There are 3 things you can sell online and depending on which one you pick will determine whether you stay stuck at your current income or excel by doubling or tripling it over the next few months.

I call these 3 things methods. It’s a way to sell something. You can either sell a service, a product or a subscription. Let’s dig down into each one step-by-step.

Method #1 – Sell Services

A service is a duty you perform for a fee. That means that this method is dependent on your time. For example, a coaching or consulting engagement would mean that you would trade money in exchange for advice. If you do not perform this task or duty, you do not make money.

Other service-based tasks are speaking, training, website development, graphic design, writing, professional organizing, personal training, and any other duties where you have to see someone in a given amount of time in order to make money.

Method #2 – Sell Products

A product can be both a digital or physical item that you would produce. That means that this method is dependent on your expertise. The digital product would be something that you provide for download off a web page, for example, an MP3 file or a PDF document. A physical item would be something that you would package and send in the mail, for example, a binder filled with activity sheets, CDs, DVDs, or a spiral bound book.

Producing a product filled with your expertise is a wonderful way to service a lot more people without consuming tons of your time. This is especially useful if you teach the same process over and over and over. Instead of working with someone 1-to-1 over the phone, you would instead sell the same process in a package that people can then order and study at their own pace.

Method #3 – Sell Subscriptions

Getting money each month over a fixed period is another way you can make money online. Otherwise known as continuity programs, this method is dependent on your infrastructure.

I first heard the concept of infrastructure through Andrea J. Lee, author of Multiple Streams of Coaching Income. In an audio series detailing the advanced multiple streams of income, Andrea pointed out that most coaches and consultants share information when instead, they should be sharing infrastructure. Examples of this are online job boards and Peter Shankman’s HARO.

The concept of building your business to sell infrastructure is new for me, but once I started to apply it to my own business, it started to make sense. Infrastructure is simply the framework of a system that serves a specific need (dictionary.com). Examples of infrastructure based on the subscription method are membership clubs, online applications such as web hosting, shopping cart system, online assessment tool, telephone bridge line, and other tools that that would require people to pay a certain amount of money each month to access your application.

I believe that licensing or certification programs fall into this method, but only if they’re required to pay a monthly or annual fee to continue the use of the program. For example, my mom is a nurse and she needs to pay annual dues so her certification remains valid. Without it, she cannot work as a nurse.

3 Methods vs. 3 Income Streams

How do these 3 methods - services, products, subscriptions - fit into the 3 income streams I spoke about in last week’s article (fixed, leveraged and residual)? Here’s a Venn diagram that covers the 3 income streams and the 3 methods to earning money.

So, now I have to explain this diagram, don’t I? I will, but in another post.

if you want to learn which method and income stream I use in my business, join me on my free preview call series where I’ll share with you how I earn an extra 4, 5 and 6 figure income per month, all while enjoying a 4-hour workday. Reserve your spot for this no-cost call.

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Post tags: andrea j lee, HARO, multiple streams of coaching income, peter shankman

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About a year ago, I asked over 400 business people how much money they made online using tools such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs and podcasts.

Only 1 in 10 who responded to the survey made $10,000 or more. This is so sad, yet I totally understand why.

With all the different strategies you’re learning online, you’re probably doing everything and nothing is clicking.

Well, I use a proven, profitable playbook that ties everything together. I’ve done it and you can too. And I’m sharing this playbook on this FREE Teleclass Series.

The FREE preview teleclass series starts Wednesday June 17, 2009 at 5pm EDT (New York time). It’s a sneak peek of all the great content you’ll get at my Online Profit Success Workshop taking place in Toronto, Canada from September 16-18, 2009.

To reserve your spot, click here to learn more.

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Shannon Cherry is launching a new membership program called Penny Pinching Publicity (love the alliteration) and has asked me to share my wisdom during one of her monthly membership calls.

I’m going to talk about the 5 ways you can attract leads using social media. It’s a perfect tie-in with publicity. I’m not sure how you can register for this program, but I’ll find out and post the link here.

If you’re curious about what Penny Pinching Publicity has to offer, it is your template in a box. In other words, imagine having all the resources in place to get your publicity machine working for you. No struggling to write a good press release. No worries about finding media contacts. NO hassles on figuring out how to do marketing that attracts customers and clients. That’s what Penny Pinching Publicity is all about. It’s like having your own PR consultant on speed dial.

Each month, you’ll learn tactics and skills to get you and your business noticed by journalists in your own backyard - and across the country. You’ll save thousands by doing exactly what PR firms do without hiring a PR firm!

If you want access to my session, plus all the other goodies in Shannon’s club, click here to start your membership.

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I’m delighted that Erin Blaskie asked me to speak at her annual Summer Speaker Series. The virtual event held entirely over the phone features 30 speakers.

If you sign up now, you’ll get access to the remaining 19 live sessions, plus the recordings from the previous 11 sessions.

I speak on June 17th at 1pm ET on one of my more popular topics called 5 Things You Can Do in the Next 50 Days To Increase Your Passive Income by 50% Using Social Media. Click here to register for this event…

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Milana Leshinsky, Alexandria Brown, Kendall Summerhawk, Melanie Benson Strick, Ramon Williamson, Suzanne Falter-Barns, Michael Port, Scott Stratten, Kim Castle, Andrea J. Lee and countless others whose information products I’ve digested.

Although their strategies differ, the one thing they all agree on is that you should create multiple streams of income in your business. There are many ways to generate money in your business, but we can group them into 3 broad categories.

They are either fixed, leveraged, or residual. Of these, only 2 can free up your time.(And you’ll notice that I left out passive because in my mind, no income stream is truly passive. In other words, you’ll need to do something in order to keep moola rolling in).

Let’s go through each one by one:

• Fixed - The dictionary defines fixed as “not fluctuating or varying.” In other words, this income streams doesn’t move. Sadly, the income of most consulting and coaching businesses are set up this way. You would charge the client an hourly rate and then you do a certain task during that hour.

  Examples of this are hourly coaching sessions or website development. As you’ve probably noticed, this model doesn’t scale. You have very little free time to create new products or services because most of your 30-40 hour week is tied up working 1-to-1. That means your income will be stuck at a certain level which is typically the mid to high 5-figure range. At this point, all you’ve done is replace the salary you’ve received when you worked full-time for someone else. As Kendall Summerhawk said on her blog on the same topic, “You end up not only feeling burnt out but feeling broke too, even though you’re working plenty hard.”

• Leveraged - In her book Coaching Millions, Milana Leshinsky describes leverage as “creating the content once, then repurposing it in different formats and at different price points.” This is the first thing I teach my clients to do to help them transition from a fixed income stream.Examples of leveraged income are recordings from a workshop that are sold on DVD as a home study course or blog posts that are published as a physical book. The whole idea is to create the content once, then produce it in a variety of formats.

• Residual - When an old television show goes into syndication, most actors will get a small royalty. This is a similar concept that can be used in your business. I first came across this strategy through Milana’s book, however, I’m going to define it a little differently from how Milana did. Residual is when you create a product or service and then you earn money through a subscription model. My monthly membership club, Lead Attractor School, falls into this model. So too does a licensing program. Also, if you sell a service, you can collect money monthly. Online shopping cart systems, such as Cartville, are a great example of this.

Of these 3 income streams, only leveraged and residual can free up your time. And if you want to learn which specific strategies I use in my business, join me on my free preview call series where I’ll share with you how I earn an extra 4, 5 and 6 figure income per month, all while enjoying a 4-hour workday. Reserve your spot for this no-cost call.

Are you earning multiple streams of income? If so, how? Share by leaving a comment below.

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I recently achieved a weight-loss goal. I was able to release 20 pounds in six months thankfully, have kept it off.

Now that I’ve reached my weight loss goals, it isn’t time for me to sit back, relax, and eat all the junk food I desire. Instead, I do activities and I eat foods that help me maintain my current weight.

But the tasks I did to help me release 20-lbs aren’t the tasks I use to maintain my current weight. I refine my eating plan and my activities at the gym to help me maintain - and even surpass - my current weight.

This is similar to your social media marketing strategy. Just because you’ve reached some of your social media goals, doesn’t mean it’s time to relax. Instead, you need to refine what you’re doing because the things you did with social media to help you reach your current goals aren’t the same things you should be doing to maintain or surpass them.

So, how do you do this?

You need to make a decision about who will continue to do the social media tasks in your business. Some of you may be thinking about giving up on social media because it takes to much time. Others of you might be contemplating outsourcing some of the social media tasks that you no longer enjoy.

In his book A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, Eckart Tolle states that there are 3 modalities of awakened doing:

• Acceptance,
• Enjoyment and
• Enthusiasm

When you’re doing a task, if you’re not in the state of acceptance, enjoyment or enthusiasm, you need to refine your approach. You are now ready to move into what I call the 3 Modalities of Business Refinement - eliminate, delegate or automate.

In this his book the 4 Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss talks about elimination, automation and delegation. He states that when you eliminate, automate or delegate tasks, you then create liberation. Ferriss states:

“It is not only possible to accomplish more by doing less, it is mandatory.”

Here’s a checklist you can use to decide what to eliminate, automate or delegate:

___ Have you lost the joy in using a specific social media tool?

___ Can your virtual assistant approve new friends on Facebook, follow new people on Twitter or make new connections on LinkedIn following your criteria?

___ Is there a tool online that can do some of your social media tasks for you?

— Is there a social media tool not helping you achieve your business goals?

— Is there something else in your business that you can outsource to free up your time to use social media?

If you’ve answered yes to any of the questions above, either eliminate the task, delegate it to an assistant or automate it using an online tool.

Want to Learn More About Social Media Outsourcing?

I’m co-hosting a teleclass on Thursday May 28, 2009 at 5pm EDT with Craig Cannings on the 5 social media tasks you can outsource and still be authentic. Craig opened my eyes on a few issues and I invite you to this free call so you can discover my a-ha moment in regards to this issue.  You’ll be quite surprised. Click here to get more info on this call and to register your spot.

Photo courtesy of Bogaugon

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I write articles online, I write blog posts, and I write articles for my weekly e-zine. While there isn’t a shortage of content, I was becoming overwhelmed trying to write content for all 3 areas.

I want to provide premium content to those subscribed to my e-zine. I wanted to reward those who took the time to give me their email address with content they couldn’t find anywhere else. However, coming up with original content for my e-zine each week was becoming a huge burden given that I was already writing high quality content for my blog and for articles I submit online.

So here’s a strategy that I started to employ that helps me generate content for online article banks, my blog and my weekly e-zine without becoming overwhelmed.

Publish all your content on your blog. Everything. Focus all your writing energy on your blog. If you’re blogging more, you increase traffic to your blogsite and you start to raise your visibility. Try to update your blog with new content once every 2 or 3 days.

Then, for your e-zine, take one of your blog posts and make it the feature article in your e-zine. However, do not publish the entire article in your e-zine. Instead, give an excerpt, say the first 3 or 4 paragraphs, then provide a link near the end that states:

“Click here to read the rest of this article and to provide your comments.”

All your blog posts will need to include your resource box, 2 or 3 lines that tell people who you are, what you do and a freebie that you’d like them to download.

Two people who do this really well are Kendall Summerhawk and Melanie Benson Strick. If you subscribe to their e-zines, you’ll notice that both of these ladies follow this format. They provide a small excerpt of the article in the body of their ezine, then they invite their readers to go to their respective blogs to read the full article.

I really like this strategy as it enables your readers to comment on the article and they get to meet other people who are subscribed to your ezine. It’s like you are building a small community on your blog and allowing your readers to finally get a chance to meet each other.

So if you are publishing a blog, publishing articles online, and publishing a weekly e-zine, you can cut down on the amount of time it takes you to prepare content for these three areas by following this format:

1. Publish all content to your blog.
2. Choose one article from your blog to publish in your weekly e-zine.
3. Provide an excerpt of the article from your blog in your e-zine, preferably the first 3 to 4 paragraphs.
4. Then, direct the readers of your e-zine to your blog to read the rest of the article and to leave their comments.

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Post tags: article marketing, blogs, ezine content, ezines, kendall summerhawk, melanie benson strick

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Of course, I was upset. My heart started beating, my hands started shaking and I wanted nothing more than to send a cease and desist letter from my lawyer.

But there is a way that you can handle content theft without getting a lawyer involved. Here are my tips on how you can approach the person who has stolen your content so you get the results you’re looking for.

First, take a 15 minute breather. I find that when you fire off an e-mail in the heat of the moment, you tend to regret what you have written. So instead of replying right away, go for a walk, grab some tea, or head out to the gym. Just take a quick break before you take any action.

Next, craft an e-mail where you do not pass blame. One time, I approached someone who had ripped off content from one of my sales pages. She replied to my e-mail stating that she had hired a copywriter to write the content for her. She had no idea that the copywriter plagiarized my content and sold it to her as the finished product. So, here’s a case of someone trusting a freelancer to get the job done, and the freelancer was dishonest.

When you write an e-mail to the person who plagiarized your content, treat it as if the person did not do something wrong. Yes, I know they did something wrong, but the tone of your e-mail should lean towards being forgiving.

For example, you can say in your e-mail:

“Hey, the content on your webpage looks exactly like mine. You may not be aware of it, but since I wrote that content first, can you please remove it or give me credit?”

Last, reward honesty. About 90% of the time, if your e-mail has a tone of forgiveness, the person will come out and admit that they were wrong. Recently, someone who attended my Social Media Telesummit launched her own virtual event. The topic of her virtual event was similar to mine and sadly, she copied content from my sales page for her own.

After approaching her over twitter, she admitted that she knew very little about marketing and felt that the only way she could complete a sales page was to “copy” from who she considered to be the best.

At this point, I felt the need to provide a little bit of coaching. After doing so, not only did she change the content on her sales page so it read less than mine, but she enjoyed a very successful attendance at her virtual event.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you provide free coaching. Also, if you are writing blog posts or articles and you’re giving people permission to copy and paste it on their own blog or in their e-zines, then this is a different story.

However, if the person has copied your content without giving you credit, then this is grounds to send them an e-mail and ask them to stop.

In my virtual event marketing blueprint, I’ll teach you how to create a name for your virtual event so that it does not plagiarize someone else’s. I’m also going to teach you how to write sales copy so that it’s original and fresh. The live training starts on May 19 and there are still spots available. Click here to grab your spot before the price goes up on May 14, 2009.

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Feel free to do so just as long as you don’t edit or alter the content in any way and you include the following: Leesa Barnes is an award winning blogger and critically acclaimed author who helps businesses get active using social media in 3 simple steps. To learn how you can become Marketing Fit, visit http://www.marketingfit.com to get your complimentary to get your complimentary kit called the Marketing Fit Success Kit containing a social media checklist, mindmap, MP3 file and a complimentary subscription to the Marketing Fit ezine.

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“I want to use ads. How can I do that?”

I was completely shocked by the question. The reason is because over the previous 90-minutes, I shared with the audience how to use social media to build rapport, build relationships and then convert those leads into clients. Yet, there was this person in the audience, one of the attendees, who was so focused on ads, he missed the whole point of my presentation.

Social media is all about building rapport. You cannot set it and forget it. You need to cultivate relationships with social media by being present.

Now, being present doesn’t necessarily mean logging in every hour of the hour. Instead being present simply means that you engage with people on a personal level using social media.

The problem with ads is that you launch them in a social media tool, then you have no idea if the right person is seeing that ad. Not just that, but you’re not engaging people on a personal level. Therefore, your social media ad becomes ineffective simply because people will just ignore it.

So, if you’re thinking about using social media, you must look at it as a business development tool. It isn’t the place for you to launch an advertising campaign. Now, you can, however, your time and money is best spent when you’re engaging with people on a personal level.

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I love virtual events and I’m tickled pink that I’ll be speaking to the Canadian Institute of Management on the ways you can get started with social media.

This session will be delivered over webinar, so no matter where in the world you are, you can connect to this timely sesssion.

You can register for this event by clicking here. If you’re a manager, you’ll love this session as I’ll be sharing examples of managers and executives using social media.

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