make passive income, I’ve got news for you. Passive income dreams actually encourage burnout.
I have seen too many super smart people chase the passive income myth. They try for years to make it work. But they’re never able to make passive income at a pace that provides a good living.
Today I’ll share a much better way to make money online.
When I say “trying to make passive income encourages burnout,” it sounds like blasphemy to many online business owners.
Some people say that passive income is the whole reason that they built an online business.
Or they say, “I want to work less, not more. I only want to make passive income.”
Or they wave that 4-Hour Workweek book in my face and say, “What about a four-hour work week, Pamela? That’s the whole reason that I got into this online business game.”
It’s not impossible to make a great living with passive income. A tiny percentage of people are able to do it. For some reason, those passive income unicorns seem to be the noisiest people online.
Not everyone can keep up that kind of pace. Not everyone wants to.
The reason I believe that passive income for everyone is a myth is simple:
In order to make passive income, you have to sell your offer constantly.
You’ve got to get that product or service in front of people — a lot of people.
You built an audience using content marketing. Now you’re wondering how to monetize online content without chasing sponsors, spending a fortune on ads — or giving everything away.
Pleasing sponsors can feel like a job. You’re working for people who pay you to create content. Which means you aren’t really your own boss.
Maybe you’re pouring money into ads, which eats into any profits you make.
It’s possible you listened to advice from online marketers who recommend you sell your expertise for cheap. They say:
Take your knowledge and put it into a $497 course
Create a tripwire and ascend people up the “Value Ladder”
Make all your intellectual property accessible and then upsell your customers
And after you’ve done all that, you can make real money.
It’s exhausting — and it’s not fair to you.
I have a much better solution that I think you’re going to like!
Imagine making money with your content. You don’t need to run ads, look for sponsors, or build low-ticket offers that you use to upsell people to a higher-priced offer afterwards.
But to generate consistent revenue with all that content that you’re creating, you have to take the next step.
Turn your content creation efforts into a consistent revenue source
If you’ve been working on creating consistent content, I want to congratulate you — even if you haven’t yet figured out how to monetize online content.
How to monetize online content by creating a high-value offer — and testing it fast
What defines a high-value offer? Where does the true value come from? A high-value offer does a few important things, for both you and your customers.
It delivers life-changing transformation
It inspires gushing testimonials from your customers, which makes it much easier to promote
It makes a massive difference, not just to your customers, but to the bottom line of your business
If you want to learn how to monetize online content the smart way, I recommend that you forget about ads, chasing sponsors, or selling your expertise for next to nothing.
A high-value offer is a much faster route to generating consistent revenue in your online business.
I’ve developed a super fast method to help people like you, who are experts in their field, to create a high-value offer. I call it my Smart Start Method, and it helps you to get your idea out of your head and into your market — and it can be done in a month.
The Smart Start method is inspired by the Lean Software Development approach. If you haven’t heard that term before, it’s a framework that’s used by developers to create a piece of software that delivers only the necessary features. Once it’s in the hands of users, they improve the solution over time, based on user feedback.
My Smart Start Method works the same way. It takes place during the first 30 days of my Offer Accelerator program.
If you want to try the Smart Start yourself, I’m sharing that process right here.
Step 1: Explore your market
The first thing you want to do is to research the market that you want to enter. Your goal here is to understand exactly what your market is looking for.
The reason you need to do this is you might be suffering from the “Curse of Knowledge” — that state of being where you can’t remember what your beginner questions and challenges were.
This happens when you’re an expert!
It’s why I recommend that you take the time to do some market research.
How the people you want to serve are talking about their challenges
What your prospects find lacking in the solutions that are on the market now
This allows you to go into the market with your eyes wide open, understanding what people truly need and how they’re talking about those needs.
Your goal is to capture the exact language your customers are using so that you can use their own words to describe the challenges your offer solves.
If you can find and use that information, people will say things to you like, “It’s like you are inside my head and you understand exactly what I’m struggling with.” That’s because you picked up their language!
The market exploration process is an important first step. What’s next?
Step 2: Tap into your personal values to make your offer unique
The next step is to sit down and identify the personal values that you want to see reflected in the offer that you create. These are things like authenticity, humor, trustworthiness, and openness.
Your offer should be a reflection of who you are and how you show up in the world — the values you’ve developed in your lifetime that represent who you are.
When you infuse your offer with your personal values, it doesn’t look like it was stamped out of a factory. It doesn’t look like everybody else’s.
You want your offer to be unique to you, and how you show up in your content marketing.
That will make it easy for your followers or your subscribers to see how your offer is directly related to what they know you for.
So sit down with your favorite beverage in the most comfortable chair you can find, and just start listing:
What’s important to me?
How do other people describe me?
What would friends or colleagues describe what my values are?
Sometimes it’s easier to think about it in terms of how people would describe you and your values than to just come up with a list of your own. Try it — you might be surprised at what you discover!
Step 3: Take stock of your current strengths and skills
The next thing you want to do is to take stock of your current strengths. You’ve developed skills over the years!
When you use the Smart Start Method, you learn how to monetize online content by using your current skills. That makes it easier and faster to deliver your offer.
You don’t have to learn how to create videos if you’ve never done them before, or create elaborate worksheets or assessments if you’ve never done those before.
You have a skill set that you’ve developed, and there are certain things that you find easy to do.
Maybe you’re a strong writer
Maybe you love doing video
Maybe you enjoy delivering live, in-person workshops or giving speeches
Whatever your best skills are, I want you to take some time to note them.
That’s so important because I see people who have a lot of expertise say, “I want to develop a course. And I’m going to make it a video course because those are popular. So before I make that course, I have to figure out how to do video.”
You do not need to learn new skills.
You can deliver transformation to people using your existing skill set.
Take the time to get in touch with your current strengths.
What comes easy to you?
What do you enjoy doing?
What is fast and simple for you to put together?
Use those skills to build an offer quickly and get it into the marketplace.
Step 4: Develop a testable version of your high-value offer
Once you have done that market research, gotten in touch with your values, and identified your skill set, it’s time to develop a testable version of your offer.
“Testable version” means an offer that delivers all the transformation to your customer, but it’s stripped down in terms of technology.
You don’t need an elaborate learning management system to deliver it, or a complicated sales funnel to promote it. Not when you’re developing your testable offer.
A note of caution: When you’re learning how to monetize online content and you’re in mid-career, there’s something you might run into that can trip you up at this stage.
It’s something that I see a lot.
You have high standards. By the time you’re ready to develop your own offer, you may have been in online programs — well-established online programs.
You might think, “If I’m going to come out with an online program, I need to make it a reflection of who I am, and it needs to be very professional and polished.”
It’s important to have high standards, and you will get there. But what I recommend is that you start out with a more pared-down approach to delivering your offer.
Here’s why:
The best online offers are developed through an iterative process, where you put a version of your offer in front of your customers and get their feedback.
Find out what they find challenging
Discover what questions they still have
Identify what might be confusing
Then you make your offer better, based on that feedback.
Making those changes is very difficult if you have developed a super-polished version of your offer without first getting feedback from customers.
This is why I recommend that the first time out of the gate, you create an offer that is less polished, but that still helps people.
This is a really important part of the process. And I’ll be honest with you, it’s not going to feel comfortable to come out with something that’s not polished.
My Smart Start Method helps you to develop a testable offer that delivers true transformation. It helps your audience without all the beautiful, polished branding and bells and whistles.
Once you’ve developed your testable offer, you can move on to the final step in how to monetize online content.
Step 5: Test your offer with real, paying customers
Final step! It’s time to offer this test version for sale. The only way to really test how to monetize online content is to ask people to pay for the offer you create.
Put your offer in front of your existing audience — your podcast listeners, YouTube subscribers, email list, social media followers, or maybe your personal contact list.
Let them know you developed a solution for them. Tell them it’s not super polished, but you want their feedback.
Tell them you want to work with them and help them with this new offer. And you can’t wait to give them a special price for being among the first people to test this offer.
You can call this group founding members or charter members.
(Don’t call them beta testers. That implies your offer is missing something important.)
Lots of people love getting in on the ground floor of something new. They enjoy being a part of the process that makes the offer truly great.
Create a high-value offer tailored for your audience
When you go through these five steps, it is completely possible for you to build a powerful high-value product or service that generates $10,000 to $20,000 in revenue every month.
This is the best recommendation I can give you for learning how to monetize online content — develop your very own, high-value offer.
Your high-value offer is tailored for your audience, expresses your personal values, draws on your current strengths, and delivers a life-changing transformation that people are happy to pay for.
If you want to explore how to monetize online content with my help and guidance, take a look at OfferAccelerator.com and apply.
You’re about to see six call to action examples that show you how to use both call to action phrases and smart sales page design to help boost conversions on your sales page.
How to convince prospects to click that “Buy Now” button
Your future customer has clicked through to your sales page. They scroll all the way down and are at the point that they will either buy — or not.
All the sales page copywriting in the world won’t help you if your call to action doesn’t convert.
Let’s look at how you can use high-converting, effective call to action phrases so that you make sales and see conversions for your online offer.
The call-to-action examples that follow will help convince more of your prospects to click that big, beautiful Buy Now button so YOU make more sales!
You can’t be there in person to walk your prospect through your sales process. That’s the job of your sales page.
One of the core principles of marketing is this: A confused mind doesn’t buy. That’s why it’s crucial to use call to action phrases that are clear, convincing, and designed for conversions.
As in all things online marketing, there are two aspects to think about. Your call to action copy, and your call to action design.
We’re going to look at both of them in this article. The concepts you’ll learn from the six call to action examples below (“CTA examples,” as we say in the marketing industry) will boost your sales page conversion rates.
It’s only through fighting past the tough times — and puzzling through the challenges — that we learn. And once we’ve put the effort in, we appreciate the success we’re able to create more than if it was handed to us.
Hi there! If you’re reading an article called “Branding for Beginners,” I’m thinking that creating a brand identity by yourself seems a little daunting to you.
If that’s the case, I’m here to tell you that …
I know you can do this.
Why?
Because you care more than anyone else about how your brand turns out.
If you’re ready to create a brand identity for your business but you don’t know where to start, this branding for beginners post shares branding tips you can use to take your first baby steps.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if you never ran out of content topic ideas again?
Good news — this post features a single content pillar example that will rock your world!
What’s a content pillar? It’s a piece of content on a topic you want to be known for, that can be broken into subtopics and you can use when repurposing content across your channels.
Content marketing means sharing helpful, useful, engaging content that establishes you as a trustworthy expert on one core topic.
Every online business owner I know struggles with coming up with content ideas.
But it’s important to choose your one core topic and build your content marketing around it.
Not 37 topics — one core content topic.
I get it. You need to write something. But straying from your core content topic is one of the most common content marketing mistakes. The result? Your content is unfocused and confusing for your audience.
The approach I’m going to show you will help you create content so you can be seen as a respected expert on your core topic.
When I started my online business, I didn’t think of myself as a writer. Since then I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words and two books about content marketing — Master Content Marketing and Master Content Strategy.
