Make Money Online

One thing I see most people struggle with when it comes to qualifying clients is how do I get started with this? And there’s a lot of different ways you could do this, but what I find is the most effective is a two-part process. Part one is Set up an application form on your website using WooFoo, Gravity Forms, whatever form service you want, and have that be the primary way somebody gets in contact with you. And kick them over to a qualifying application after that. I mean, think about how doctors treat you when you go to the doctor’s office. You don’t show up and say, I have a broken elbow, give me some pain pills. You show up, you fill out an intake. Form, you answer questions, they diagnose you, they qualify you as a patient before you could even work with them. And it’s important to have something similar set up. So, what I recommend doing is Have that intake process defined. Somebody fills out this application, they get redirected to the secondary application to tell me more about their business, and then I go no-go on calling them. Once you’re on that call with them, have a list of five to seven questions that you ask them. Just go-to questions. My personal favorites are like Tell me about your business. How do you make money? What’s the number one issue you’ve experienced over the last two months? How can I help? Why me? Why not someone else? Questions that help me understand why they’re seeking me out. And also. What exactly is the problem that they’re trying to solve by talking with me, by applying to work with me? I put together some thoughts on this and some starting resources to help people who want a client intake process and a client qualification process get started at ClientintakeCheatsheet. com. We’ll drop a link into the show notes, but you just give me your email address and I’ll send you over some nifty resources on getting started with a client intake process.

Yeah, I agree. If you establish a price, people suddenly start saying, oh, it’s not free. I’m going to go somewhere else. And putting a price in front of somebody is the quickest way to discourage them. I mean, we give the same advice to consultants and freelancers who say, I get a lot of people applying to work with me, and like 10% of them are real people or real projects. A lot are just tire kickers. What should I do? Our advice is: you know, put a price in front of them, have a road mapping session. Say, great, it’s this much money to get started. People will either walk or decide to work with you. It applies the same way when it comes to friends and family asking for free stuff. One thing I do is Occasionally, I will do a free project for a friend. Like, friend is a website. They’re like, I can’t get the thingy to do the thingy. Can you help me? And I’m like, sure, it’ll take me 10 minutes, and I love you. But what I tell them is, if I’m doing this for free, it is lower than the lowest priority on my to-do list. I cannot give you a due date. I cannot give you a will be completed by date. It’s going to be the, I’m bored and procrastinating and want something to procrastinate on, so I’m going to do this thing now. It might be in two months when I get to it. The only way to make me pay attention to it. is by having it be a paying project. So again, I think it all circles back to if you present them with that cost, then it’s either going to be a cost in terms of time and attention, this is going to get none of my time and attention. Or cost in terms of money, you’re buying my time and attention, you get better results. I honestly thinking about it, when’s the last time a friend or a family asked me for free stuff? It’s been a long time since somebody said, Hey, Kai, can you do this like web thing for me? It doesn’t happen that often. I think it’s more of a fear than something that often happens. But wrapping up on this one, if friends and family are frequently asking for free stuff, say, Great, it’s X dollars or X dollars an hour. Here’s my PayPal. And congratulations, you just made money, or congratulations, you don’t have to do free work.

Well, at the same time, like we talk a lot about productized. Consulting, and when do you offer like that Cadillac option? So you’ve got Draft Revise, you have Revise Express. Does it make sense to have like, here is the thirty thousand dollar I only sell one of these per year because that’s how many I want to sell option, both as a price anchor and also to offer as a premium service to clients who show up and say, we have the budget, we want the full service option.

And I think on the benefit of having, I fall on the side of wanting to have a premium service on my website, even if it’s You know, 2,000-word, 1500-word, 1,000-word sales page I wrote, describing what it is, apply here button, even if nobody ever buys it. It lets me point to it to say, I’m available for large-scale six-month engagements that look like this and start at this five-figure price point. Do you want to talk about this? Excellent. Fill this out. And I think it. Positions me and price anchors me well for all the other things that I sell. And even if nobody goes for that option, it’s similar to the most expensive bottle of wine on the menu. It’s going to make everything else look. Slightly cheaper or a lot cheaper in comparison. And I think there is a benefit to having that. One trick I’ve seen used and am planning on using is If you write a proposal for a high-priced service offering that could act as that premium service offering, essentially white label that proposal, turn as much of that content from that proposal into the sales page on your website as possible. And say, I am available for this type of work. It starts at this price point. Apply here. And now you have that premium offering available as a consultant. You might not ever sell another one, or somebody might come and knock and say, I need that exact same thing, or a very similar thing. And you’ve already defined it, and you don’t need to do the proposal song and dance again. So I think there are, I think, on the balance, there are more benefits to having something like this set up than negatives, but it could go either way. It might be a stylistic choice. Yeah.

You have to list all of them like, um, no. I was a lifeguard for two years with the city of Eugene. This was my first actual official job. I had no idea. Yeah, they trusted me. It was that’s Did you save any lives? Well, metaphorically, emotionally Literally, as no. I did not take any lives, so Cool. But no, I was a lifeguard for two years and I quit to work at the local Magic of the Gathering card shop and hustle Magic cards for the next four years of my life. it quickly laddered into doing a thing that is not lifeguarding. But no, for two years I was a lifeguard. Yeah. So mine.

Do they have lists of people who are about to get married where you’re cold calling and saying, like, hi, this is Nika? The answer to this might be no. I’m just curious. Are you about to get married?

They really didn’t enjoy it. Speaking of speaking to people, let’s talk about speaking engagements.

So I think there is a good question about Scopy. Are we talking about podcast-type speaking engagements or speaking at conference-type speaking engagements?

Yeah, always be podcasting.

Speaking of engagements at conferences, I think part of it depends on what your level is as a consultant. If you’re a beginner to intermediate consultant, I think You want to be approaching conferences and be doing free speaking engagements. Pay your own way, pay your travel. They might have you pay the ticket. It’s a huge level up in terms of getting you in front of potential buyers, getting you in front of audiences. Being able to say, Hey, look, I spoke at this conference. Ideally, they’re recording the conference, either the video or just the audio, and you’re able to leverage it as an asset you could share with your audience. At that beginner to intermediary level, I think it’s very valuable to be taking any speaking engagements you can. Local meetups, local conferences, smaller conferences, conferences where you have to pay your own way, but you’re doing a 15-minute lightning talk because It lets you cement your positioning and further demonstrate your authority to that target market. As you level up as a consultant, two interesting things happen. One is more people start approaching you to speak at conferences. The other is now you’re able to start saying, excellent, my fee to speak at a conference is. You pay my travel, or you pay my accommodation, or you pay this much money for me to actually show up, or I only speak at keynotes. So, you’re as your authority grows, you’re able to leverage it into yes, I’d love to speak at your conference. if it meets these criteria. I emailed one very successful author about speaking at a conference I’m organizing in 2017. And he responded back and he said, We’d love to. I only do the keynote, and it’s $50,000 a day plus travel. And I was like, Thank you so much. we will email you back later. And we did not email back because that was more than the budget for the entire conference. But you hit a level and you’re able to come back with that type of response. But for the average listener of the podcast or people who are saying, I haven’t spoken at a conference before, When should I start taking these speaking engagements? I think the earlier you start, the better. Start reaching out to local meetups, local organizations, local Get togethers of any type and say, Hey, I’m a consultant who does XYZ and helps this type of person solve this type of problem. Can I teach your audience something new? Essentially, the same pitch I tell people to use when approaching podcasts. Use that for any local group of Audience members that match your target market, and see if you could give, you know, a 15-minute lightning talk at a local meetup or speak at a local conference and level your way up from there. But the most important thing of all, see if there’s a way to record that video or record that audio. I’ve gone as far as when speaking at the local university, hiring my buddy and saying, Hey, I’ll buy you lunch and give you $100. Show up with your video camera. And just videotape me talking, and like we have a wireless lav mic, so we get decent audio. And that was great. Like, I got a 30-minute video out of it of me giving a presentation on topic XYZ. That is the most valuable thing that could come out of a speaking engagement. Ask the conference organizer or ask whoever is organizing the engagement: will this be recorded? If they say no, ask, can it be recorded? If they say no, ask, Can I bring my own person to record my speaking segment? You really want to get that as an asset because that’s a very valuable asset to have.

Like, that’s perfect.

One other thing I’d add as you’re getting started with this, if you’re like, I haven’t ever done a speaking engagement before, what should I do? Find local meetups and organizations. Again, find them, outreach to them and say, hey, are you looking for somebody to give a talk on a topic? I’d love to. The dirty secret is, people who organize regular events or recurring meetups like that, they’re really hungry for content. So if you show up and say, I know things about X, I would love to teach your audience a thing about X, would you like me to? Chances are they’ll say yes, we’d love you to, and then boom, you’ve got a speaking engagement and you could level up from there. I started out speaking to Classes of 15 to 20 students at the University of Oregon. This past year, I was presenting to 400 to 600-person rooms at larger conferences. Leveling up happens, leveling up takes time, but start with outreach and say, I’d love to talk about this thing. Would your audience enjoy hearing me talk about this thing? And over a few years, you’ll level up to larger and larger events. I have a close colleague who just broke into, oh wow, they emailed me and they said, We could afford to pay you $X,000 to speak at this conference. It’s not even a keynote. It’s just a one-off talk during the day. And her reaction was, I would do it for free. They offered me money, I’m going to say yes. And I was like, take the money, take the money, and be happy.

Have I ever told the story? This is perfect for a mailbag episode: how I accidentally lost. $200 on Google AdWords, but got 10 gigabytes of storage space free on Dropbox. So I started running Google AdWords, targeting the keyword Dropbox using my affiliate link back when I was a college student, figuring like, Hey, the clicks will be a couple cents each. Some people will sign up, and I get bonus space for everybody that signs up. It worked perfectly. In a day, I had maxed out the referrals for my Dropbox account, but I forgot to pause the Adverts campaign. And I didn’t realize this until two weeks later. And like I had a multi-hundred dollar bill for this. It was net loss. Net loss by far. But a fun experiment and a fun one-off thing that worked well. But that’s the story of how Kai lost money online.

I’d add to it, you do a very great job of balancing educational and entertaining content with pitching content. I often tell people, Shoot for a four to one ratio. So, four pieces of education or entertainment, one piece of pitch. You go way heavy on, like, I’m sending a weekly letter, and it’s education, and it’s entertainment, and it’s teaching people. And then you’re like, by the way, I just made a course on A-B testing. If you want to learn more about it, here’s the sales page. And next week, we’ll be back to our regular scheduled thing. People have received so much value from your free content, from your educational content, from your entertaining content. By the time it comes to the pitch, it’s like, oh, the guy who I love made a thing. I’m going to buy that thing. So I think. You make your services so easy to buy, let’s say, so addictive to buy, because you provide so much value throughout. The lifetime of that customer that when you do launch a new thing, they’re like, Of course, I want to buy it. Maybe I want to buy it just to support Nick because I love his letters. Maybe I want to buy it because it solves that business problem I’m experiencing. There’s that wonderful snark market essay, Stock and Flow, by Robin Sloan, where he talks about stock being the large pieces of Content we put out into the world. This is the movie, this is the book, this is the course, and flow being the small, more ephemeral pieces of content. My tweet, my Twitter stream, one-off email newsletter, maybe smaller pieces of content, more consumable content. You have great flow and you have great stock. And I think that leads to people saying, I love the stuff I received from Nick for free. Oh, he bought something that’s paid that he’s been working on for the last six months. Of course, I’m going to buy it.

This is a good one. I don’t do affiliate programs, so I have no idea how to answer this question. So The best way is to make it seem organic and natural by having it be organic and natural. So let’s say We’ll use a real example here. I just switched from using one outreach tool to a new one, reply, reply. io, reply app. The branding is confusing. So I just switched to using reply and I emailed them and we had a call and they were like, hey, we could give you a discount code if you want to share it with your audience. And I’m like, that’s awesome. And so within my outreach course, within my book, The Outreach Blueprint, different articles I write where I talk about, you know, how to do outreach and say, you know, the tool I’m using right now is Reply. I include that discount code. And that discount code could be linked to an affiliate program. In this case, I said, let’s max out the discount percentage. I don’t care about any affiliate bucks. But I think by having it naturally fit into that content, so it’s not, let me tell you about an affiliate thing I like. It’s, hey, this is how I do this thing. This is how I solve this business problem. I happen to use this tool. Here’s an affiliate link to it if you want to sign up for it. Small tactical things I see people like a lot, people doing that I like a lot are: when you include the affiliate link, immediately next to it, also say here’s a non-affiliate link. And just let people choose. The folks who would say, oh, I don’t want to click on an affiliate link, they’d Google for the site anyway, and you wouldn’t get the affiliate buck. Put that link in front of them as a choice of yeses, and it decreases the chance of you coming off as an internet marketing affiliate person. I also think it’s valuable to think about. Bonuses you could include. So, if you do do sort of a canonical affiliate write-up, let me talk about how much I love the service. The call to action is sign up with my affiliate link. Well, anybody could create something like that. What’s valuable is saying, hey, here’s a bonus I’ve put together that’s exclusive to people that sign up through my affiliate link. When you sign up, forward me a copy of your receipt, or once I see you in my affiliate dashboard, I’ll know you have signed up. Once that happens, you’ll get this exclusive bonus. Maybe it’s a collection of templates you put together. Maybe it’s your getting started checklist. Maybe it’s a screencast you recorded. Whatever it is, it’s something that adds more value to them. So you’re essentially saying, hey, we both know, you click on this affiliate link, I’m going to get a couple of bucks. But as a thank you for me getting a couple of bucks, I’m giving you something of value. And if you make that as a product, something that you create once and could release as many times as you want, you don’t have to worry about fulfillment down the line. It could be as easy as. Somebody forwards a thing to you, you forward them that thing right back with the bonus you promised them. And that’s how I’d say how you want to pitch affiliate programs or services and not come off too much like an affiliate. Add value wherever you can.

You’re like, marketers have rent the internet.

Yeah. Yeah. It’s seen as, I think, affiliate marketing is seen as an easy way to launch a business, but not have to create a product yourself. Hey, I’m repping somebody else’s product. The problem of product creation is taken from me. But the downside is: well, you’ve got a bunch of me two people shilling the same offer, and there’s nothing that stands out or interesting about it. I mean, I could go to site one or site two and get the same exact affiliate pitch. Well, what’s valuable for me as a consumer deciding to sign up? So I think that paradigm has turned people off to the idea. Of affiliate marketing, where they’re presented with like an affiliate pitch. Let me tell you about this wonderful thing that somebody else has, and you counter that by adding more of your own unique value. This is my teardown of how I use it. This is. My workflow for using the tool. This is my screencast for getting started. These are the templates I use on every outreach campaign. Go sign up for the thing, and I’ll give you this in exchange. And that becomes more of an exchange of value. And you’re recommending a tool that you actually use, that you could show proof of you using, and that you’re helping somebody get started using.

Yep. Yeah, I’m looking at the wirecutter’s best cheap in-ear headphones to replace your stock earbuds. This is a 22-page article reviewing. Uh, done done done a dozen plus. I can’t say the number in here, but there’s a lot on this photo. A dozen plus versions of In ear headphones, like they put a ton of time and effort into creating this content. You see this and you’re like, wow, this is value. I’m going to buy their pick. And that trust is immediately built.

You just describe my entire workflow whenever I read the WireCons recommendations. I’m like, oh, this is a long page. Oh, the number one pick, that’s in my budget.

One thing I to go deep on affiliate marketing unintentionally on this mailbag episode, one thing I love that they do here in the table of contents, the first one is why you should trust me. And we’ve got three paragraphs here talking about. The author’s background and experience. And these are like dense graphs, talking about the author’s background and experience and how they did this review process. And that builds trust. It’s not. I’m Joe internet marketer by this thing. It’s like, you know, I actually have run an audio testing facility for years. Since starting with the wirecutter, I’ve reviewed hundreds, more than 400 different pairs of headphones. You’ve got some bona fides at that point. Like, I’ve probably touched less than 400 pairs of headphones in my life, and I ran a business selling iPhones. Like, this person has handled more unique types of headphones than I’ve touched headphones in my life. That is. Credibility building right there. And at that point, it’s less of, oh, this is an affiliate site, and more, I’m reviewing cool things, and I happen to be monetizing it through affiliate marketing.

I found the most personal success in terms of enjoying promoting them with affiliate programs when it’s a tool I use and love and recommend. And then I discover they have an affiliate program. And so it’s like. Listen, I’ve been recommending this for six months. I discovered that they have an affiliate referral thing. I’m still going to recommend it. I’m just going to include that link in there too. Like, I love the shit out of WP Engine. All of my sites are on WP Engine. Whenever a friend’s like, Do you have a recommendation for a WordPress hosting site? I’m like, you should use WP Engine right now. Sign up for them or sign up through my affiliate link, and I’ll love you forever. But either way, go sign up for WP Engine. They do it right. And I think when you find a product that you have that level of just frothing at the mouth love for, that’s when you know it’s a good product to recommend to your audience and not to come off too much like an affiliate. Like. At some point, I will probably write like the 10 reasons why I love WP Engine for hosting my sites and will never use anything else. And it will include affiliate links in there because I’ve used them for, I think. Three years now as a company, like I’ve paid them thousands upon thousands of dollars. I love them to death, and I’ll recommend them to everyone buying with my affiliate link or not.

I can’t remember this episode.

I hired a consultant recently for a client project, and the consultant sent me a tin of cookies for Christmas. And I was like, This is the sweetest thing ever. And I’m shoving cookies in my mouth, writing the consultant an email. Thank you so much for the cookies. I deeply appreciate this. And, like, it’s a nice gesture. And I’m sure, me as a lifetime value of me as a client. Orders of magnitude greater than the cost of that tin of cookies. But that tin of cookies, that built a lot of goodwill. That’s me saying, like, I enjoy these cookies. This was wonderful. Thank you. So I think it’s a net positive to send gifts to clients. I think The hardest part, said as somebody who has for years now had the intention of becoming regular at doing this, is building that habit and building that standard operating procedure. I think step one is. Like, figure out what the minimum viable gift is. This is a book I read this year and really loved. I wanted you to have it because I appreciate you as a client. P. S. How is business? You have a letter. You could get it printed at your Kinkos or your FedEx. You have 10 copies of a book you enjoy that you bought off of Amazon. Stick it in a thing, handwrite a little thing, send it to them. Great, you’ve now sent a gift to a client. SOP that out and have it as a regularly recurring thing. And the next time you have an idea for something interesting to send to people, it was the holidays. I’ll send them a Christmas cookie gift basket. Great, run the SOP against that and build that habit. I think giving gifts to clients can be wonderful because it plays into getting referrals, reactivating old clients, and turning them into ongoing clients, generating new business. It could be a money maker for you, but there’s a lot of logistical behind the scenes. You don’t want to accidentally become a dropshipping business that you need to figure out. And the more readily you SOP it out, the more well you define it, the easier it will be. to do on a recurring regular frequency?

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