Today I am drinking a beer and celebrating with you guys just like I promised? Long time listeners will remember this promise and why I am drinking this beer.
Hey guys, Ryan here from Instructions Not Included. I am drinking a beer and celebrating because I made a promise to you guys that when I got my first sale of something. Now, can you remember? I will go ahead and drink a beer and celebrate with you guys when that actually happens. So, here we go. I’m going to drink my beer. It’s good stuff.
The reason we are celebrating is that I made my first sale for outspoken.co, which is my public speaking site. I made my first sale on the product for this site, which is the $30 US sale. So, $30 – definitely not life-changing by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m super stoked to have taken this step and sold my first product and proven that at least someone wants to buy this product.Maybe this person is the only person in the world that wants to buy it, but at least someone did.
Yesterday, I got the notification from Snappy Checkout that someone has purchased my course. Snappy Checkout, as you guys know, I’m affiliate for them now. So, best way to collect payments, absolutely. Go to pelt.co P-E-L-T dot C-O /checkout to check out Snappy Checkout.
I definitely recommend them. The guy, Mike, who created it, is a stellar guy. Awesome customer service. But yes, I got the notification from Snappy Checkout through my email that I got a new product. I didn’t really think anything of it, because I get those notifications all the time through On Property.
You know, new subscription to Property Tools, new product sale, new course sale. And I have been marketing my course on suburb research, so I thought, oh, you know, maybe it’s something like that, just kind of left it. And then, I went through my emails to take action on these items and follow them and stuff like that and saw that it was actually for outspoken.co. This was actually a public speaking sale. I was like, Yes! Yes! This is absolutely awesome!
The marketing that I did for it was pretty pathetic, really. I’ve got a products page on the website where I’ve got a little spiel about the product with the Buy Now button, which takes you through to Snappy Checkout, but no good sales page or anything that. And then, I’ve also got an email that goes out about it.
So, nothing super serious that is going on there. But I made a sale. And so, I’m very happy with this, which means I’m making some money through outspoken.co, which means that maybe, just maybe, it’s time to re-invest in outspoken.co. Begin creating some videos for that where I can teach people about public speaking. And now that I’ve got a course and I can send them to the right website because all of my episodes talk about publicspeakingpower.com.
I can talk about the product as well and mention that and try and get people to buy it.
I haven’t actually decided that, yes, I’m going to go ahead and market this product more. But at least, one person bought it and so the day’s work that I did to create this course wasn’t for absolutely nothing. So far, it’s been for $30 and really, we wanted to create this to see whether we could sell it. And also, so we could improve on the product over time. Because, obviously, the more customers you get, the more feedback you get, the better insights you get about what products to create.
So, I’m super excited about that. Super excited to be celebrating with your guys, drinking my beer. Very good. It’s Friday afternoon. In terms of the suburb research course, the sales haven’t gone too stellar. I think I’ve had 2 sales. Definitely considering changing the cost of the product to $99 rather than $100 just to see if that makes any difference. My mate, Ben, said when they tested it, if a number ended in a 9, people were 16% more likely to buy it. So, experimenting with $99 versus $100 could be something to do.
I really just did $100 for transparency purposes and because I had done it on Property Tools, I had made it $5, but that was because Property Tools is so cheap. I wanted people to be able to say, yeah, there’s this tool, it’s just $5 a month. Go ahead and check it out. But I’m thinking maybe I should make it $99. And maybe I should make On Property Listings $49 instead of $50. I’m not 100% sure, but thinking about that.
Also, I’ve created 7 videos for that, so that’ll go out in November. I’ll send out some emails next week. I didn’t get around to sending another email this week, but I’ll send some more emails next week about suburb research because I’ll have content to send out about it as well. And so, hopefully, we can drive some more sales next week for that product as well.
Also, I’ve been working on Instructions Not Included today to get more episodes out to you guys. I had a break in recording, which means there was only one episode that I had missed the publish date for. So, that will go up today. So, that’s good. So, people didn’t miss out on much because I was too lazy to get the episodes edited. And also, for Instructions Not Included, I did a cool interview with the guy from Lully, which is a company that sells this vibrating disc, I guess you would call it, that helps children who have night terrors and I’ve got a child who has a night terror.
It really helps with them. So, I had a cool interview with him today, which I’m actually going to schedule earlier just so we can get it out sooner rather than later. I think that’s episode 44. So, ryanmclean.net/44. You can check out that interview. It’s called a [inaudible 5:51] story and how they came up with the idea and the research they went through in order to get it and to create a product that they could market and create a company around, which have now raised funds for and they’re doing really well.
It’s a great product. They’re meeting a real need. That was a great interview. So, that’s where I’m at. Nothing too serious, but definitely, I want to create more and more episodes for On Property and for the suburb research sort of stuff. But then, also, I was thinking after doing the interview with the guy from Lully, they actually sell that on Amazon. And so, I was thinking that could be a cool affiliate site for me.
A site about night terrors because I’m a parent, I have a child who experiences night terrors. I could definitely take that angle on it. Market the product through Amazon and then just have it as an Amazon affiliate site. I’ve been talking to them, shared some ideas about how to market stuff for their product. I really like the product, I would feel very comfortable marketing it and it’s just something very interesting. Obviously, the big risk with that is if they product off Amazon, decide to sell it directly, well, then I just kind of lose my entire revenue stream from that. So, I don’t know.
It’s something that I’m going to mull over and consider this weekend. Should I create an affiliate website on night terrors to market this product? Because I have that experience, I can do some research and some knowledge into it. The product sells for $150 or something. So, a 5% commission is $7. I have to sell a lot to make any decent amount of money, but definitely something worth exploring. So I’ll mull over that and see how I go.
Well, that’s my musings for today, guys. I’ve been working hard. I’m keen to grow my business even more. I talked to Ben. No payments coming through for the end of this month, which is disappointing. But I have had some product sales, $50, $100 here and there. So, I do have enough money. I don’t think I’m going to run out of money. And I do have a lot of personal savings as well, which I’m okay to spend if I need to. But I spoke to Ben, I got 2 extra sales, which is like another $2,500 coming from him eventually.
So, it’s not coming at the end of the month, so cash flow is going to be tight, but I will make it and I am doing enough in product sales to get me through this storm. Even if I’m not, then, I do have some savings that I can work upon as well.
That’s it for me today, guys. Wish me the best of luck in musing about this new website and also dealing with my cash flow issues. I hope everything is going well for you. And until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.
Sometimes you just get lucky first go…and sometimes you don’t. This is an example of me not getting lucky.
Sometimes you just get lucky first go, and other times, you don’t. I remember, it would have been 3 or 4 years ago, I was still working as a pharmaceutical rep and I had a property blog and I had a little over 1,000 email subscribers, over 100 articles, less than 120.
Were getting a decent amount of traffic and I thought, you know, I need to make some money from this – I want to make some money from this. And so, I decided to create and launch a membership site where I would teach people how to find positive cash flow properties. So, what I did was I created a single page.
Literally, a single webpage that was password-protected. That was it. It’s a functionality within every single WordPress page or WordPress post – you can set a password on it.
So, I created that and I put a video on it or a couple of videos or something like that. It wasn’t even complete, the product. I sent out an email to my list saying, “Launching this product.
Here’s a 50% discount.” or something like that and I sold it for $50 and I had $2,000 in sales in the space of 1-2 days. Before then, the most I’d ever seen in terms of a month was maybe $300-$500 in AdSense revenue. So, for me, this membership site was a big kicker for me.
This membership site, eventually, over the course of a couple of years evolved into OnProperty Plus, which is now OnProperty Listings, which makes me a good 4-figures per month and means that I can work from home and I don’t need to have a job.
That was striking it lucky. I was very lucky to launch that and to get so much success off the bat with that. Just really struck a cord with the market and what they wanted. One that’s not so lucky is my public speaking course. Yup, no sales. We are not drinking beer today. We are not celebrating and getting drunk together because there are no sales for my public speaking course.
I sent out an email to my list of about 700-800 email subscribers talking about the course. Had a bit of traffic to the page, but absolutely zero sales, nada.
I was thinking that maybe today I create some free videos for outspoken.co, but at this point, I just don’t see the point because I’m not making any money from the site. I haven’t “nailed the coffin” so to speak. I haven’t given up on outspoken.co or given up on this product.
I will still give it probably a month to see do people go to it? Are people interested in it? Do I get any sales? All I need is one sale to really encourage me to push this site forward. But I know this is my first product that I’ve ever created and it may not be aligned with the market, it may not be what they want. It has a good learning experience for me, but I definitely did not strike it lucky with this course.
It’s not something that I just launched and I sold a whole bunch of copies to this course. So, I don’t know if that means it’s a dud course, I don’t know if that means that public speaking is a harder niche to monetise. I’m not 100% sure what it means, but definitely didn’t strike it lucky. So, I’ll wait a little bit longer and see what happens and then, maybe go again and create another course or try and market it in some other way.
So, yeah, I was hoping to strike it lucky. Hoping to get a little bit of traction with this course so I could then justify working more on oustpoken.co, but unfortunately, that’s not the case. So, I’m back to just focusing on OnProperty, focusing on creating more marketing materials for that. So, more free content and driving people to my products.
I am thinking about the long term and longevity of OnProperty and me and this business and what it’s going to look like moving forward. And something that I’m doing is at the end of each of my videos, I’m doing a call to action to one of my products. So, rather than just trying to get more and more email subscribers now – which I actually think is becoming less and less relevant, less and less valuable over time. But the content is going to hold it’s value and so I really have this sense that the value is in the content. The value is not in the email list, as people say.
Obviously, collecting people’s emails are very important. But when you’ve got people who are so segmented online now, so many people surfing the web through apps. So many people go into a lot of different websites using Facebook and stuff like that. But you still develop a relationship with the person.
So, whether you’re watching someone on Youtube or you’re watching their video on Facebook or you’re interacting with them on their website or they send you an email, it’s all the same person. And I think that as I grow this brand, as I build up this brand, I think email will become less and less important over time.
I can’t remember the last time I actually bought something from an email that was sent to me; which is really interesting. But I do know that I follow people like Gary Veynerchuk, I love all the stuff that he does. I follow his podcast or his Youtube channel. And he’s the same person there. He’s the same person on iTunes as he is on Youtube and when he has a book out or a call to action, I find it through the videos he does and I then go ahead and take action.
So, I’m thinking that emails aren’t as important as they used to be. Still important, but they’re not the be all and end all. And so, what I’m doing, because I believe the content will hold value for longer into the future than collecting email subscribers, I’m actually marketing my products at the end or within each of my videos. So, I’ll do a subject like I just did one about the biggest mistakes that people make when doing suburb research, when investing in property.
So, at the end of that and throughout that video, I was talking about I’m launching a course on suburb, which you can get at onproperty.com.au/suburb. So, I’m integrating it into the videos. I did other videos and marketed other products, like my course on how to find positive cash flow properties or my membership site, OnProperty Listings.I’ve been doing more of this free content with a call to action.
So, we’ll just see how that goes and see whether that’s going to work. But I think in terms of long term strategy, I think that’s going to be the most successful way to do it, is to just have in-content discussions about my own products. I think that’s going to be pretty cool.
I am considering moving back to daily videos. I did this back in 2014, so last year. What I did was I release a new video, podcast, article every single day. So, the video gets transcribed into a blog post. It also gets converted into an MP3, into a podcast. And I saw huge growth over my site in that period of time and I’m still seeing upwards of 1,500 people visit my site every single day from the content that I produced partially during that period. Some of the content was before that.
I have noticed that as I release articles talking about the courses that I’m creating, like I’ve released some of my videos are sales videos, I’ve noticed that I’ve had sales that I feel are related to that – not to the emails that I sent out. And I know this because some of the people who purchased my product weren’t even email subscribers of mine. So the only way they could have found out about it was through the actual episodes themselves or through the menu tab on my website.
I think that it’s powerful. I think that getting people in the routine of listening to me, I think the idea of getting more and more content out there and just smashing my competitors in terms of how much content I have, how much I can be found in Google and have people find me is going to be super valuable. And I think the long term strategy of absolutely owning this space in terms of the market and getting people to come to me really allows me to have a more positive impact on people’s lives than if I was to do affiliate deals to try and sell my products and stuff like that.
I want to be like Apple and basically be fully integrated. Everything from my marketing to my products. I don’t want to make money selling other people’s products. I don’t want other people acting as affiliates for me. I want to do everything myself, which is, I guess, less like Apple, more like James Shramko and what he does over at SuperFast Business where he doesn’t have any affiliates marketing his stuff, but he just does it all himself. And I think that’s going to be the best long term strategy for me and for my business. And if I’m creating all these free content now and I’ve got the backend, like my virtual assistant Dipti, she’s absolutely awesome.
She can get all this stuff up. So I can create 3 videos in the space of a couple of hours. I then upload them, let her know about it and then, bam! She’s away, gets everything scheduled, gets everything ready and published on time. So I don’t have to worry about all that backend stuff anymore. It’s not sucking my time. So, I think it’s more achievable for me to do daily videos now than it used to be.
So I’m excited about that. That’s going to be good. I think we’ll move towards that I was doing 2 videos a day for a while and I’ve just started moving to 3 videos a day. I’m going to get my way up to 5 videos, so Monday to Friday there’s going to be a video every single day. And then, as soon as I have enough content and I feel like I can keep it up, then I’ll go ahead and I’ll do fully a video every single day.
I think that’s going to be exciting because then once I’ve created this course on suburb research and then I’ve created the course on how to evaluate an individual property, then I can just focus on marketing those courses.
The free videos could be all I do. That could just be the only stuff that I have to do on my business. It’s just, I do free videos and I do customer service, like emails and stuff like that. And then I could definitely work 5 hours per day. Working 5 hours a day has been pretty rough.
It’s been getting difficult to get into the habit. But I think now that I’m starting to do it, starting to get used to it. I think there’s massive value in it for me, for my family, for my wife – to help her out. But then, also for me, in terms of socially, I will then have more time. My wife will be less stressed, so she’s okay if I go for a surf or if I go to someone’s house and play Smash Brothers or something like that. I think it’s going to be good, I think it’s going to be long term.
I think I can definitely make enough money – if not more money doing just 5 hours a day than doing 8 or 9 hours a day. So, it’s definitely something that I’m going to be working towards and it’ll probably happen faster than I expected.
Anyway, I have rambled on enough. I’m excited to get on with the day to go ahead and make some videos. I’ve got 4 hours until I finish work. So, let’s see how many videos I can get done. If I get 3 done, I’d be happy. But why not push for 4 and then I’ve done 7 this week, hey? Well, we’ll see how we’d go. Hope you guys are having an awesome day. I hope that you are working on your business. I hope that sometimes you get lucky and you get a quick win like I did when I first launched my membership site for OnProperty.
Sometimes you just don’t get lucky and you need to re-evaluate and think, “What did I do wrong? What can I do better?” And also, I want to encourage you, it’s not about doing the grind and working 12-16 hour days. It’s about achieving what you want to achieve, having the biggest influence that you can – positive influence on people’s lives. And then living the life that you want. Living the life that you want is super hard to work out. So hard to work out what kind of life do I actually want. What I want to do for work? What I want to do with the rest of my time when I’m not working? But it’s totally worth it if you can work it out.
I’ll keep you guys up to date on that. Until next time, if you want instructions, go and buy some furniture.
I recently started a brand new niche site. I am making videos, podcasts and blog posts for this site to get traffic.
The biggest thing I did was I took a high traffic page from a website that was generating no money and moved it to this brand new niche site. Overnight my traffic for this site was high and I started earning some Adsense revenue.
But that isn’t what’s crazy.
Last night (about 11pm) I set up a sales page for a membership site on this niche site. I didn’t think anyone would go there so I set the “Add to Cart” button to just redirect to my home page.
A WISE DECISION
However, I put a tracker on this link so I could see if anyone was clicking it.
My thoughts were “If people start clicking I will go to the effort of setting up an actual PayPal sales option”.
Just 12 hours later (on a site with 0 community and 0 email subscribers) I have already had 2 people click through.
Tonight I will set up an actual shopping cart and see if I can launch a membership site from scratch.
Undoubtably the best circus experience ever Cirque Du Soleil displays the absolute best performers in the world.
I envy the people who have devoted their life to their craft. I envy their discipline, their focus and their passion.
I also envy the creator, the master artist who does the greatest performance of all. He brings together the talent from all over the world and turns it into something of value, something people talk about.
Each individual performer is great, but it is only when you bring them together that the true masterpiece is created. That is why I envy and respect the director most of all.
One Thing
These performers spend all their waking hours perfecting and honing their craft. They have a clear cut plan of practice, and by practicing they get better. It is almost like if they stick to the path and work hard enough they can’t fail.
My life doesn’t feel that clear cut. There doesn’t seem to be a path laid out in front of me and it is hard to predict the practice I need to do to end up where I want to end up.
My one thing: communicating
I love communicating to people. I love inspiring people, building them up and getting them to live better lives as a result.
I have no greater joy when I am with someone and something snaps… The Aha moment where they all of a sudden see life in a way they never have before and they burst through into new possibilities and better results.
Better Ways To Practice
I practice in my job every single day. I intentionally try different ways to convey the message I want to get across. I read people’s feedback and then adjust based on the responses I get.
I do subconscious role plays in my mind. “What if I said it this way” is a constant thought in my mind.
However, watching the performers in Cirque Du Soleil makes me think I need to find even better ways to home my craft. Better ways to practice, ways I can put in more time and effort to get better faster.
There are some simple things, and some not so simple things.
Read Books – Read sales books, books about public speaking, books about communication, books about great achievers.
Blog Daily – Writing is a form of communication and requires you to think about the words you are going to say. My writing is no Shakespeare but it is leagues ahead of the days when I wrote for my blog SmarterWealth.net (5 years ago).
Practice Public Speaking/Preaching – I don’t need to get up in front of a church to practice. I can write sermons or speeches just as a way of practicing, and I can perform them in front of a mirror (or my wife).
Watch The Best Sales People In Action – And takes notes…not on their content but on their delivery
Give More – Give more of myself to my sales calls. More planning, more energy, more passion, more charisma, more professionalism and more me. By giving more I will be unable to stop improving. The more you give the more you get back.
Almost every Sunday morning I go to my church at 9:30am. Church finishes about 11:00am and by 11:01am I have forgotten almost everything that was said.
A large part of that is my fault. I often fail to take notes and then reflect on those notes.
But I look around the room and maybe 1 in 20 people actually take notes.
Today the preacher had 7 points…think hard I can remember point #1 and #7.
Repetition helps people remember. So why not create a sermon focusing on one idea instead of 7. Tell stories, give examples and do everything to enforce the one point.
Then maybe instead of 300 people walking out of church (or your staff training) remembering almost nothing, have them walk out unable to forget that one point.
Because if they only remember the story you told, the joke you gave or the point you delivered it will all reinforce the one idea.
Maybe, just maybe, we should live our lives dedicated to sharing one idea?