Ryan McLean : Slightly Unconventional

#15 A Detailed Breakdown Of How I Make Money

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In this episode of Instructions Not Included, I am going to settle once and for all exactly how I make money online and kind of give you guys a framework so if you ever want to do something sort of similar to what I do, you are actually going to understand the overarching framework of exactly what I do.

If you want to try and replicate that, you can go ahead and do that.
As you may know, if you listened to other episodes or if you do not, I make my money online through my websites.

What I do is I create content for those websites and then I sell information products. I sell things like eBooks. I sell access to a membership site.

I sell what is called affiliate products which are other people’s products which I sell and then get a commission for. So I am going to go into detail on exactly how I go about doing that.
Now, my main money site is called onproperty.com.au. It is a property website and I teach people general information about property. If you want to sell something online, the first thing that you need to do is get someone’s attention because you cannot sell something without someone’s attention.

So if you are an average Joe – like I am and you want to get someone’s attention, let us say, we are in the property space which is exactly where I am, no one knows who I am. Who is Ryan Mclean? I do not own any properties. How am I going to get someone’s attention to say, Look, I can help you, you need to buy my products. How am I going to get their attention?
The way that I get their attention is I create videos, I create podcasts and I write blog posts. And what I do in these blog posts – this is my specific strategy, is that I answer people’s questions. I am just going to go through some of the titles of my blog posts so you guys can see what I do. I am creating these blog posts on a very regular basis. I have hundreds and hundreds on my website. And this is how people find me.

So looking at December of 2014 and some of the things that I have done: Should I Self-Manage My Investment Property? is one title; Why Don’t People Invest in Positive Cash Flow Property? is another one; Does Depreciation Affect Capital Gains Tax?, Do You Pay Tax on Negatively Geared Properties?, Do You Pay Tax on Positive Cash Flow Properties?, How Do You Know If an Area Will Be a Good Investment?, Do Positive Cash Flow Properties Exist in Australia?.

As you can see these are all questions. These are all titles of a blog post. What I did is I post a question and I then go ahead and answer the question. I have another one Can You Get Positive Cash Flow and Capital Gains? which is something that I know people are asking. So let us just type that into Google, “Can you get positive cash flow and capital gains,” I have typed that in and for me the 2nd result is actually my website.

If someone was typing can you get positive cash flow and capital gains into Google then they are going to find my website. Or maybe they might type positive cash flow and capital gains, let us see if I come up there. Look, I come up for a different one that I wrote which is Positive Cash Flow Versus Capital Gains Shaped Down. So if they type positive cash flow and capital gains, I come up 2nd result again. If they type positive cash versus capital gains, we can see that my website comes up in the 3rd result. My YouTube video comes up as the 4th result.
 
So this is how I get people’s attention. I create blog posts, I create videos, I create podcasts answering people’s questions. And the reason that I rank so well, the reason I get so much traffic to my website is that I am willing to put in time to answer questions that big websites probably are not going to answer.

One of the questions that I recently did is Why Are Mortgage Brokers Free? Most magazines, most websites are not going to go to the bother and go to the effort to answer that question and to answer questions like 10 Smart Things To Do If You Can’t Save A House Deposit or How Much Of A Deposit Is Required For An Investment Property? When you type stuff into Google, you are asking Google a question and you are expecting an answer but someone has to create that answer, right? And so that is exactly what I do to get people’s attention. I create answers to questions so when they ask questions on Google, they find my website and they come to my website.
 
Next thing is once you capture someone’s attention you need to get them down the path towards understanding what products you have to offer and understanding how you can help them and how your products can help them.

You can make money online through advertising if they click on ads or that sort of stuff and I do make money when people click on ads on other sites but my main website On Property, I do not have any advertising on it, it is all my own stuff that is sell. And so in order to get people aware of my products, you can do that on your website, I do have a resources page which talks about my products and I do have Buy A House eBook that I link up to that from my pages so people can find that. But my biggest thing is what I do is I give things away for free in exchange for someone’s email address. So the moment I have 10 positive cash flow properties – the locations revealed and I have a button that says click here to reveal.
 
Let me just explain why this is valuable. When people are investing in property in Australia, there is a thing called positive cash flow property and this is property that generates a greater income than you paying expenses so it generates passive income for people over time.

So basically people want to invest in these certain properties but they do not know how to find it and that is what my membership site is and we will get into that in more detail in a minute. But what I am doing with this freebie is I am saying Look, I know you want to find positive cash flow properties because a lot of people do. If you want to see the locations of 10 real positive cash flow properties, just click here. And when they click there, there is a little box that pops up that says just enter your email and then you can click to reveal the properties. And so once someone enters their email then they go on my list.
 
And now we are going to go into how I direct people to my product. I do have links to my products as I said in the resources page and stuff like that. But what happens for most people is that they get on my email list and what that means is that I then have their email, I then have the permission to email them and let them know about my products, let them know about whatever I want, obviously related to property because that is what they signed up for. So they sign up for this freebie, I get their email address and then what I do is I send them emails with free video content.

So I have a mini-series where I teach them some techniques for finding positive cash flow properties and techniques for researching an area, some tools that they can use, some mistakes that they should avoid and basically I had all these value through these free videos.

Then after three free videos then I release a fourth video to them and that is my sales pitch and that is where I talk about my membership site which is On Property Plus and I let them know that here is what you get inside, you get in depth training tutorials on how to find positive cash flow properties and how to research an area. You get property listings so I go out and I find properties with a high rental yield, a good chance of being positive cash flow and you get access to all that so you can see hundreds of real positive cash flow properties. And I also have some tools in there as well that help them to analyze properties and to invest.

So I give my sales pitch and I say, Look, if you want to sign up, it is $49.95 per month or it is $297 per year. And as you can guess, most people go for the yearly one because it is over 50% off, that is about $300 per year.
So what I do is I create this content to get people’s attention. Once I get their attention I try and get their email address by giving them free stuff and then through the email address I market my products and I say, here are the products, would you like to buy them? Here is your opportunity to buy it, it is $300 per year or $50 per month. And a percentage of people will sign up for that and a large percentage of people will not sign up for that. But a large enough percentage of people will sign up for it that I can make a decent living online.
 
In the last 2 weeks as you may have heard – if you listened to the last episode, I actually have been back and forth to the hospital. I recently had a son. He had to stay in the hospital to get a feeding tube. He was a bit premature, a bit early so I have not been able to work much in the last 2 weeks but I have continued to generate a great income in the last 2 weeks. $1,500 in the first week and I think $1,800 this week and I have not been doing a lot of work.

And so this is one of the benefits of what I do with my online business. Yes, I work hard. I do 40-hour weeks. I do 50-hour weeks.

I work pretty hard on my business but what happens is everything that I do builds up because like we talked about, this positive cash flow versus capital gains article that I wrote, Positive Cash Flow Versus Capital Gains Shape Down. I wrote that in the 5th of June 2014. That is about 9 months ago. But that is still getting traffic because people are searching positive cash flow versus capital gains. They are seeing my article and for 9 months that has been generating traffic and for the next 9 months that will still generate traffic and attention and a percentage of those people will eventually convert into my products.
 
So that is in essence how I make money. I grab people’s attention by answering their questions as helpful as possible. Once I grab their attention I try and convert them into a freebie offer so I can get their email address and permission to follow up with them. I then send them more valuable content and I then present my offers and there they decide to sign up or not. That is how I make money online. If you want to do something similar, I am going to talk about that now.
 
So how do I do it? What is my exact set-up?
In order to do this, what you need first is a domain name. This is my www.onproperty.com.au. This costs about $10 per year to buy. You can buy it by going to ryanmclean.net/godaddy, which is my affiliate link or you can go to godaddy.com and you can buy domain from there.
 
The next thing you need is something called hosting. When you visit a website, what you are actually doing is downloading that website onto your computer from another computer or from a server. So hosting is where you put your website so people all over the world can download it because it does not just sit in the ether, out there in magic land, it actually sits in a computer or a server somewhere or in multiple servers all over the world.

So you need a server to have it on. So you need hosting and I recommend a hosting company called Arvixe. You can go to ryanmclean.net/arvixe, a-r-v-i-x-e if you want to use them and I signed up for 2 years and it was $4 a month otherwise it is $7 per month. You are paying $10 for the domain. You are paying $7 a month or $4 a month for hosting. And that is going to get you started.
 
What you then do – you can Google or you can YouTube all these stuff for their granular details, but what I then do is put what is called a WordPress blog on that site. WordPress is like this backend platform that allows you to create a website, create an awesome-looking website, put up blogposts, put up podcasts, put up videos, all of these sort of stuff and it is just simple on the backend. So I put WordPress on there and that is my website.
 
That is how I create my website. And you can then go from there and you can create blogs. And you can move on with that. If you want to create videos, I create videos. I simply upload them to YouTube. YouTube is actually the number 2 search engine – we would be talking about typing things into Google, people are going to do that. But people also type stuff into YouTube.

So if I go to youtube.com and I am going to search the same thing, positive cash flow versus capital gains, and let us see what comes up, mine is the 1st video. Mine is the 3rd video. Mine is the 4th video. I also have the 6th video. I have the 7th video. I have the 9th video and something like the 13th video or something like that. In the first page of 20 results, I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. 7 videos out of 1, 2, 3, 4,… 7 out of 20 of those listings on the 1st page if you were to type that into YouTube are mine.

As you can see people search through YouTube and I can get traffic through YouTube as well. That is pretty exciting so I upload my videos to there. You guys can work out how to do that. Just go to YouTube and search How do I upload a video to YouTube?
 
And then for podcasting, that is a bit more complicated. But basically, you need to pay for someone to host your audio files and you then publish your audio files to your website. And look, this is getting complicated. It will cost you $15 per month if you use SoundCloud, which is who I recommend.

So this is an extra cost that you are going to have to incur if you want to do podcasts as well. If you want instructions on how to do this, just go to podcastfast.com and I have a 4 mini-series – that is 8 episodes on exactly how you can set up a podcast on your website.
 
I will show you from start to finish how to set up a SoundCloud account, how to set up a website, how to buy a domain, everything, all the granular details, all the tutorials. Actually you do not need to Google or YouTube, you can just go to podcastfast.com and I will show you how to set up all that sort of stuff over there.
 
So that is how I do it. I have a website that I run on WordPress. I host my audio files on SoundCloud then publish them to my WordPress blog which then goes out to iTunes. I also put my videos on YouTube and I then get a share link which is like an embed link from YouTube which I put on my website as well. That is how I gather all of my attention.
 
And then for selling my products, I actually use a product called Snappy Checkout. There are a lot out there. There is one called gumroad.com which is good. There is one called selzed.com, s-e-l-zed which I highly recommend. Snappy Checkout just ended up being the best for me, for recurring products and how exactly what I needed.

So you can check them out, snappycheckout.com as well. But that is how I accept money online and so I do not need to have anything fancy on my website. What happens is is when someone clicks on the checkout button or buy now button, they go over to Snappy Checkout secure server so all credit card information are secured by them. They pay then Snappy Checkout take a commission out of that just like a credit card processing fee out of that. So I do not have to worry about managing credit cards and stuff like that, it is all done by Snappy Checkout for me. That is how I sell my products.
 
And then, how do I deliver my products? Selzed.com delivers my eBook for me. I do not have to do that at all. But I also have a membership site so I have been talking about On Property Plus, so I have been talking about this membership site that I offer to people. I actually host that on a separate WordPress blog at plus.onproperty.com.au. I host that over there. So I use WordPress for that, just like what I do for my website.
 
I use something called Wish List Member to actually protect that content so only members can get access to that.
In essence, that is what I do. That is how I make money. That is my entire business model. And look in the last episode I was talking about giving away education for free, which is what I am talking about getting attention and then selling tools and then selling premium content is what I do and how I make money. I love it. I am passionate about it.

One of the things that I love is that I am getting thousands of visitors per day to my websites. And as I have said in the last 2 weeks I have done probably a few hours work at a maximum and I am still getting thousands of visitors a day. So getting people to sign up for my email list, I am still getting members to sign up for my membership site. And what happens is once they go through Snappy Checkout, they then hit the final registration page and they register and they get instant access.

So I do not actually have to do anything in order to get that money and set up their accounts. Obviously I have to keep that membership site updated, I have to keep finding those property listings. But I have a virtual assistant who helps me with that so it is not a massive task for me to do.
So it is possible to make money online. It is possible to make good money online. I have been doing this for 7 or 8 years and so it does take some time. Some people do it faster but for me, the way I always thought about it, was if this takes me 20 years – let us say like I started when I was 18, so this takes me 20 years.

I hear people succeeding in 12 months. But if this takes me 20 years, I am only going to be 38. And imagine if I can be running my own business and generating passive income and I am 38. Most people retire until 65 and have the lifestyle that they want. And I can get way ahead. 20 years, what will it be, almost 30 years ahead of the game. So even if it will be 20 years to work all these stuff out.

I have to work my ass off for 20 years, for me that will still be worth it. So for me, it took a lot longer than it did for the people out there who are talking about making money online. For me, I started in 2006 so I am really only starting to make good money online this year like money to fully support my family and it is 2015, it has been 9 years, 9 years guys. I have said if it takes me 20 years, it took me 9 years to work all these stuff out and I am 27.

I have worked 9 years doing this but I am only 27. So there are possibilities out there for you to generate the lifestyle that you want, to generate income online. I am not saying it is going to be easy because it is definitely not. It is a lot of hard work. And I have put money into it. I have put a lot of time into it, a lot of investment into it. But guys, I am 27. I have been working on this for 9 years, doing it part-time most of the time.

Probably about 2 or 3 years of that is full time. But I am 27 and I have my whole life ahead of me and I now have the freedom and flexibility to build awesome businesses, to help people, to impact people’s lives and to do the best that I can without needing to worry about paycheck or losing my job or working for someone else. I get to work for myself. I get to work for my customers. I get to work to help educate the world and that is something I am really passionate about.
 
And so I hope that me sharing with you granular details on exactly how I make money has really explained to you how I make money. If you want to check out the full transcription of this episode or if you want to see the links to download, I will put in the links to hosting and all to podcastfast and all that sort of stuff, just go to ryanmclean.net/15, 1-5.

I am also going to put this at ryanmclean.net/how, h-o-w. So if someone says to me how do you make money, I can go, dude, just go to ryanmclean.net/how, listen to the podcast and I will share with you on there exactly how I make money if you are interested. And I really hope that this inspires a few people, gets you pumped up about online marketing and the potential to change your life, to add value to other people’s lives and the fact that even if it takes you 9 years, it is still probably going to be worth it.
 
So thanks so much for listening to this episode of Instructions Not Included. And remember, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.



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