How to Build Your Blog Sales Funnel – with Yaro Starak

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How to Build Your Blog Sales Funnel – with Yaro Starak

Episode: 275
Who: Yaro Starak
Blog / Website: Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

Want to turn your audience from casual readers into loyal customers?

Ready to start consistently selling your own stuff instead of relying on ads?

This week, I’m on the line with none other than Yaro Starak, author of the Blog Profits Blueprint and founder of Entrepreneur’s Journey, a blog dedicated to helping entrepreneurs start a blog, grow an email newsletter, and make money selling digital products.

Yaro has been blogging for over ten years and is actually the person that taught me how to blog. He’s one of the two guys that started Become a Blogger and is an expert at building blog sales funnels combining the power of email marketing and digital products in a way that makes money over and over and over.

Yaro’s Story

Way back in 1998, Yaro got a dial-up connection for his university studies, and he fell in love with the internet. At the time, he was really into a card game called Magic: The Gathering, and built a basic GeoCities site based around the game.

That site turned into his first online business.

Yaro says that he was aware of the potential to build a business online, and he never wanted “full-time employment” anyway. He says that he was sort of in the right place at the right time: he and the internet reached their “teenage years” together. At the time, there were no video tutorials, no WordPress, no social media. Nobody was really buying ads yet. He constructed the whole site in flat html.

This site earned $500 to $1,000 per month at its peak. That income came from banner ads, newsletter ads, and buying and selling cards for the game. The site also gave Yaro his first experience of credit card fraud!

Yaro reporting on a match at Magic. IMAGE SOURCE: www.entrepreneurs-journey.com

Around the time that he graduated from university, Yaro had lost interest in playing Magic: The Gathering, and he was feeling like he wanted to do something else. He sold that site for $13,500.

At the time, he also had another online business called BetterEdit.com, which was like “the eBay of editing.” The site connected students who didn’t have English as their first language with professors and graduate students who could help them edit their papers. Yaro sold this site in 2007, but it was because of this business that he started blogging.

Around 2004, Yaro started seeing that blogging was a great way to get free traffic from Google. So he attempted to blog about essay editing for BetterEdit.com. He didn’t know much about editing, and so he found himself writing more and more about the entrepreneurial side of things.

Yaro really enjoyed this kind of writing, so he registered entrepreneurs-journey.com in 2005. He didn’t think that this site would become his livelihood at the time. He felt that he was just telling stories about his journey as an entrepreneur.

2005 was the dawn of social media, so Entrepreneurs Journey didn’t have an email list at first. It was all about RSS feeds at the time. But Yaro also felt that he had to understand what the email list was for before he could start one. What content goes where?

Finally, he realized that the email list is more “laser-targeted, sequential content with a core outcome,” whereas with a blog you can “bounce around a bit more with your ideas and subject matter.” Once he added the opt-in on the blog, he was getting 5 to 10 subscribers per day.

The Slide Deck

Selling Your Own Stuff

Selling your own stuff is better because of the strong relationship people have with you.

At first, Yaro was making most of his income through ads and affiliate sales. But you need a product of your own to really make money. Yaro had seen friends do product launches, and doing a launch seemed to really make a big difference to the growth of their businesses. It felt like a “low-hanging fruit” opportunity. He had about 3,000 email subscribers, and as many people subscribing to the blog at the time, so there was a ready-made audience to launch to.

After launching a monthly subscription service, Yaro eventually transitioned to a 6-month program, which is the first product that I bought from him!

He says that selling your own stuff is so much better than relying on ads and affiliate sales because of the strong relationship people have with you. They’re much more likely to buy your stuff than an affiliate recommendation. Plus, $47 per month from even 100 people is much better than $100 per month from 4 or 5 ads.

Yaro had already created two flagship courses by the time he met Gideon Shalwick. We covered the story of how becomeablogger.com came to be in episode 273, so go to becomeablogger.com/273 to hear all about it.

Why Build a Sales Funnel?

Why Build a Sales Funnel?

Yaro was making a ton of money just launching and re-launching his flagship courses. Around 2012, however, he needed to close down some of those courses because they were dated. He had a chance to rebuild his business and create some new products. A sales funnel was his next step.

The core idea of a sales funnel is that it’s easier to sell your highest-priced products to people who are already your customers. So you build in lower-priced products and upsells along with email sequences in order to entice people to buy.

So why do a sales funnel, especially if you’re already making money?

Launches are a lot of work. Yaro didn’t want his long-term business plan to rely on always needing to come up with a new and creative way to launch his products. Launches also rely on asking friends for promotions, and returning the favor when they launch their products. Yaro wanted a steadier income that wasn’t based on advertising and affiliate sales. With launches, you make a bunch of money all at once, but you don’t have the same kind of income month-to-month. And if a launch fails, you could be in real trouble.

Yaro has built his sales funnel over the past few years. Once he had taken down his older courses, he was down to $1,000 to $2,000 per month in income. Now, he’s earning $20,000 to $30,000 per month just through his sales funnel.

How to Build a Sales Funnel

Yaro recommends starting by mapping it out. Ask yourself:

• What does my audience want?
• What can I potentially give them?
• How do I take those needs and turn them into a product funnel?

Keep in mind that you can re-purpose existing content in creating your products. For example, your ebook might be made up of existing blog posts that you’ve put together. You can also sell audio content if you have a popular podcast. Yaro had paid podcast interviews club that he used to sell.

For your sales funnel, lay out a sequence of information that can run on autopilot.

You want to map out the products you want to sell and how you want to sell them. The implementation will take time and hard work. Yaro’s plan took about 3 years to actually be completed. Take it one step at a time.

You can set up a sales funnel for anything you’re selling. The key is to lay out a sequence of information that can run on autopilot. Autoresponders make this possible.

Once you have a plan mapped out, the next step is to stop using broadcast messages or one-off newsletters and switch to at least a two-week sequence of emails that are strategically designed to sell your products.

All of the normal rules of sales apply. So you need to have case studies, or stories of your product working for people, lined up. You need to know the problem well enough that you can really speak to people’s needs. And you need to present people with a clear solution to the problem.

Here are some of the sales tactics that Yaro uses on a regular basis:

Scarcity

This tells people that the thing you’re offering will go away if they don’t buy it right now. You can use this with prices, actual products, or bonus offers. Yaro likes to use this on his lower-priced products. For example, he offers his $49 ebook for $29 as part of a free email course.

Social Proof

With this one, you’re demonstrating that your product works because other people are seeing results. This is where your case studies and testimonials come in.

Authority

This shows potential customers that you know something about the problem. Sometimes, this can be because you’ve spent a lot of time researching something, or because you have a qualification. Sometimes you get authority by association, which is why people will share photos with celebrities. It’s all about establishing trust.

The simplest version of a sales funnel is this two-week email sequence. This is how Yaro sells his ebooks.

Two-week email sequence

You start with an opt-in to a free email course. Once someone is signed up, they’ll receive 6 to 10 emails over the course of two weeks. Yaro’s emails give subscribers links to blog posts, which contain the teaching content.

In the first week, you’re focused on education and introducing your product. The first email should explain the problem and tell your story. In the second email, you want to give them some how-to info and start teaching them. You should also introduce the product at full price in this second email.

In the second week, you’re still giving case studies and teaching. But the key focus is on emphasizing a limited-time offer. This is where you introduce scarcity. In every email in the second week, you reiterate that the offer is for a limited time only. The last email warns subscribers that they only have 12 or 24 hours left to take advantage of the special offer.

The key is to make this process evergreen. Someone should be able to search at any time, find your opt-in, and go through this whole process without you being involved at all. The machine should run on its own once you create the content.

Once your simple funnel is set up, the next steps might be upsells or additional email sequences offering higher-priced products.

Final Tips

When you’re just starting out, Yaro says that it can be easier to start from a higher-priced product like a webinar sequence. If you’re selling a $300 product, you only need 10 buyers to earn $3,000. With an ebook, on the other hand, you might only be making $20 at a time, and that can feel like “a slow way to get rich.”

You can build out from your simple sales funnel pretty easily. For example, Yaro prices his ebooks at $49, and sells them at $29 through his email course. His ebook purchases also come with a one month free trial of his membership site, which can turn a one-time $29 purchase into a recurring $40 purchase.

Remember that the idea is to get people in the door with lower-priced products. People need a lot of exposure to you and to your teaching in order to justify a $1,000 purchase.

You can also use a sales funnel just to get people to access content. If you’re just starting out and you’ve got a 90-minute webinar, you can use the funnel just to get people into the webinar. You give it away for free, but it gives you the chance to build some trust to get them to the paid products.

Yaro also talked about a tactic that’s popular right now called a “tripwire.” It’s basically a post opt-in offer. So if someone opts in to your free email course, they’ll immediately be offered a $19 manual or short ebook. If they say yes, then they’re a customer! If they say no, they’ll still get funneled through the email course, and they may make a purchase later on.

The goal is to graduate people from casual readers of your blog, to subscribers, to customers, to loyal customers who are willing to spend $1,000 per year or more with your blog. If you have a $100,000 business, Yaro says, that’s most likely coming from the hundred people who are willing to spend at least $1,000 per year with you.What’s Next?

If you want to go deeper and learn more about building your sales funnel, head on over to platformlaunchplan.com. Yaro has just launched a webinar funnel, and if you sign up you’ll have to opportunity to learn the process by experiencing it. Plus, the content is about selling through your blog, which is exactly what you want to do!

Resources Mentioned:

• Entrepreneur’s Journey – Yaro’s, blog/website
• Blog Profits Blueprint – one of Yaro’s several resources where he teaches how to make money with your blog
• How to Start a Movement with Your Blog – with Gideon Shalwick – an interview with Gideon where we also mentioned how he and Yaro started Become a Blogger together.
• platformlaunchplan.com – A webinar recently launched by Yaro to where he teaches how to build your sales funnel.

Infographic

How to Build Your Blog Sales Funnel – with Yaro Starak

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274 How to Become a Better Writer – with Paula Pant

How do you become a better writer? Is it something you’re born with or can you learn the skills that are needed. According to Paula Pant, you can get better. Here’s how.

Show notes: http://www.becomeablogger.com/274

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Call the hotline @
(888) 835 – 2414

The post 274 How to Become a Better Writer – with Paula Pant appeared first on Become A Blogger by .

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A Practical, No-Nonsense Guide to Earning Passive Income Online

It sounds so enticing, right?

Tinker around on the side, creating a few websites, and before you know it, you’re earning hundreds or even thousands of dollars per month, giving you the freedom to quit your job, travel the world, and live like a millionaire without anything tying you down.

It’s the dream lifestyle, and everywhere you turn online, someone is offering to sell you a course, showing you how to do it.

You have to wonder, though… is all this Internet stuff real, or is it just a scam?

And if it is real, why isn’t everyone doing it?

Today, I thought I would take a moment to answer those questions for you. Normally, we only talk about earning money online from a blogging perspective, but I thought it might be helpful to step back and address the topic of “passive income” in general.

The sad fact is, there’s a lot nobody tells you. I wouldn’t exactly call it a cover-up because I don’t think most “gurus” are deliberately hiding the truth about how it works, but I do think they have a vested interest in not giving you the whole story.

So, that’s what I’d like to give you. First, a few important details:

This Blog Makes about $60,000 per Month in “Passive Income”

The reason I put “passive income” in quotes is I think the term is a little misleading.

Almost nothing is totally passive. While you may not personally be doing any work to receive the money, someone is, and there’s usually at least a little bit of management overhead.

For instance, I’ve gone on record saying this blog averages over $100,000 per month from selling online courses. From that total, about $60,000 of it is technically “passive income” because I don’t have to do anything to generate it. I could die, and the money would keep coming in month after month for years into the future.

But that doesn’t mean no one is working. It also doesn’t mean I’m personally receiving the entire $60,000.

The truth is, most of that money goes to paying my team. We have course instructors, customer support representatives, marketing specialists, and so on. All of them are working full-time to keep the “passive income” machine running, and they do it quite well.

But somebody still has to be the boss.

While I don’t technically do any of the work necessary to generate that income, I do spend about 10 hours every week on phone calls and meetings. I also spend at least another 10-20 hours a week thinking about how to improve the business and make things run more efficiently.

So, in reality, I’m working 20-30 hours per week for the “passive income.” In exchange, I receive a nice salary, plus the majority of the profits the business generates. If I wanted to, I could probably hire an outside CEO and cut it down to 5-10 hours per week, but that would also reduce the amount of profit I make.

And that’s how passive income really works.

Most of the people bragging about making millions of dollars per year online are being somewhat misleading. Yes, they might be grossing millions, but how much are they netting? In many cases, maybe 100-300K per year after paying for advertising, affiliate commissions, and salaries.

Granted, that’s still a pretty good living. It’s also work you can do from anywhere.

But is it “total freedom?”

Not really. For all practical purposes, you still have a job, you still have to do work, and you still spend at least a little time doing stuff you don’t really enjoy.

I’m not saying it’s a bad life. If you can make it through the learning phase (which I’ll talk about at length later), it’s still a hell of a lot better than having a regular day job, but I don’t know anyone getting paid tons of money to do absolutely nothing. While it’s theoretically possible, I don’t think it’s a realistic objective for most people.

You can earn a living online, but you will have to work for it. In time, you can also reduce the amount of work you have to do personally, but it’s almost impossible to eliminate it entirely, even if it’s only managing the people you delegate the work to. As any manager can attest, that in itself is a job, and it never really goes away.

That being said, how exactly does one generate this not-really-but-sort-of-passive income?

Well, let’s talk about that next.

5 Ways to Generate Passive Income Online

Technically, there are hundreds of ways, but I’ll give you the five most common ones I’ve seen work in the real world.

1. Selling advertising on your site

The idea here is to publish content that ranks for competitive search terms on Google, attracting a continuous stream of traffic, and then sell banner ads to businesses who would like to reach those people.

Of all the different strategies, this one is the most passive, but it also requires TONS of traffic to generating meaningful income. For example, a site getting 10,000 visitors per month might only earn $50-100 per month.

So, if you were planning to make enough money from advertising to quit your job, you can probably forget it. It takes too much traffic. In fact, one of the other methods below will almost always make you more money on a per visitor basis. Nevertheless, this is a legitimate model, so it deserves to be on the list.

2. Earning affiliate commissions

Similar to selling advertising, the goal is usually to rank for competitive search terms, but instead of selling advertising, you endorse different products your audience might be interested in, and whenever someone you refer buys, you get a commission. It’s kind of like the next generation of Amway, except instead of referring your friends and family to buy the products, you refer strangers who visit your website.

If you do it well, you can earn a lot of money. For instance, Pat Flynn is on record for earning over $100,000 per month in affiliate commissions. While that’s certainly unusual, I know quite a few people who make a few thousand dollars a month from it, and in my opinion, it’s the best model for a beginner.

Another variation of this model is to pay for advertising and then earn affiliate commissions from people who click on the ads. Years ago, when advertising on Google and Facebook was cheap, lots of people made a lot of money this way. Nowadays, it’s still possible, but it’s much more difficult, and you have to be much more sophisticated. Nevertheless, I thought I would mention it, because it’s still a viable approach, especially in certain niches.

3. Drop shipping

Here, you set up an online store, but instead of selling your own products, you sell products from other companies, you submit the order to them, and then they deliver the product to the customer. It’s called “drop shipping,” and it’s more common than most people realize. You’ve probably purchased items delivered via drop shipping and didn’t even know it.

While I don’t have any direct experience with it, I know it can be quite profitable, especially in niches where you have high profit margins and low shipping costs. Vitamins and cosmetics, for example, or two popular drop shipping industries. Anyone can theoretically start a “store” and have dozens or even hundreds of products to offer within a matter of days.

Needless to say, you have to find a way to differentiate yourself from everyone else, but if you can, the income can be relatively passive. Chances are, you’ll still have to deal with some questions and complaints from customers about other people’s products, which I’m guessing can be quite a headache, but you don’t have to deal with manufacturing, warehousing, shipping, or any of the other headaches of creating the product yourself.

4. Selling information products

Chances are, you’ve seen all the buzz about creating your own online courses, membership sites, e-books, online events, and whatnot. Collectively, these are known as “information products,” and selling them is one of the hottest online businesses to start right now.

Technically, the margin is close to 100%, because you have no product creation or distribution costs. You do everything online. You can also create the product once and then sell it to hundreds or even thousands of people, creating a stream of revenue that can last years or even decades.

The downside: it’s really difficult to get started. While information products are typically pitched as a “side project,” it’s really more like starting any business. You have to learn how to create products people want, promote them, support your customers, do your finances – everything businesses deal with.

It takes a special kind of person to wear that many hats, and in my opinion, the current positioning in the information marketing industry of “anyone can do this” is just nonsense. Everyone I know who has been successful creating information products is a driven, uber smart entrepreneur. If you’re one of those people, you might consider it. If not, I would look elsewhere.

5. Selling simple software (or apps)

In the past, most people wouldn’t have considered selling software to be a source of passive income, but I believe that’s changing. Thanks to tools like Bubble, creating simple web or mobile apps is easier than ever before. You can do a lot without knowing how to code or hiring a developer, and in the future, I think that’s only going to become more and more true.

Now, does that mean you’re going to develop the next Google in your spare time? Probably not, but you might create a simple app that makes you a few thousand dollars a month. I know quite a few people who have done it, and I even have a few friends who have become millionaires in the software business.

Once again, though, it’s like starting any company. While you might not necessarily need to know how to code, you do need an entrepreneurial mindset, work ethic, and personality type, and you’ll probably struggle for years, going through a string of failures before you finally get it right. If you’re successful, though, the passive income potential is enormous

Now, you might be wondering how all of this relates to blogging

While you don’t technically need a blog to make these models work, it’s quite common to use one as both a traffic generation tool and a way of staying in touch with customers. In other words, the blog gets people “in the door,” and then you monetize that traffic through the above methods.

But here’s the thing…

None of this is easy. Some models are simpler than others, but all of them require extraordinary skill.

Here’s what I mean…

The Prerequisites for Passive Income

Let’s say I gave you a step-by-step guide to earning passive income by selling information products, breaking down everything you have to do with specific instructions, real-world examples, and everything you need to understand exactly how the model works.

You’d think you could become successful within a few months, right? Most people assume it’s just a matter of doing the work.

But it’s not.

It’s a matter of skill.

For example, here’s a list of skills that all the models require (assuming you are using search engines as a traffic source):

• Creating better content than all of your competitors
• Search engine optimization, including keyword analysis and link building
• Copywriting to improve the click through rate on your headlines
• Conversion rate optimization for your opt-in forms
• Basic WordPress and hosting administration

And let me be clear…

Those are just the prerequisites for getting traffic. We haven’t even started on monetizing that traffic.

In other words, you need to be proficient in all of those areas before you earn your first dollar. All in all, I’d say it’s about the equivalent of a two-year degree in college.

And the monetization side of things? That’s another two years, assuming you’re only mastering one business model.

So, to learn everything you need to know to generate passive income online, you need to invest about four years, assuming you are studying full-time. If you’re only studying part-time, it’ll take you about eight years.

That’s just an estimate, of course. Some people will be faster; some will be slower.

The bottom line:

None of this is as easy as everyone makes it sound.

Don’t get me wrong, though. Despite the time required to learn everything, I still think it’s a fantastic trade.

The Trade of a Lifetime

If you’re willing to invest four years, 40 hours a week, into learning everything you need to know, you’ll have some extraordinarily valuable skill sets that will serve you for decades. The best case scenario? You never have to worry about money again until the day you die.

To me, that sounds like a better deal than most universities are offering.

Reading about how long it takes and how difficult it is, you might think I’m trying to discourage you, but I’m not. I’m actually trying to save you time.

Because what’s the alternative?

You tinker around on the Internet, reading articles, buying courses, trying this technique and that, running around in circles for years without getting anywhere. Four years later, you conclude it’s a lot harder than you thought it would be, and you’re forced to decide if you want to go further.

Wouldn’t you rather skip all of those years running around in circles and decide now?

If you read everything I said here and your response is, “Okay, that’s fair. I can give it four years,” then you’re already way ahead of most people. On the other hand, you might also say, “Jon, this is interesting, but I really don’t have that kind of time, so I’m going to bow out now.” In that case, congratulations, you just saved yourself a lot of wasted time.

Because listen…

Building a passive income machine that fuels the life of your dreams is only one path, and it’s not right for everybody. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with working for someone else. You can also become a freelancer, offering your services to businesses who need your skill set. Or you can start a more traditional company.

There are lots of options out there. This is only one of them.

Is it the right one for you?

Only you can decide. Now, at least, you know what’s required, and you can make an informed choice.

Good luck.

About the Author: Jon Morrow has asked repeatedly to be called “His Royal Awesomeness,” but no one listens to him. So, he settles for CEO of Smart Blogger. Poor man.

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How to Become a Better Writer – with Paula Pant

Learning with Leslie: | Download MP3 | iTunes | Stitcher | Soundcloud | Raw RSS | More |

Episode: 274
Who: Paula Pant
Blog: AffordAnything.com

Does your writing style need improvement?

Not sure how to edit your writing?

No sweat. I’m talking to Paula Pant in this episode, and she’s here to help you become a better writer.

Paula’s Story

Paula launched her own business at age 27. She had traveled to 30 countries by age 30, and she hates cubicles with a passion. Her blog, Afford Anything, is dedicated to developing laptop-based lifestyle businesses, crushing limits, and maximizing life. AffordAnything.com is the new gathering spot for a tribe of people who want to build wealth, create freedom, travel, enjoy epic adventures and quit the corporate grind.

Afford Anything is based on the philosophy that you can afford ANYthing, but not EVERYthing. That applies to money, of course, but also to time, energy, or any other finite resource. Paula works at the intersection of money and lifestyle.

Paula was on this podcast back in 2015, and at that time she had two goals: start a podcast of her own, and launch her first course. I checked in with her this time around, and she had great news to share. Her podcast launched in February 2016, and she already has 350,000 downloads! She’s also working on her course as we speak, and it should be ready in early 2017.

Why start a podcast? Paula thinks of herself as a writer, and she loves writing, but she said that she wanted to express herself in a totally different medium. It has also given her an opportunity to meet some of her favorite writers, because the show is interview-based. In addition, she’s got the incentive to read new authors if they’re coming on the show. But the podcast isn’t just for authors; it’s for anyone with “ideas worth sharing.”

The podcast has also deepened her relationship with her audience, particularly her most dedicated fans. She’s connecting to her audience across multiple platforms. And as Paula’s friend once put it, “when you’re in somebody’s earbuds, that’s a very intimate connection.”

Becoming a Better Writer

Outside of her podcast, however, one of Paula’s strengths is her writing. She says there’s two components to good writing:

1. Originality of ideas
2. Technical skill

Paula spends a lot of her time working on number 2. Crafting well-written sentences and paragraphs takes work!

Paula’s Process

Step 0: Get inspiration

Get Inspiration

This step is about taking in lots of ideas and information from outside sources. Paula says that a big part of the writing process is “synthesizing many different thoughts and ideas that you learn from the outside world, and pulling that all together and contextualizing it within your own framework.”

How do you do that? Read a lot, and listen a lot.

Those two things will help you build a strong foundation to work from. Paula recommends reading books within your niche and related to your niche for the ideas part of your writing. But if you want to improve your technical writing skills, there’s a huge benefit in reading anything, even if it’s way outside your niche.

Step 1: Brain dump

Good writing is a combination of three things: reading, writing, and editing.

Get a piece of paper, or a fresh document on your computer, and just brain dump.

Paula sets aside protected time for this task. She spends at least an hour writing every weekday.

How much of the brain dump actually gets published? Very little.

Good writing is a combination of three things: reading, writing, and editing. That last one is so, so important. It is impossible to overstate how important editing is. If you publish everything in your brain dump, you haven’t really edited it, and the article will not be as good as it could be.

Step 2: Shelve it

Put your daily brain dump to one side, and don’t think about it for a while. Leave it alone for a minimum of 24 hours. Ideally, you’d step away from it for a week, two weeks, a month, even six months.

Stepping away before editing allows you to look at the piece with fresh eyes. You’ll see it more clearly.

Step 3: Start editing

This is where it gets fun. We’re going to look at the specifics of how to edit. It’s important to know what you’re looking for, or else you won’t be effective.

Start Editing

If you have access to a talented editor, send your articles to that person before you publish them. Paula had the experience of working for a daily newspaper, where she sat down with her editor every single day and worked through her articles in detail. This was the time when she really honed her writing skills, and her abilities at the end of that job far exceeded what she was capable of producing when she started out.

Editing takes practice, just like writing. But you have to practice smart. Paula cites Cal Newport, a professor at Georgetown, who says that sheer practice alone does not equal improvement. You’ve got to practice at the edge of what you’re capable of.

So that quantity of hours that you spend isn’t the only thing that matters. The quality counts, too. Are you the musician who only plays songs you know well over and over, or do you constantly challenge yourself to learn new material? Are you the figure skater repeating the same jump, or are you always falling on your butt trying to pick up new tricks?

What does quality practice look like with writing? Paula says you should read books about how to be a better writer and then consciously apply those tips during the editing process.

Paula recommends Sol Stein’s Stein on Writing and Stephen King’s On Writing.

You’ve also go to edit more than once. Paula will go through her pieces five or ten times before they’re ready to publish.

Editing Tips

Stephen King’s On Writing

1. “Kill your darlings”

The #1 tip that Paula took from Stephen King’s book was to “kill your darlings.” Just because you’ve spent a lot of time working on something doesn’t mean it should get published. If you’re only going forward with something because you’ve invested time in it, you’re serving yourself instead of your audience. In that case, you need to kill the piece.

If it’s easier, don’t send it straight to the trash. Paula keeps a separate file folder for her darlings!

2. Get rid of adverbs

This one also comes from Stephen King, who says to get rid of almost every adverb.

An adjective modifies a noun. In the sentence, “I saw a beautiful flower,” “beautiful” is the adjective.

Get rid of adverbs

An adverb modifies a verb. King says that if you need an adverb to modify your verb, what you really need is a better verb.

Here’s an example: “He shut the door quickly.”

“Quickly” is the adverb in that sentence. Is there a better verb that we could use besides “shut?”

Paula suggests “He slammed the door.” It’s much more powerful and more evocative.

3. Be judicious about adjectives

If an adjective states the obvious or doesn’t add anything to the sentence, cut it. This one actually applies to all the words in your sentence. Editing is partly about trimming the fat and getting rid of words you don’t need.

Let’s look at an example sentence:

“Twelve rescue ambulances stood by to rush injured people to nearby hospitals.”

Be judicious about adjectives

How many of those words are really necessary?

We can cut “rescue.” What other kind of ambulance is there?
We can cut “rush.” How many ambulances go slowly?
We can cut “injured.” The ambulances wouldn’t be there for healthy people.
We can cut “nearby.” An ambulance wouldn’t normally go to a far away hospital.
We can even cut “hospital.” Where else would an ambulance go?

So once we’ve cut all of those words, we get:

“Twelve ambulances stood by.”

That much simpler sentence gives us all the information we need.

4. Remember the fundamental sentence structure

Stick to the Basics

If in doubt, revert to this basic sentence structure: subject, verb, object.

If you structure a sentence in this way, you’re unlikely to add anything unnecessary. You’re also more likely to use the active voice.

Here’s an example: “The girl threw the ball.”

You could write: “The ball was thrown by the girl.” But that sentence uses the passive voice, and it reverses the basic sentence structure. The object comes before the subject. It’s also too wordy. “The girl threw the ball” is much stronger.

5. Don’t start a sentence with a dependent clause

A dependent clause is a part of your sentence that can’t stand on its own. It wouldn’t be a full sentence if you ended it with a period instead of a comma. It depends upon the rest of the sentence.

Paula actually found an example of this on becomeablogger.com, on the How to Start a Blog page. I wrote:

“Well (making a long story short), that blog landed me my dream job as a university professor in a doctoral program even without a PhD.”

The dependent clause in that sentence is “Well (making a long story short).” And it is so unnecessary! It doesn’t add anything, so we can just cut it.

Another problem in that sentence comes at the end. Paula knows that I mean to say, “I didn’t have a PhD and I got the job anyway,” but that’s not what my sentence says. Phrases modify whatever they’re closest to in a sentence. So when I write “in a doctoral program even without a PhD,” it seems like I’m saying there weren’t any PhDs in the doctoral program.

So how do I fix it? Paula has a couple of suggestions.

I could say, “I landed my dream job as a university professor despite not having a PhD, thanks to my blog.”

I could also break it up into several sentences, like this:

“I landed my dream job as a university professor. I didn’t even have a PhD. How did I do it? It was all thanks to my blog.”

Become a better writer from Leslie Samuel

Final Tips

Paula wanted to leave you with two more things to think about.

The Most Dangerous Writing App

Ernest Hemingway famously said, “The first draft is [bleeeeeeep]!” Hemingway is one of the greatest writers of all time. If his first drafts are terrible, you don’t need to feel bad about yours. First drafts are always awful. They’re supposed to be! Don’t worry. Even Hemingway needed to edit.

Finally, don’t edit during your brain dump! This rule is so hard to follow, but it’s so important. Trying to edit while you brain dump can interrupt your workflow and even lead to writer’s block.

There’s an app that can help you with this one, which Gideon Shalwick recommended to me. It’s called The Most Dangerous Writing App , and it actually deletes what you’ve already written if you pause for more than 5 seconds!

If you’re interested in what Paula’s up to, head over to AffordAnything.com and sign up to her email list. That way you’ll be the first to know when you course is ready. Plus you’ll have access to all of her amazing existing content!

Resources Mentioned

• 203 How to Brighten Your Content with Personality, Story, and the Occasional Outburst- with Paula Pant – My first interview with Paula Pant way back February 2015.
• Afford Anything– Paula Pant’s blog
• Afford Anything Podcast – Paula’s podcast launched in February 2016 and now has 350,000 downloads
• Recommended books about writing:
  • Sol Stein on Writing
  • On Writing by Stephen King–
• The Most Dangerous Writing App – An app that will help you with your writing and practicing it under time pressure.

Infographic

How to Become a Better Writer – with Paula Pant

The post How to Become a Better Writer – with Paula Pant appeared first on Become A Blogger by Leslie Samuel.

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5 Surprising Ways To Rapidly Increase Online Course Sales

By now you’ve probably heard about someone who created an online course, started selling it, and made a living doing it.

The question is, how can you do it effectively? And profitably?

Well…

Over the last 5 years, I built Social Triggers from scratch into a multi-million dollar online business.

And as you know, much of this revenue was was generated by creating and selling online courses.

Needless to say, I learned a things about how to do it – and I know MANY of them will surprise you.

So, today, on my blog, I’d like to reveal 5 big insights I learned.

More specifically, I’ll show you.

1. Why I offer payment plans (the secret? yes, it helps increase sales, but it also does this ONE thing).

2. The BIG secret behind why people “Open and close” enrollment for online courses (People think it’s just about “scarcity.” Not true. There’s another BIG reason why people do it…).

3. Should you give all your content out at once or should you drip it out? Believe it or not, there’s a right answer. And it affects your bottom line AND your students success rate.

4. The psychology of a new customer (and how to ensure they don’t fall into the dark pit of despair after they buy your course).

5. A simple way to increase the revenue of your next launch by 25% (or more).

So, let’s dive in…

#1 The Power of Extended Payment Plans

I recently stumbled on a sales page for a premium online course. The cost was $2,000 or two payments of $1,000.

I laughed.

Here’s why:

A payment plan makes your premium online course more accessible to people who don’t have the money “up front.” But if your prospect doesn’t have $2,000… they probably don’t have $1,000 either.

So, what are you really accomplishing with a “two payments of $1,000?”

You’re not increasing sales. You’re not making it easier on your customers. You’re not reaching a new segment of the market.

In reality, all you’re really doing is giving yourself the headache of collecting two payments when people could have easily have afforded the single payment.

And that’s why longer, extended payment plans are great. As you bring the monthly payment lower, you can reach a new segment of customers that you couldn’t reach with the larger, one time payment.

Plus, here’s the benefit that most people don’t talk about: payment plans help you create predictable revenue. And if you want to scale your business to multiple six figures – and seven figures – predictable revenue is important because you can make smart hiring decisions without worrying where the money will come from.

So, the next time you launch your course, try an extended payment plan. Maybe try 5 payments of $400. Or Even 10 payments of $200. The goal is to reach a new demographic of customers you can’t reach otherwise and Im willing to bet you can increase your conversion rates.

How Zippy Courses Makes This Easy: Creating payment plans used to be a real big pain. Not anymore. In the new Zippy Courses “All-In-One” Platform, you can create multiple payment plans in just a few seconds.

 

Want to learn more about the new Zippy Courses “All In One” Platform? See the full details here. And you can get in at a discount until August 26th, 2016.

#2 The Power Of “Opening” And “Closing” Enrollment

Let me share a staggering number with you…

75%.

That’s how many sales often come in for my online courses during the last 24 hours before I “close the cart” for an online course.

SEVENTY FIVE PERCENT.

In the last 24 hours.

It’s pretty ridiculous. But as you know, one of the main reasons why people don’t buy is because they like to procrastinate. But when you “close enrollment” for your online course, you help light a fire under people and get them moving.

Plus…

There’s an added benefit here too: when you sell online courses during specific enrollment periods, you often generate a larger group of students going through your course at the same time.

This is GREAT for your students. When you sell something on evergreen, you might get 1 or 2 people going through your class at any given time. But when you create a larger enrollment group, you give your students the opportunity to form connections amongst their peer group, and that’s GREAT for the user learning experience.

So, yes, it’s good for sales. And it’s also good for your students. It’s truly win-win.

How Zippy Courses Makes This Easy: You can open and close enrollment for your online course with Zippy Courses, again, in just a few seconds. It’s as easy as creating what we call a “Launch Window” attached to your product, and this “launch window” determines when something is on sale and when it’s no longer for sale.

 

Want to learn more about the new Zippy Courses “All In One” Platform? See the full details here. And you can get in at a discount until August 26th, 2016.

#3 The Power of “Dripping” Your Content (vs Releasing It All At Once)

My friend told me that his refund rate was much higher than he liked. I asked him why, and he told me he didn’t know. So I recommended that he run quick survey on the people who bought his product and refunded it.

What did he find?

The #1 reason why people refunded his product was because they felt overwhelmed by all the stuff they needed to do.

And that made sense.

Here’s why: He sold a 10 module online course and he gave his students all 10 modules as soon as they purchased the course. And then, people would log in to their membership area, see all 10 modules, click around to 5 or 6 videos and think, “THIS IS SO OVERWHELMING.” And they’d leave the membership site and ask for a refund.

All because he offered too much content too fast.

So, I told him to drip his content out. And it will help focus your students on “what’s important now.” And it will help eliminate overwhelm. And sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. As he helped eliminate overwhelm, his refund rate started to drop.

How Zippy Courses Makes This Easy: In the new Zippy Courses “All-In-One” Platform, you can drip course content out with ease. Some “membership software” requires you to create special configurations and special coding to drip out content. But in Zippy Courses, it’s as easy as clicking a few buttons during the “Course Scheduling” part of the “course builder.”

 

Want to learn more about the new Zippy Courses “All In One” Platform? See the full details here. And you can get in at a discount until August 26th, 2016.

#4 The Power Of Strategic “Follow Up” Emails After People Buy Your Course

I bought an online course from a well-known course creator. It was expensive too. About $1,000. But after I bought the course, I noticed something: I got an email with information about how to login to my course…

…but I never heard from this course creator again. Yes, he went on to try and sell me more things, but he never sent any emails specifically related to the course I just bought.

This is DUMB.

When people buy a premium online course, “getting the sale” is just part of the problem. You also need to KEEP the sale. And you need to make sure your customer is happy with the purchase.

And that’s why strategic followup emails are so important. You can manage customer expectations when they need it most.

As an example, if you join a course from Social Triggers, I often email you once a week about each module that I release. But, after about 2 or 3 weeks, in those emails talking about each module often start including phrases like: “If you fall behind, don’t worry. Now that you’re a member, you get lifetime access to the training material.”

Why?

When people buy online courses, it’s natural that they fall behind after a few weeks. And when they start falling behind, they start feeling bad and they think about giving up. However, when you reassure them that it’s okay that they’re falling behind… and that they still have plenty of time to catch up… it keeps people focused on their main goal.

It also helps prevent people from refunding the product prematurely.

So, again, it’s good for business. And it’s good for the student, too.

How Zippy Courses Makes This Easy: And as you might imagine, you can configure these “followup” emails VERY quickly inside the New Zippy Courses “All-In-One” Platform. Take a look:

 

Want to learn more about the new Zippy Courses “All In One” Platform? See the full details here. And you can get in at a discount until August 26th, 2016.

#5 How to Increase Sales By 25% With Multiple Tiers

What do I mean by multiple tiers?

Quite simply: instead of just selling one course at one price… you should create one course with multiple tiers at different prices.

As an example, you might sell an online course for $500. You should also consider creating a $1000 level of that same course.

(In this more expensive level, you can offer additional training material, live group coaching calls, one-on-one consulting, whatever you like to make the value worth more).

And you’ll watch your revenue soar.

Here’s why:

When you sell an online course with multiple options, you’ll often see a breakdown that looks something like this: 75% of people will buy the cheap option. And 25% will buy the more expensive option.

So…

Run the numbers:

Let’s say you sell 100 copies of your course. If you only offer one option at $500, you’ll collect $50,000 in revenue. However, if you sell 75 people into the $500 option and 25 people into the $1000 option, your total revenue skyrockets to $62,500. A solid 25% increase.

Why does this work so well?

In my experience, there are always people who buy the nice toilet paper at the store. And these people want more service, more training, and a more premium experience. And if you fail to offer one, you’re leaving a tremendous amount or revenue on the table.

How Zippy Courses Makes This Easy: You can create multiple tiers of an online course in SECONDS. It’s really just as easy as clicking one button, and setting one little configuration. Take a look:

As a matter of fact: I’m willing to bet it will take you less than 30 seconds. That’s how easy the new Zippy Courses is to use.

 

Want to learn more about the new Zippy Courses “All In One” Platform? See the full details here. And you can get in at a discount until August 26th, 2016.

Now I Have A Quick Question…

#1 Which tip did you love most and why?

#2 Did you learn anything interesting about creating and selling online courses?

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How to Get Paid to Write for Magazines – The Ultimate Guide

But you’re just a little old blogger, right?

Why would popular magazines like Forbes, WebMD, and Redbook be interested in you?

You might be surprised.

Thousands of magazines appear on the newsstands and in readers’ mailboxes every month, and they’re constantly on the lookout for new writing talent. Yes, your audience as a blogger may still be small, but all those hours you spent slaving away on your content has probably honed your writing skills to where you could, in fact, compete with the big boys and girls to write for magazines.

And it’s SO worth it.

If you’ve been blogging for a while, let’s talk about why you should be interested in magazines:

1. They can send you a lot of traffic.

Most magazines that pay well for freelance writing also command a huge readership.

For example, when I wrote for Woman’s Day, they had 6 million readers all across the United States. That’s a lot of eyeballs reading your work.

Of course, the size of the audience isn’t everything. Sometimes you’re looking for a smaller but more targeted audience. Magazines can help you there, too!

For example, if you want readers in a particular geographic area, you can write for local magazines that boast followings in that area. If you want readers from a particular industry, you can write for trade publications devoted to that field. If you want readers who buy a particular product or service, you could write for custom publications reaching those customers.

The important point:

Magazine readers are an entirely different audience than the people surfing the blogosphere. These readers are all people who might never find out about you outside of their favorite magazines.

Even better, many publications, especially online ones, run a bio box at the end of your article where you can trumpet your credentials and lead people to your blog. Writer’s Digest gave me a bio box at the bottom of my column in every issue when I wrote their Conference Scene column, and it drew interested readers online to find out more about my books and classes for writers.

2. They can be lucrative gigs.

Some magazines don’t pay anything at all… but some pay big. (Hint: Those are the ones you want to write for.)

I’ve earned anywhere from $.10 per word writing for trade magazines at the beginning of my career up to $2.50 per word penning articles for national consumer magazines like Health. What’s important, though, isn’t the per-word rate — it’s your hourly rate, and I usually earn $250 per hour at this kind of work even at magazines that pay just $.50/word.

So, you’re not just connecting with new readers. You’re getting paid to connect with new readers.

How cool is that?

3. They can help you land other well-paying gigs.

You can use published articles as clips, or samples, to show to potential clients in all writing areas. Copywriting clients, for example, like to know you understand the ins and outs of journalism and have the skills to weave a narrative and tell a good story. Just what they want you to do with their products!

Your article writing can also turn into speaking gigs. If a conference organizer likes one of your articles in their industry trade pub, they might ask you to turn your article into a speech, giving you not only more exposure, but a nice speaking fee too! One of my very first articles, in a national business magazine, led to a speaking opportunity at a Chamber of Commerce in Pennsylvania.

Plus, let’s not forget about credibility. If you’re on the hunt for a book deal, a business partner, or an affiliate, who do you think they’re going to want to work with: the person with no creds, or the one with a column in a major magazine? Yeah, it’s a no-brainer.

Traffic, money, credibility – you’re sold, right? Now you’re itching to learn how to get started.

Luckily, as a blogger, you’re one step ahead of the game, because just as you can use magazine articles as clips to get blogging gigs, you can use blog posts as clips to land article assignments.

Who wants to buy my articles?

You already know about the big magazines that populate the newsstand, so let me share two super-secret markets out there for writers:

TRADE MAGAZINES: LITTLE BUT LUCRATIVE

Trade magazines are business-to-business publications created for members of a certain industry.

For example, I’ve written for Pizza Today, The Federal Credit Union, In-Plant Graphics, Sign Builders Illustrated, Restaurant Management, and Mini-Storage Messenger. These magazines tell readers how to best manage, market, and generally boost the success of their businesses.

There are gazillions of these magazines, covering every imaginable market niche. For example, my husband once wrote for Indian Gaming Business — and this magazine actually has a competitor. So whatever educational or professional background you have, you can probably parlay that into trade assignments.

The downside?

Don’t expect to get rich. At least, not right away.

Trade magazines typically pay less than consumer magazines — think 10 – 50 cents per word, though many pay higher — but on the “pro” side, they’re easier to write for than the big guys, they tend to pay quickly, and they become loyal clients that will come back to you again and again. Also, once you get the hang of writing for a particular industry, you’ll be able to complete assignments more quickly, meaning your hourly rate will increase.

Find trades in Writer’s Market and at WebWire. Webwire doesn’t include links to the magazines, but you can search for the sites of pubs you’re interested in on Google.

CUSTOM PUBLICATIONS: ALL THE BRANDS YOU TRUST

A custom publication is a magazine that serves as a marketing piece for a business to give to its customers or clients.

Many of these are published by companies called custom publishers (though many of them now call themselves content companies). That means the business distributing the magazine to its clients is not the actual publisher. The business pays the publisher to create the magazine for them.

So, that magazine you get at Sam’s Club? Custom published.

The one you get from your bank, supermarket, or insurance agency? Most likely also custom published.

And the even cooler part?

Custom published magazines tend to pay more than trades — in my experience, at least 50 cents to $1 per word. Yes, you do need some writing skill to freelance for them, but not really any more or less than you need for consumer and trade magazines.

If you’re good, you can also get steady work. As with trades, if custom pub editors like you they’ll add you to their “stable” of writers to hand out assignments to. Sweet!

Find custom publications at The Content Council. Click on “Members” and you can search by industry to see who publishes magazines (and other content) in sectors like health, retail, and financial services.

Writing a Kick-Ass Query

To break into most magazines, you need a query letter, also known as a pitch. It’s basically a sales letter telling the editor what your idea is, why it’s important to readers, and why you’re the best person to write it.

Here’s what you’ll need:

A FANTABULOUS IDEA.

Read over your target magazine to help you brainstorm ideas. If you can’t find physical copies of the magazine, check out their online archives. Sometimes the content differs, but you’ll get a good idea of what the magazine runs.

A word of warning:

Most of the ideas that first pop out of your head will suck. Even if you think they’re great, they’ll probably suck. (Sorry.)

That’s because we tend to think in terms of topics, not story ideas. A topic is a broad idea that could really be a book, and has probably been done already, in some form, in both books and magazines. A story, on the other hand, has your own unique angle or slant that a jaded editor hopefully hasn’t seen before. For example:

Topic: How to stay healthy this summer. (See how that could be a book?)

Story: Summer bummers: The top 5 health snafus that can ruin your summer, and how to solve them.

Story: How to stay healthy this summer with items you already have in your pantry.

Story: Special precautions people with condition X need to take to stay healthy during the summer.

Get the idea?

Great. Let’s jump into the next most important part of a great query:

A SUPER-AWESOME LEDE

A lede (yes, that’s spelled right) is the first paragraph or two of your query, and it’s typically written in the same style as the ledes you see in articles in your target magazine. So you might start with an anecdote, a compelling quote, a startling stat — or you may do something more literary in style.

Here are a couple of potential ledes for the “Summer Bummers” idea above.

1. The anecdotal lede
When McKenzie Smith, 32, went to the beach last summer, she envisioned lying around on the sand reading a romance novel while her kids played in the warm waves.

What she didn’t envision was developing an itchy condition called sea bather’s eruption, which is caused by stings from tiny, larval jellyfish.

2. A stat lede

Beset by bug bites? Feeling sick from a summer picnic? You’re not alone. According to a new study by the National Institutes of Health, nearly one-third of Americans over the age of 18 have to miss work each summer due to seasonal snafus like these — and other recent research has found that 45% of us avoid going outside in the summer because we’re afraid of bee stings, poison ivy, and sunburn. [Note: I totally made those stats up.]

A NUT GRAF

I know — what’s with all the funny spellings, right?

The nut graf is the paragraph right after the lede where you quickly summarize what you’ll be offering. For example, let’s take my stat lede above and add on a nut graf:

Beset by bug bites? Feeling sick from a summer picnic? You’re not alone. According to a new study by the National Institutes of Health, nearly one-third of Americans over the age of 18 have to miss work each summer due to seasonal snafus like these — and other recent research has found that 45% of us avoid going outside in the summer because we’re afraid of bee stings, poison ivy, and sunburn.

Summer doesn’t have to be that way. In my article “Summer Bummers,” I’ll interview top docs to give your readers solid, little-known advice on how to combat the top seven seasonal health woes: poison ivy, dehydration, food poisoning, sunburn, sea bather’s eruption, bug bites, and heat rash.

See?

It’s the point in your query letter where you pivot from the idea into your actual pitch. The transition should be smooth, the lede flowing right into the nut graf, just like the one above.

Next, we need…

A BODACIOUS BODY

The body is where you get into the nuts and bolts of your pitch. You don’t want to make the editor guess at what you’re offering: Give her some examples, written in the style you’d write the article in.

And yes, that means you’ll have to do your homework. Probably more than you’re used to.

Most blogs are opinion-based: You write what you think, and nobody is looking over your shoulder, expecting you to back it up. Magazines, on the other hand, are evidence-based. Unless you’re an expert writing an opinion piece, editors will expect you to show supporting evidence.

Sometimes, that means conducting a couple of quickie pre-interviews. You can find potential sources to interview at universities, organizations, and think tanks, and on LinkedIn, online forums, Twitter, Facebook, and source-finding sites like ProfNet. And don’t discount the value of your email list!

So here’s the body of the query I started above.

For example, I’ll offer doctor-approved advice such as:

* Food Poisoning

If you downed questionable shrimp salad at the office picnic, you may find yourself faced with nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. “One thing you shouldn’t do is take an anti-diarrheal medicine, because the diarrhea carries the toxins that are making you sick out of your system,” says Daniel Jones, MD, an associate professor at Harvard School of Medicine. Instead, sip a sports drink, which helps replace the electrolytes you’re losing. Until you feel better, avoid solid food and drink your usual liquids plus a quart of sports drink per day.

* Dehydration

The bad thing about dehydration isn’t that your mouth is parched and you crave Frappuccinos– it’s that dehydration can lead to heat exhaustion, which can in turn lead to heat stroke. The worst-case heat stroke scenario is that your blood pressure drops dangerously, resulting in organ damage.

Here’s advice from Liz Johnson, MD, a physician at The Wellness Institute in Boston: If you notice decreased sweating, lightheadedness, or dizziness, get to a cool place and rehydrate with a sports drink. Anticipate and head off the problem by deep-sixing the caffeine, which can make you sweat more and therefore lose more water, and drinking more than usual if you plan to be out in the heat or if you take a diuretic such as blood pressure medication.

Don’t skimp on your research! This is where you prove to a skittish editor that you do indeed have the goods.

Then and only then can you…

BRAG ON YOURSELF

My writer friend Kelly James-Enger calls this the “why I’m so great” paragraph. This is where you tell the editor why you are the best person to write the proposed article. So if I were 100% a blogger and had never written for magazines, I might write:

I’m a freelance writer in Sacramento who writes on health topics on my own blog, TheBestBlogEver.com; I’ve also written for blogs like X, Y, and Z. As a former nurse, I understand medical concepts and terminology — and as I writer, I know how to translate them into readable, fun prose.

Even if you don’t have a lot of writing credits to toot your horn about, there are other brag-worthy things you can use — like a deep personal knowledge of the topic (your spouse is a doc? mention that here!), an educational background in the topic, or exclusive access to a key source.

You’re a writer, so spin what you do have into the best possible light!

A CLOSING

In the closing of the pitch, I usually do two things:

1. Show I understand the magazine’s readership.

Explain why your article will be important to the magazine’s readers. For example:

Your readers are young women who want to relax and enjoy the sun all summer long — without being waylaid by pesky summer health troubles. My article “Summer Bummers” won’t disappoint them.

2. Ask for the sale.

One mistake many writers make is they forget to wrap up in a clear way by asking for an assignment. They let the pitch simply peter out, and leave the editor wondering why the writer bothered.

You can ask for the sale in a lot of ways: “I look forward to hearing what you think about my idea for Magazine X!” “I look forward to your reaction.” “Does this idea sound interesting to you?” “May I write this article for you?”

And that’s it! You’re finished!

What’s Next?

Send your query letter via email directly to whichever editor you think would handle your topic.

At big magazines, that is often a senior, deputy, or associate editor. At smaller magazines, like many trades, you can pitch directly to the editor.

Can’t decide? Give them a call and ask.

To find the editor’s email address, first search the website, and try Google searches on the editor’s name and “contact.” You can also search for the editor on LinkedIn; sometimes you’ll find an e-mail address right on the editor’s profile.

If those tactics come up short, try calling the magazine. Don’t be afraid! I promise no one will yell at you.

As a last resort, try to decipher the magazine’s email format (it’s often on the Ad Sales page) and use that to figure out your editor’s address. You can take advantage of one of the many free online email verification systems like Verify-Email.org to determine if the address you guessed at is correct. This isn’t foolproof, but it helps.

Once you zap off your query, don’t just wait with bated breath for a reply, because it can take a loooong time. Send your pitch to other magazines as well (you may need to tweak your pitch a bit for each one), and get to work on your next query. Pitching a numbers game, and it’s all about volume.

Keep pitching…

Once you learn to write a query, you’ll get better and better at it, and the process will take less and less time. You’ll start to develop relationships with editors — yes, even a nice rejection asking you to pitch again can be the start of a beautiful (and lucrative) friendship. And some of those relationships will lead to regular gigs.

But you have to keep pitching.

Too many talented writers fire off a query or two and then quit. Maybe the rejection is too painful, or maybe you’re just too busy.

Regardless, the writers who make it are the ones who send a lot of pitches. Preferably at least one or two a week — with each of those going out to multiple publications — at least for the first few years.

Here’s why:

You have to do the work to write for magazines

Writing for magazines is the same as anything else. You have to do the work.

At first, you suck. Then it gets a little easier. Then one day you look at your work and realize you actually know what you’re doing! Heck, when I started out as a full-time freelancer in 1997, I would print out each pitch, go over it with a red pen, have my writer husband go over it with a red pen, enter in the edits, and repeat the process until the pitch was as clean and perfect as possible. These days, I can write a full pitch in under an hour.

You just have to keep going. You have to keep writing. You have to trust it’ll all pay off

It’s certainly paid off for me, and I believe it can pay off for you too. Not only through money, although that’s certainly nice, but through connecting with people who need your wisdom.

The world is full of people with questions who aren’t searching blogs for answers. To help them, you have to reach outside of your medium and connect with them where they already are.

You have the skills. You have the passion. You now have the step-by-step plan to make it happen.

So get out there and start writing!

There’s a whole other world waiting for you, and if you’re willing to put in the work, you’ll do just fine.

About the Author: Linda Formichelli has written for more than 150 magazines, from Pizza Today to Redbook. She’s also the co-founder of Renegade Writer Press, which publishes self-help, books for writers, and books for foodies — not to mention erotica (yes, erotica) through their imprint That’s What She Said Press. Linda is running her next Write for Magazines e-course on Monday, August 22, and 100% of the proceeds from the Basic version of the class will be donated to Convoy of Hope to help the victims of the flooding in Louisiana.

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How to Start a Movement with Your Blog – with Gideon Shalwick

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How to Start a Movement with Your Blog – with Gideon Shalwick

Episode: 273
Who: Gideon Shalwick
Blog / Websites:  Entrevana.com, Veeroll, Splasheo, Rapid Video Blogging

Are you feeling like you’re on your way to burning out?

Have you lost your flow?

Today, Gideon Shalwick is here to talk about his journey from entrepreneurial hell to getting his mojo back, and he wants to share how you can do it, too. Although he’s found fulfillment with his newest project, entrevana.com, it’s been a long road with lots of bumps along the way. By following Gideon’s advice, you can take yourself to entrepreneurial heaven, but you’ve got to do it for the right reasons!

Gideon’s Story

Gideon left his job ten years ago, and at the start he says that he was a “wannabe entrepreneur.” Early on, he and his wife were living on the bread line for about two years. In fact, he almost gave up on being an entrepreneur because things were so tough. Luckily, he had a very supportive wife who was paying the bills while he pursued his dream.

The story started in New Zealand, where he was fed up with working for someone else. He felt a lack of freedom and a lack of fulfillment. So he started applying for jobs in Australia. For three months, he got turned down again and again and again. Not even an interview! At that point, his wife started applying for jobs, and within a week she had three job offers. Gideon now says that this was a sign that he wasn’t meant to get a normal job at that point in time.

Job Interviews

After emigrating to Australia, it took Gideon two and a half years to “unlearn” the employee mindset and learn how to be an entrepreneur. What does that mean? Gideon says that the employee mindset is more passive than the entrepreneurial mindset. When you’re an employee, you don’t have to worry about the bigger infrastructure of the company. You just play your part in a larger organization.

Gideon also says that he had a bit of an “attitude” as an employee, because he thought he wasn’t being paid what he was worth. This ended up “slapping him in the face,” as he puts it, because in his first year as an entrepreneur, he earned minus $1000! He says that it took him some time to learn what it takes for people, potential customers, to actually want to spend money with you.

Gideon uses the metaphor of a Big Mac to talk about how the education system trains employees rather than entrepreneurs. He sees standard education as a manufacturing line, where everyone comes out like a McDonald’s Big Mac. It “ticks all the boxes” for a hamburger, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but it isn’t true to the individual. It doesn’t express you, it expresses what the system wants you to express. By thinking like an entrepreneur, Gideon says, you give yourself more freedom.

Become a Blogger, Pre-Leslie

Yes, folks, there was a Become a Blogger before me! It was started by Gideon and Yaro Starak. And this was the first time I heard the origin story in this way, so that was pretty exciting!

Yaro and Gideon Image source: incomediary.com

Back in 2007, Gideon had tried and failed in a bunch of projects, and he decided to start doing video interviews with people who were big in the industry. This was when YouTube was about a year old, and lots of video sharing sites were popping up. But nobody knew what to do with them yet! So with zero experience, Gideon would go to events and target people he wanted to interview. But the files were too big, and his computer was too small, so it never really got off the ground.

One of the people he ended up interviewing was Yaro Starak. After the interview, Yaro said that he was really impressed with the set up that Gideon had, and they stayed in touch. Not long after that, Yaro got in touch and asked Gideon if he’d be interested in making a series of videos for a new project.

Yaro had realized that his Blog Mastermind course wasn’t catering for people just starting out in blogging, and he saw a gap in the market. He paid Gideon to make 10 videos that showed people step-by-step how to set up their blogs. They published the videos on blip.tv (remember that?!). They were initially available for free.

What Happened Next? Unbelievable.

It sounds like click-bait, but it’s true. Gideon said that those videos went “ballistic” for that point in time, with hundreds of thousands of downloads. As the project continued to be successful over the next three to six months, Gideon and Yaro decided to launch it as a separate business, with a 50/50 partnership.

The partnership worked really well because Gideon was good at the practical side, creating content, making videos, and planning the course, while Yaro was really good at the marketing and promotion. Plus, Yaro’s existing email database and industry connections came in really handy.

Before Become a Blogger officially launched, Gideon spent six months working on the course without being paid. Even though there was no money coming in, he could see the light at the end of the tunnel. But that doesn’t mean it was easy. He remembers having moments of thinking “what am I doing?!” This was his last push. If it hadn’t worked out, he was preparing to go back to work.

The support of his wife and his partnership with Yaro became so important. Gideon says that a support group is essential for all entrepreneurs. You’re in the minority as an entrepreneur, and you need to find like-minded people who understand your journey.

He also benefited from a lot of personal development. In the two years before Become a Blogger, he had done a lot of reading, thinking, and meditating to re-program himself. He felt that he needed an attitude shift, and that hard work paid off later on.

Launching Become a Blogger

Finally, it was time to launch Become a Blogger. They started off with a free report, the Roadmap to Become a Blogger. Within the first two weeks, they had 10,000 people signed up to the email list.

Roadmap to Become a Blogger

They launched with a $27/month membership for the first six months, at which point it increased to $47/month. In the first few months, Gideon remembers $23,000/month coming into the business. It was incredible. He’d gone from two and half years of hustling and getting nothing in return to starting a real business, something with a future.

After the launch, the next six months were still tough. He’d only created enough content for the first two months, so he had to create lots of new content. Gideon was also managing the customer support side, answering emails and taking phone calls from all over the world to help people get their blogs up and running.

The difference was that now he was getting paid. He was finally seeing a return on his investment of time after two and a a half years.

Gideon says that if he had it all to do over, if he could go back with the skills and experience that he has now, he could probably have gone through the whole process in about three months. But it’s easy to let ego and stubbornness slow you down and get in the way of your learning. Even now, he says, that stuff can creep up on him.

Changing Hands

After a while, Become a Blogger got to a point where it wasn’t really a 50/50 partnership anymore because Yaro was spending more time on other projects. Together, they decided to part ways and let Become a Blogger peter out a little. They both moved on to other things, and Become a Blogger continued in a really passive way.

Eventually, Yaro and Gideon had a chat about how to revive Become a Blogger, but neither of them wanted to pick it up again themselves. So, they thought about who could take it on. Gideon says that they started thinking about Become a Blogger’s students, and my name came to mind.

So, the three of us had an initial discussion. I remember it really well because it felt so surreal. I was doing backflips on the inside, but trying to play it cool externally! Yaro and Gideon offered me a 50% share of Become a Blogger. I would create the content, and they would handle the promotion. So it started as a partnership. Eventually this became a 75/25 arrangement.

Yaro Starak, Gideon Shalwick, and I working together for BAB

Later on, when I was looking to leave my job, I knew that I had to go all-in on something. I decided to see whether I could buy out Yaro and Gideon. We had a Skype call, and we talked about it.

Ultimately, Gideon says that he and Yaro really wanted to see the Become a Blogger brand continue, and they knew that there was a need in the market. They just didn’t have the energy to continue with it. They felt that I had put so much into the brand already that it should be mine.

Since this is the first time we’re publicly talking about this, let me take this opportunity to say a very public THANK YOU to Gideon and Yaro!

What Has Happened Since Then?

Gideon says that what he was really looking for when he left his job 10 years ago was a sense of fulfillment. He’s gone through lots of projects looking for something that will give him that sense of happiness and wholeness.

He got close with Rapid Video Blogging. With this project, he was building a business around his natural talents.

Rapid Video Blogging

But things changed when his first child was born a few years ago. He felt that he needed to change his tactic in order to protect his family. Rapid Video Blogging relied on his personal brand for its success. He started to worry about what might happen if he was no longer able to make videos in the same way. So he looked to make a change from a personal brand to a business brand, something that could run independently.

First there was Splasheo, which Gideon describes as a “great little business.” However, it still felt out “out of flow” for Gideon. He managed to make it “mostly automated,” but it never reached its full potential. Having said that, it was the most successful thing he’d done to that point, and he’s still amazed at how much traffic it gets given that it’s completely passive now.

Splasheo

His next business, Veeroll, was very successful, but once again he found himself feeling out of flow, moving too far away from his natural gifts and talents. In going down that path, he reached a point of burnout. About a year ago, he was selling Veeroll like crazy, and feeling more and more drained. He was what he calls “below the threshold,” at the point at which he could no longer find his flow. Every little thing was setting him off.

Veeroll

He made some changes and tried to make his work more creative, but ultimately he was still on the same path, and he had to undergo a more radical transformation. Gideon describes this as his “resurrection.” He believes that there can be no real change unless there is a kind of death and resurrection. So he had to die to his old way of doing things in order to be reborn.

How to Go From Burnout to Reinventing Yourself and Starting a Movement

Entrepreneur Burn Out

I think we all understand what it’s like to feel trapped in a business that’s not in alignment with who you are. But how do you start to make that change?

Gideon says it all comes back to how you feel and how you want to feel. What is it that we’re really after in life? Why do we pursue money, possessions, success, fame, and power? It’s not for those things in and of themselves. It’s because we want to feel fulfilled. We think that these things will make us feel good and make us feel whole, but that’s a fallacy.

If these external things become your prime focus and your end goal, Gideon says, you’ll get out of your flow pretty quickly and you’ll start burning out. And once you’re burning out, you’ll be drained physically, emotionally, and mentally. Gideon feels that he was on the road to a literal, physical death by straying from his flow. His hair was going grey and falling out, his skin was ageing—he could see himself ageing faster and faster. He had to be reborn.

He locked in on this idea of energy. When you’re energized, you feel good. So you’ve got to find those things that make you feel energized as you do them. That’s what it means to be fulfilled, for Gideon. It means you’re full of energy.

But how do you do that and still be an entrepreneur?

For Gideon, it starts with finding your PRIMAL ACTIONS. What are the actions, the things you can do, that you are called to? What are the things that you feel you were born to do? For Gideon right now, it’s writing. For me, it’s teaching. These will be things that are aligned with your natural, unique gifts.

On the flip side, you’ve got to avoid doing the things that you’re not gifted for. Step away, listen to your inner voice, your intuition, or God —whatever you call it— and you’ll find that certain actions make you feel more at peace when you’re doing them. Those things are your primal actions. They energize you as you’re doing them. They make you feel good.

It’s easy to forget these things because sometimes the outside world gets louder than your inner voice. You’ve got to ask yourself…

“What are the core primal actions that I can take that make me feel good while I do them and that serve the world?”

Ask Yourself

Okay, got it. So once I’ve uncovered my primal action, what do I do next?

Gideon says that lots of gurus will tell you to just follow your passion and everything will be fine. But what they forget to mention is that “passion” has lots of different meanings. At one time, “passion” indicated suffering, as in the Passion of Christ. In more modern terms, “passion” might mean sexual desire. And, even if we just think of your passion as your dream in life, how are you supposed to know what your dreams are?

Gideon’s hack is to find the primal actions first, and then find out what things in the world you’re passionate about and decide on a certain area of passion. Then, you apply your primal action in that area. The area of passion you choose is your PRIMAL PASSION.

This isn’t something you’re born with. It’s something that you get to choose. Your primal actions are tapping into your God-given gifts and talents, but your primal passion is something you choose. You might be interested in a lot of different areas, but you choose one that you want to focus on.

How do you know which area to choose? Ask yourself, what’s the thing that you can’t stop talking about? There’s your answer! For me, that’s blogging. For Gideon, it’s personal development and entrepreneurship.

Once you’ve identified your primal passion, it’s time to start thinking about your PRIMAL PURPOSE. This creates a “why” for you. It helps you to make your work about something bigger than yourself. And, again, this is something you get to choose. Gideon believes that you find your purpose in life, so it’s not something that most of us are born with. What fuels your actions and your passion? Why do you do what you do? How can you use your skills and experience and passion to make the world a better place?

Once you have identified your primal actions, your primal passion, and your primal purpose, you’ll find that you access your PRIMAL MOVEMENT pretty naturally. If those first three things are well-aligned, the movement will happen almost automatically.

But you can’t start with the movement. Otherwise, you’ll be listening to the outside world too much, and that’s a good recipe for being extremely unhappy.

Start from the primal action, and as you move through the primal passion and primal purpose, it’ll become clear what your primal movement is. It’s about the change you’re making in the world.

It’s hard work, and you’ve got to keep at it day after day after day, but it’s all right because you’ll love what you’re doing. And eventually, the movement will run on its own.

The great thing about a movement is that it’s so much bigger than the leader. Maybe it’s about the individual at first, but it should grow and become more about the community and about making the world a better place.

Homework

Homework

Now, I don’t usually give homework on this podcast, but today’s a special day. So if you’re listening to this episode, whether it’s in 2016 or 2050, share your primal action, your primal passion, your primal purpose, and how it contributes to a movement. 

You can do so in the comments below. You’ll have to do some brainstorming, so feel free to brainstorm in the comments and we can have a conversation that way.

But I want to know your primal action, primal passion, primal purpose, and your sense of the movement you’re heading towards.

And if you’re interested in learning more about Gideon’s work, head over to entrevana.com, which is his latest project. It’s all about helping burned-out entrepreneurs find their mojo again. If you feel like you’re in blogger hell, he can help you get back to nirvana!

Resources Mentioned

• Gideon’s projects:
  • entrevana.com – Gideon’s newest project; helps burned-out entrepreneurs find their mojo again
  • Splasheo – helps people create professional videos using templates
  • Veeroll – helps people manage their video ads
  • Rapid Video Blogging – teaches people how to make money with videos.

Infographic

The post How to Start a Movement with Your Blog – with Gideon Shalwick appeared first on Become A Blogger by Leslie Samuel.

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