Foolish Adventure

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Following up on Gettin’ Ahead Money and Why I’m Happy To Make $12,000 in 2012 articles, I want to cover what Foolish Adventure is about:

Making A Living Online.

I tend to define “Making a Living” as $50,000 US dollars per annum, which is about the median US household income.

HOUSEHOLD income… that could be two or more people in the home working which is typical of US families. Also, it is the median income. Half of all households make less than $50,000 and half make more than $50,000.

Some people would be happy with half that at $25,000 because at least then they wouldn’t be working a job they hated. Or for parents, at least one could stay home with the kids.

Some people would say there was no way they could live on $50,000, but to those people I say use the $50,000 you earn from your online business to pay off debts and then build your income-producing asset base.

Eventually, your assets will produce enough income that you could quit your job and live off the earnings. Oh, and you don’t have to stop there…

You can always make more.

I don’t want you to feel limited or overwhelmed by the $50,000 figure. Like I said, in the US half the households make less and half make more than $50,000. If it seems like a lot… it probably won’t after you read this article. And if it seems too little then you’ll understand the foundations of how to turn $50,000 into $100,000 or $250,000 or more.

If $50,000 or $100,000 or more sounds like a lot to make from your business, it’s because you haven’t yet learned marketing and how to attract customers.

Making It Sound Easy

Let’s break $50,000 into manageable numbers. I find it much easier to think about small numbers and getting them to add up to a big number over time.

So, $50,000 is $4,167 per month. This sounds more manageable, but let’s break it down further. $50,000 per year is $137 per day every day of the year. Don’t worry, YOU won’t be working every day — your online business will be.

Now that we know we need to make $137 every day (on average) to make $50,000 we need to know HOW to make it.

Here are the 3 ways my clients and I have made money online and how you can use them to make $137 a day.

1. Ebooks

The old standby. Ebooks have been making money since the very early days of the Internet. What’s great is that they still make money.

Let’s say you have a $37 ebook to sell. To make $50,000 you would need to sell 1,282 ebooks. That’s about 107 ebooks per month or 4 ebooks per day (I rounded up).

4 x 365 x $37 = $54,020

Just 4 ebooks. Not thousands. Not hundreds. Just four.

If your website gets a 1% conversion rate from the visitors that come to your site, you would need daily traffic of 400 visitors or 12,000 monthly visitors. That’s not terribly hard, but it isn’t super easy either.

So to increase conversions, we’re going to have an email optin so that we can communicate with our email subscribers over time. I’ve seen email lists convert over 70% of the subscribers to buyers, but let’s be conservative. Let’s say we only get 10% to convert to buyers with our monthly promotions.

That means you would need 40 people on your list for every four ebooks sold. A list of 1200 people should purchase enough ebooks per month (you’ll always be adding more subscribers) to earn you $4000 each month.

Later I’ll explain how to structure your online business in case you don’t sell enough of just one type of product.

2. Training Course

You can also make $50,000 with training courses, which have three pricing tiers: Low, Mid-level and High. The dollar amounts for these levels is different for each industry, but I’ll just use prices based on what some of my clients and myself have used just as example. Your pricing will vary.

First, let me define what a Training Course is.

Training courses are much like an expanded version of an ebook that teach people how to do something. As an info-product, training courses can be downloadable, delivered over time through email, on a password protected site or even delivered as a physical product made up of books, CDs and DVDs.

Oh, and training courses tend to be multimedia. This isn’t required. They can be just audio, or video, or text. But typically they are some combination of print, video and audio.

Back to pricing…

A low priced training course could be $79 to $249. Mid-level could be $250 to $499. And high prices could be $500 to $1000. In the Internet marketing world, it is common to see a mid-level product cost between $500 to $1000 and high level products at $1000 to $2000.

But let’s take $147 as the price for your training course that you’re going to sell. To make $50,000 you would need to sell 340 courses each year. That’s a little less than one course per day, but let’s round up to one.

Thirty sales per month from cold traffic to your site converting at 1% would require 3000 visitors per month, but we know better…

We’re going to get visitors onto an email list so we can get a higher conversion rate. At 10% conversion, we need just 300 people on our list to make 30 sales each month.

Thirty sales each month at $147 and you’re making over $50,000 a year. You just need to learn how to make one sale each day.

Maybe it takes you six months to learn how to turn enough traffic into an average of a sale a day, but six months — hell, even a year isn’t a long time when it comes to changing your life forever.

Now I want to cover my favorite way to make a living online.

3. Membership/Subscription Products

There’s one major reason I like membership sites and subscription products…

You make the sale once and get paid over and over.

Remember the ebook above? Well, we are going to make “ebook money” each month from our membership site. We’re going to charge $37 per month so to make $50,000 a year we would need 1,351 “sales” each year. Sounds like a lot of sales until you realize that this translates into just 113 total customers.

You need to make 113 sales and you can make $50,000 a year!

This is so powerful.

You can focus on a really targeted niche so learning how to find customers will be significantly easier.

But this isn’t enough.

The Power of Product Lines

I want to show you the true power of a “Making a Living” business.

We’re going to put all three info-products into action.

To make $50,000 (or more) per year from an information product business, we will sell a mix of ebooks, training courses and a membership site — another term for this is product line.

One product leads into and reinforces the next product. You sell an ebook, then offer them the membership site and then a specialized training course to go deeper into your topic.

I’m going to keep using the $50,000 per year benchmark just to show you how this will work for you, but you can make a lot more with this approach.

Let’s say we sell 20 ebooks each month at $37 each. This brings in $740 a month.

Out of those 20 new customers, you sell 10 membership subscriptions and bring in another $370 a month.

We also end up selling 3 training courses each month and bring in $441. Our grand total is $1,551. Not quite what we need yet, but…

In month 2 we earn $1,551 + another $370 from new members which equals $1,921.

Month 3 we earn $1,921 from our 20 current members, ebook and training course sales plus another 10 membership subscriptions for a total of $2,291. We’re now over halfway to our goal.

By month 8, you would be earning $4,141 or just under $50,000 a year if you kept making ebook sales and training course sales, but stopped adding new membership subscribers. Total sales so far… just 264 sales. But not 264 customers. Your total number of customers would be about 160 customers since nearly all of the customers are funneling in from the ebook sales in our product line.

If you keep this up you could be earning over $100,000 a year within 2 years.

That’s the info-product roadmap to making a living online.