Ryan McLean : Slightly Unconventional

#30 Marketing Property Tools More Mon 27th July 2015

iniartworksmallHey guys!
 
Ryan here from Instructions Not Included and I have missed a couple of days because I was working and I forgot to record.
 
So if you are hanging out for that sort of stuff and I do not even know at this point of time if I have any audience at all because what I am doing is creating these and publishing them 6 weeks in the future. But if there is anyone hanging out for that I do apologize.
 
I try to record every day that I work but I do not get around to doing it every single day.
 
So I am back on Monday. I think last time I spoke to you guys I was super pumped about creating eBooks and doing that sort of thing. And what I did, I finished the 30-day Property Journey which I think I told you guys about. And then I started scouring through my blog to see if there was any blog post or a series of blog posts that I could compile into an eBook and I found one, 15 Ways to Improve an Underperforming Property.
 
It was a 20 minute video that I did so it is about 3,500 words and so I converted that into an eBook and got that up on Amazon within a day.
Now in terms of sales from the eBooks that launched I have had no sales in the last week or whatever, ever since I launched them which was probably Friday when I really got them all online. I have not seen any sales through Kindle at all for those sort of things. And I am not too worried about that, it is very niche topic and so to expect to get sales every single day from a book that I just launched from an author that nobody knows about on a topic that not a lot of people care about.
 
I am probably not expecting that. What I am hoping for is that over time people will buy the books and it will just create a small passive income stream to supplement my other business income.
 
What I would love is just to diversify my income a little bit so it is not all coming from one membership site but there is this eBooks and I have a couple of different membership sites or software tools. By having that diversification it allows me, I guess, to be more financially stable and so that way if for any reason one thing goes away then I have other things to cover that up.
 
Today, I did some emails and then I did a couple of videos for On Property and what is interesting is I got a notepad 6 or something months ago and I went through every page on the notepad and I wrote a property question on every single page. I just answered 2 of those in videos today so I created 2 videos. But I am going through this and look, for On Property I am getting like 2,000 visitors a day to my website, 1,500 to 2,000, which is pretty good for the Australian property industry. And I am looking through these questions and a lot of them I already ranked pretty high for them when you type it on Google like the one What is the 11-second Rule? which I am ranked first for.
 
Anyway, I am going through this and is there any point actually answering these questions and actually creating this content because I am already maxing out the attention that I get from these sorts of topics. I guess I have been questioning today what is the future of On Property and should I be focusing on creating more content at all or should I just be focusing on creating products and selling products and monetizing the audience that I have. That is a question that I do not have an answer to.
 
One thing that I was thinking, I have a software program called Property Tools which I sell for $5 a month or $50 per year. And then I have On Property Plus which is my premium membership website which is like $300 a year. But Property Tools I launched about 2 months ago and I have 50 members and On Property Plus I launched over a year ago and I have about 130 or 140 members.
 
Property Tools definitely has the potential to be bigger in terms of the number of customers, in terms of the revenue that it generates. Obviously I need to get a lot of customers in order to generate significant revenue. Like in order to generate $60,000 per year, I would need a thousand customers. And at the growth rate I am on at the moment, which is only about 20 new signups per month, assuming that no one ever unsubscribes, which let us face it, a lot of people are going to unsubscribe. It will take something like 5 years to get to a thousand, 4 or 5 years or something to get to a thousand people.
 
So not really achievable for that but I do still think that there is a good possibility for Property Tools to make good money so something that I was thinking about over the course of the weekend was how can I make Property Tools more prominent on my website and how can I sell more memberships to Property Tools because a lot of people are signing up. People are not necessarily email subscribers. They are not getting it through the email. They are just seeing it on my site and signing up so the barrier to entry is low because obviously it is cheap, serving a need for people and so I would like to market that more.
 
And so some of the ideas I came up with, obviously I could create more content and then I could market Property Tools within that content. I could add it into my email subscribers but I have done a couple of emails about it with not a lot of conversions. It is really something that I guess people have the need and they sign up because they have the need for it. I am actually not 100% sure but one idea that I did have was basically go through my old content and the content that gets a lot of traffic I look at ways that I could incorporate advertising property tools into that.
 
Let me just see if I can find the page that I did this on. Here we go. So I looked at the top posts. The top 19 posts, now I have over about 500 posts or something like that on my site which in the last 30 days I have about 70,000 page views and the top 19 pages actually acquired 38% of the page views that I have.
 
So what I am considering, which is thousands and thousands obviously – 26,000 or more page views, is going through these articles, these videos that I have created and actually putting in some marketing for Property Tools in there inside the content. And at the bottom of the content, recommending Property Tools more heavily just to try and get people across.
 
So that is something that I am exploring. I will let you guys know how it goes. But today as I was going through these questions and trying to create videos, I am just finding myself stuck because a lot of the content I have already created and I feel like I do not really want to do it again. So should I move on to a different topic like my public speaking site? What am I to do? And I do not have any answer to that question yet.
 
In terms of public speaking, as you guys know I changed the name from Public Speaking Power to Teach Speaking. And I am actually considering re-branding again. I got the website Outspoken.co and I thought that is a pretty cool name. Maybe I could name it Outspoken and Teach Speaking could just be the product for teachers, helping them to teach students public speaking. So Outspoken.co would be the brand name and then teach Speaking would be the product. So that is something I am mulling over.
 
I am not 100% sure if it is just a silly name, not very good or if it is actually going to be awesome. So I will keep you guys updated on that.
 
That is it for me today. That is my update from Instructions Not Included, from this Monday. And my room is very messy and I need to clean it. But hey, the life of an internet entrepreneur.
Okay guys, until next time. If you want instructions go and buy some furniture.


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#18 My Go To Market Strategy – Fri 3rd July 2015

iniartworksmallI wanted to explain my go to market strategy for my websites and how I roll out my websites and make them profitable.

Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. And today I wanted to quickly go through my go-to-market strategy for my websites and this is how I tend to roll out my websites. I only just really discovered this the other day.

Step number 1 is I enter a market with a bulk of free content. I did this with On Property; previously it was called Cash Flow Investor. You go into a market. You create a lot of free content. I did the same thing with Public Speaking Power which is now called teachspeaking.com and I did the same thing with podcastfast.com. So I went into a market and created a series of videos or articles or podcasts, series of free content in order to drive traffic to my website.

Step number 2 is then convert that content into a low-end paid product. For example, with Podcast Fast at the moment the content that I put out to start with was a free video series about how to set-up a podcast. What I am doing now is that I am repurposing that content, I am taking the text and I am converting into an eBook. And now this is not necessarily an easy task, it is easier than creating a product from scratch but especially with Podcast Fast, I almost gave up on this eBook.

I am working on it at the moment as I am recording this. But this eBook was just so much harder to create than I thought it was but it is going to be worth it. I am more than halfway through at the moment. There is just way more screenshots, so way more editing to do than I thought I needed to do. But once I get this done then I am going to have a $1, $2, $3, $5 product that I can go and sell. I can sell on my website or I can sell it on amazon.com.

So step number 2 is to convert that content into a low-end product. With onproperty.com, I did not convert the free content into low-end paid products but I did create an eBook called The Essential Guide to Buying Your First Property in Australia and I launched that and that sells for $5. Step number 2 is basically create this low-end product that does not take a lot of effort just so you can validate the market. You want to validate that people are willing to spend money in this market and that there is a market there.

You just do not want to put too much effort into your website. Well, I do not in my business. I create free content which drives traffic. I create low-end products and I try and sell that to people who come to my website or I try and sell that through other means like through Amazon. And that is how I validate my market. If there is something happening there after a while, well then I will move on to the next thing.

Step number 3 is to find out what the audience needs and to create a high-end product for that. The hardest one for me was Public Speaking Power which is now Teach Speaking. It was so hard to work out what does this market need because it is so fragmented. But I think after receiving a lot of feedback especially from teachers who were saying that I’ve been using your videos in my class, they’re great, they’re really helpful, I have decided to create a high-end product for teachers to help them teach public speaking.

High-end products can be anything from $100 to $1,000, depends on your market. For On Property, the high-end product that I created was the membership website where I teach people how to find positive cash flow property and I also go out and find positive cash flow property and share it with those members. That is $300 a year.

So step number 3 is to find out what the market wants and to create a high-end product for it which is going to start delivering you decent cash flow into the business. And for my other website Podcast Fast, the plan for my high-end product is to have a product where I teach people my method for making money through podcast which is different for a lot of people.

Step number 4 is then to ramp all of that up now that you have this low-end product, now that you have this more expensive product, now you want to ramp up that and get more sales, get more people through the door. The way I do that is by creating more and more free content. So I did this with On Property, basically I created that website back in April of 2014 called On Property Plus, which is the one for $300 per year and in order to market that, I just created more and more free content to drive more and more visitors to my site, to get them through my sales and hopefully into the product. And I am now getting consistent sales of that product every single week and things are going pretty well.

Step number 5 is to introduce a cheaper high-volume product. Once you have a decent amount of people coming through, you have good cash flow from this high-end product; step number 5 is to introduce a cheaper high-volume product. This is something that is cheaper than your expensive product. It may be the same price as the first product that we create or it may be more expensive than that but the goal of this is something that really has mass market appeal for the particular niche that you are in. For me for On Property, what I have done for this one is I have created a calculator to help people analyze properties and I sell this for $5 a month or $50 per year.

It is a very low cost item but it appeals to a lot more people than my membership site which is more expensive where I should be able to help find positive cash flow properties. This slow-end mass-market appeal means that I can get a whole bunch of customers and hopefully, eventually I will make the same amount from Property Tools which is my calculator as I will from On Property Plus which is my high-end product.

So the goal for me is to diversify my income strain and to have a whole heap of customers so that I am more protected. And also just let me know if that while I am doing this everything is designed to have a sort of passive level to it. In terms of the products that I create, I want them to be passive. I want to create a product and then I want to be able to sell it over and over. For my marketing, I want to be able to create free content which drives traffic over and over. The goal for me – because I am a one-man band, I do not have a team that I can scale this with, is to have the content scale for me. Create passive products, create passive marketing strategies so I can scale my business by myself with just a small support team that I have behind me.

Step number 6 would be to fuel it with ongoing content and to create more and more free content. So you have basically: I start a website. I put in a bit of content, a big batch in the start that might be 10 or 20 or 50 episodes or whatever it may be. I then convert some of those episodes into a paid product to validate the market. I then leave the website for some time and I am making a little bit of money through that low-end product and I am just seeing if I am getting the interest to the website, see if it is growing naturally.

And if it is I will then contact the customers – all the readers, and try to find out what is the need that people have that I can go out and fill and I will then create a high-end product for that and try and sell that and ramp that up with more content. And once that is going, I will look at creating a mass-market appeal for the particular niche that I am in that is cheaper but that I can sell to more people. And then I will continue to ramp that up with more free content as well.

So that is kind of my go-to-market strategy that I am using. It has been very successful for me with On Property. I am now looking at implementing it with teachspeaking.com and podcastfast.com kind of at the same time but mainly focusing on teachspeaking.com after I get this eBook out for Podcast Fast.

So what I want to do is see if this works for Teach Speaking. And if it does, then I can teach it through my website, Podcast Fast. Maybe even through here on Instructions Not Included, if that is something that you guys are interested in learning about.

I hope that has been interesting. That is my go-to-market strategy. What I have been working on at the moment is that eBook for Podcast Fast, it has just been really hard. It is probably going to take me another 2 weeks to get that done but I really think that is going to be a great resource for people once it is complete and that is going to be something of high value that I can sell, even if I am selling it for a low cost. I can begin to validate that market: are there people out there who are willing to spend money with me on things around the topic of podcasting.

So I am pretty excited to have that launch. I will keep you guys updated once that goes live and see what else come in.

So that finishes it for today. Remember, if you want instructions go and buy some furniture.


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What Do You Really Do?

I am willing to bet that the answer you give at parties to the question “what do you do” is actually completely different to what you actually do to be successful in your job.

My answer: “I’m a pharmaceutical rep. I sell drugs to pharmacies…you could say I am a legalized drug dealer. ”

What I really do: What I really do is more like what they do in the movie Inception than sales. I spend the majority of my day using my words to open the minds of really smart people. I make people see that they can and will achieve more. I get them to believe what was previously impossible is now possible, and that they can do it too.

It just happens that by doing that it generates more sales for my company and more success for my customers.

What do you really do?


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How An Influential Chinese Blogger Grew The Business of An Australian Blueberry Farm

This story shows the true, and amazing power, of the fact that ever single person is or could be extremely influential.

My day’s girlfriend’s brother owns a blueberry farm.

They make the majority of their money in just 2 months of the year and they make the majority of money from tourist picking their own blueberries rather than selling them commercially.

Tourism drives higher margins and delivers better revenue from them than the commercial sector.

This season they have been scaling back their commercial operations due to increase tourism for one reason, an influential blogger.

A Chinese fellow visited their farm and when he went home he posted about it on the Chinese twitter or his blog (we aren’t actually sure where or how he posted it).

Now the farm gets an influx of Chinese tourists driving down from Sydney especially to visit this blueberry farm.

The farm did no advertising campaign, a happy customer advertised for them.

Your next lucky break could come from anyone, so treat everyone like they are extremely influential…because they may be.


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What I Want To Get Out Of Sales Conference 2013

Tomorrow morning I leave for the red centre of Australia, Uluru, for the national sales and marketing conference for my company.

This is a time when all the reps can get together, share ideas and learn about our plans for the year moving forward.

Here is a small list of what I want to get out of this year’s conference

1) Climb the rock – I can’t see myself going to Uluru without climbing the rock. Maybe I can lead an expedition to the top.

2) Come out with 10 brand new ideas for my company that I CAN IMPLEMENT (in the trenches) in 2013

3) Begin a “think tank” with just a couple of the most engaged reps

4) Speak to key leaders about what they think about the “new media marketing” (web 2.0, Facebook, twitter etc) and how they believe this can be used to drive the company forward in 2013

5) Gain sales tips and confidence in winning new business from the reps that have a proven track record in winning business

My goal have nothing to do with the content that will be delivered at the conference because I have no control over that.

My goals are specifically things I can do to grow over the course of the week.


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The Death of The Bell Curve

Recently I have been listening to a lot of Seth Godin audiobooks whilst driving. They are packed with gold!

Today I was listening to Meatball Sundae, which discusses the way marketing has been turned on its head and how to thrive in the new world of marketing.

Traditional Bell Curve
The traditional bell curve looks just like the shape of a bell. Small at the start, peaking in the middle and then dropping down to become small again at the end. In the past only a few people would purchase the cheap (and crap) and a few people would pay for the best. Most people were in the middle paying average prices for average things (think Jeans West and Target)

The New Inverted Bell Curve
With the changes in the web the bell curve is now inverted with most people either buying the most expensive and the best or the cheapest.

If I want a new phone charger for my car I can get one for $1 posted…I wouldn’t pay an average price ($10-$20) we I can get almost the same quality for cheap.

If I don’t care about the brand then I am going to go for the cheapest.

Take the other side of the spectrum. A lot of people will pay in excess of $400 for a pair of Ksubi jeans. The style and brand of the jeans demand a premium and people are willing to pay for it.

What This Means For Me
For me it proves what I knew all along, no one wants average. People either want the best or the cheapest.

In sales this means I either need to be the cheapest (and let’s face it someone is always cheaper) or I need to find a way to be the best. I want to set the bar so high that other companies will fail to reach it.

If I drop my brand new iPhone in the toilet and then drive over it I can take it to the apple store and get a brand new only for a couple of hundred dollars. This is excellent service and it will take Samsung a long time to win my business back.

I am still not 100% sure how I can provide something so excellent that people would be happy to pay a premium, but I intend to spend this year figuring it out.

Maybe I could provide phenomenal service, or find a way to get pharmacies their products faster than ever before. Maybe I can find a way to become so integral in their business and leave such an aftertaste of satisfaction that they wouldn’t want to risk going elsewhere.

I don’t have all the answers, and in the regulated industry of pharmaceuticals it won’t be easy to find a clear way to win. But I believe it is something the market is lacking, and something I would love to provide to them.


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