7 Simple Income Streams That You Can Create
7 Simple Income Streams That You Can Create
7 Simple Income Streams That You Can Create
This is not one of those fluff articles where you hear 20+ obvious (and generally
worthless) tips about how to make money, such as "throw Adsense on your site"
or "sell your used textbooks."
This guide is about how to create real income streams based on real value that
comes from your very real business, whether you're a blogger, freelancer,
professional service provider - whatever.
This is consulting-quality advice that you're getting, stuff that I'll be expanding
into a full workshop in 2010. You're getting my first thoughts on the subject,
with a free workbook to boot, so enjoy the free while it's here. :-)
Let's talk income streams. And how to have more of them. And how to make
each of them complement each other so your entire business gets stronger.
As you read about each of these seven income streams, You may realize that
you're doing some of these already, but chances are you're not leveraging them
as much as you can. The free workbook will help you with that. You may not
use all 7 of these streams, but I've tried to arrange them so that they "cascade"
and each stream sets you up for the next.
2|P a g e psst ... don't forget to take great notes in the margin.
OFFICIAL KICK-ASS MINI-WORKSHOP NO. 3 • 7 SIMPLE INCOME STREAMS (THAT YOU CAN ACTUALLY CREATE)
STREAM #1: EXTREMELY TARGETED CONSULTING (NOT JUST THE STANDARD STUFF)
Take a look at your business. What do you do? Are you a freelance designer? A
life coach? A marketing consultant? Chances are high that you're offering a
general service (even if you're niched) that is diluting your brand. Here's an
example. You're a life coach and you offer a free consultation or a general
coaching package that's really just a bunch of hours you trade for money.
That's great if your target market is someone just looking for a life coach. But
the problem here is that you're being too general. I don't want a life coach. I
probably need one, but the general need hasn't crystallized enough for me to
really feel like it's what I want. But what if I see you're a life coach that has
consulting packages like these?
Emergency Calming Techniques - Havi Books from The Fluent Self blog has
an incredible product with this exact name. It's incredibly specific - it
promises to help teach you how to defuse that paralyzing fear that all
entrepreneurs feel at times. I don't feel like I need a life coach yet, but
this? I can identify with. I'll sign up for a few hours of coaching on this.
Streamlining Coaching - I just made this one up, though someone probably
thought of this before me. If a coach said "I could coach you for 4 hours and
help you clarify your goals and make a plan to streamline out all the crap you
don't need to be doing so that you could focus and kick ass," I'd say you
might just have a sale. (Please don't email me about this, though, but thank
you. :-) )
Here's the thing if you're a life coach, you probably already do this for your
clients - but in an all-in-one umbrella. You're not segmenting it. And so you're
offering a global service that's not selling as well as you'd hope and you're
passing up all these mini-streams of income that could come from more targeted
services.
3|P a g e psst ... don't forget to take great notes in the margin.
OFFICIAL KICK-ASS MINI-WORKSHOP NO. 3 • 7 SIMPLE INCOME STREAMS (THAT YOU CAN ACTUALLY CREATE)
If you're not consulting at all, you should be (as long as you enjoy working one-
on-one with people). Even if you're not a "consultant" per se, you have
specialized knowledge and skills that you can offer. Throw some packages up
there, let people know about it, and start enjoying a new stream of income.
Again, this is nothing groundbreaking - but are you doing it? Or are you
offering another me-too global solution instead of offering smaller packages
that address a laser-focused need?
When you download the free workbook I'll step you through how to take your
big thing and turn it into a buffet of smaller services that can pick up sales you're
currently not making now. Read on.
STREAM #2: SMALL PRODUCTS THAT COME FROM YOUR EXTREMELY TARGETED CONSULTING
Once you start selling all these mini-consulting services and working with people
one-on-one, you'll be learning a lot more about what your target market's true
needs are. They'll be asking questions you didn't expect them to ask and they'll
be coming at you with backgrounds / circumstances that challenge you to
improve your advice and strategies.
I hope you'll be taking notes as you go through your consulting sessions with
them. Because if you do, you can start turning your consulting process into a
workshop format, where you'll be able to create a structured set of
worksheets/exercises that will allow people to get the same results without as
much hands-on time for you.
This means you can break that original income stream up into three more
streams:
Premium group workshops where you work with a small group of people in
a one-on-few setting. You'll charge less than you would for one-one one
consulting because you're leveraging your time: On a group coaching call or
4|P a g e psst ... don't forget to take great notes in the margin.
OFFICIAL KICK-ASS MINI-WORKSHOP NO. 3 • 7 SIMPLE INCOME STREAMS (THAT YOU CAN ACTUALLY CREATE)
in-person meeting you'll teach multiple people at the same time; then you'll
meet with each for a smaller one-on-one session.
Most people never get around to creating products because they think it's a
huge undertaking. But it's not.
Don't get me wrong, it does take a bit of time - but if you're building products
based off of your consulting, that's an insanely high-leverage opportunity. All
you need to do is take notes on how you're consulting people and 80% of the
work is already done for you.
So our simple path is consulting -> product. Use your basic consulting - which
will be fairly unstructured at the start - to build a product from the ground up.
When you download the free workbook you'll have a chance to do some
brainstorming on how to make this happen. Read on.
STREAM #3: DEVELOP A MEMBERSHIP PROGRAM THAT PAYS FOR YOUR CONTENT CREATION
Everybody's talking about membership sites these days as if they're some get-
rich-quick deal that will set you up for life. What they don't tell you is that most
of these membership sites either fold quickly, or the owners look at it as easy
money and "phone it in" so people quit after three months. I can tell you I was
pretty pissed when I joined one of these programs, run by one of my heroes, and
he phoned it in.
5|P a g e psst ... don't forget to take great notes in the margin.
OFFICIAL KICK-ASS MINI-WORKSHOP NO. 3 • 7 SIMPLE INCOME STREAMS (THAT YOU CAN ACTUALLY CREATE)
Do this wrong and you turn a customer off for life. Do it right and you transform
them into raving fans. Let's talk about one simple way to do a membership site
right:
When running a membership site, don't "phone it in" and give your
leftovers. Instead, use it as a incubator for future products and services, and
give people real value they can use right now.
This is where that "hero" of mine screwed up. He threw in a bunch of pre-
recorded calls and stuff that would have been considered "freebie" content and
expected $97 a month for it. It was kind of sad, because I'm now no longer
interested in anything that comes from him. Don't be this guy.
Instead, create a product creation schedule and use a membership site to drive
it. For example, you could charge $47 a month for a membership site where
you're essentially creating one consulting-based product per month. Except
instead of creating it up front and then running a launch, you open up your
program and get people to pay you up front.
If you've built up a list or blog following, this can be pretty powerful, because if
you can get people to pre-pay you to create content, you have enough money
coming in so you can step back from hustling up more business and make the
promised material.
This is exactly what I did with my list-building workshop. I knew people needed
it, I knew what I wanted to put into the product, I just didn't have the time up
front to do it. So I pre-sold it to my list, and brought in enough money so I didn't
have to do coaching for 5 weeks and I built the product. Everyone was happy. I
was happy.
But when I did it, it was a one-time deal, not a recurring subscription. I wasn't
planning on making a subscription site until I realized how well it sold.
If you're tight on time you can still create a subscription program. Don't
have enough time to develop products? Then sell a lower cost weekly or
semi-weekly program where you get on the phone and just spend an hour
delivering your expertise. That's what Naomi Dunford of Ittybiz does with
6|P a g e psst ... don't forget to take great notes in the margin.
OFFICIAL KICK-ASS MINI-WORKSHOP NO. 3 • 7 SIMPLE INCOME STREAMS (THAT YOU CAN ACTUALLY CREATE)
here SpeakEasy program. Each month she delivers a few calls with useful,
actionable information for her audience, and she gets recurring income.
If you're tight on ideas you can still create a subscription program. Don't
think you can come up with enough material? Go back to that workshop
idea and extend it. Turn it into a multi-month program, delivered a little at a
time, and as it progresses think to yourself "How can I take this
deeper?" "What things does my audience need to know next?" "What
complimentary topics does my audience need to cover?" You can riff off
your original topic forever and create value worth paying for.
If you just step away from the get-rich-quick crap the self-styled gurus are
pitching you, it's clear to see that there are a lot of different ways you can ease a
membership-based income stream into your business. Start small. Build
up. Enjoy the process.
When you download the free workbook for this post, you'll have a chance to
plan out simple ways to get a membership income going. Read on.
Again, there's a get-rich-quick crowd that will sell you all sorts of elaborate JV
(Joint Venture) training and paint a picture of instant millions if only you do
massive joint venture magic with incredible affiliate participation and ... wait,
how the hell do you get that started from scratch?
Forget the instant millions. There's a better way to simply start generating a
new income stream where you are right now. It can be done so quickly that it
won't cramp your schedule and it's so simple that you've probably never taken it
seriously. But you should, because it's an important way to boost your revenues
and your public profile.
7|P a g e psst ... don't forget to take great notes in the margin.
OFFICIAL KICK-ASS MINI-WORKSHOP NO. 3 • 7 SIMPLE INCOME STREAMS (THAT YOU CAN ACTUALLY CREATE)
Take a look at the kinds of things your audience needs that you don't
provide them right now. For example, if you're a freelance blog designer,
maybe your customers need some technical blog kung-fu training that you
just can't provide (or don't want to provide).
Find someone at or slightly above your success level who provides these
things. Look around you on Twitter for people who have a reputation for
being able to deliver on this kind of training. Or simply ask your following
who they recommend. Check their blogs out, do some background research
and find someone with integrity who has value to add to your audience.
Connect with them and agree to do a small paid product together. There
are a lot of ways to do this. Maybe you have a call with the other person and
they deliver a general consultation on the phone, and you promote a $29
downloadable call to your audience. Or maybe you both do sessions for each
other's audiences and make it a combined product of higher value. It doesn't
have to be elaborate, it just has to be useful and valuable to your audience.
You could do this over and over again, with different people, and gain exposure
to other audiences as well as create a valuable stream of income. Each time a
product launches, you get more attention. Each time you're done, you have
another product to go in your store.
And it goes both ways. If you have no audience at all, you can find
complementary people who have audiences you can leverage and just do
sessions for their audiences - and now you have instant recognition with those
people.
Why more people don't do this, I'll never know. In the free workbook I'll step
you through the initial planning stages for getting this income stream rolling for
you.
8|P a g e psst ... don't forget to take great notes in the margin.
OFFICIAL KICK-ASS MINI-WORKSHOP NO. 3 • 7 SIMPLE INCOME STREAMS (THAT YOU CAN ACTUALLY CREATE)
This means there's a lot of money potentially left on the table if you're not
tapping into the other numbers in that spectrum. For example, let's say you're a
6 - maybe you're a WordPress theme designer who can take an existing theme
and modify the hell out of it.
You do good work, but maybe you're not capable of doing the massive design
mojo that 9s and 10s do. And you really don't want to do the basic-level design
that 3s and 4s do, because it doesn't excite your or it just doesn't pay enough.
If you do this, you open yourself up to a lot more money coming in.
Let's say that you do $1,200 blog theme designs and you currently turn away
simple $400 premium theme customizations because it's not where you want
to spend your time. So you find someone who does them for $300, and you
start offering $400 packages that you'll outsource to them.
Or, if you're in the spot where work is coming in faster than you can handle,
find a few 6s and 7s who you can push work to (for a modest cut of the
action, of course).
This way, you get to do work at the level you're comfortable / happy with, but
you still leave the door open to process these types of work. Of course, this
comes with a little overhead, but if you're comfortable with it you can leverage
this to create a nice income stream.
9|P a g e psst ... don't forget to take great notes in the margin.
OFFICIAL KICK-ASS MINI-WORKSHOP NO. 3 • 7 SIMPLE INCOME STREAMS (THAT YOU CAN ACTUALLY CREATE)
By building a small team of reliable people, you protect yourself from periods of
overwork and give yourself the ability to tap into work streams you currently
don't have access to.
In the free workbook I'll step you through how to start planning your own small
team. Read on.
When we talked about targeted co-consulting, you started thinking about people
who could add value to your audience, and vice-versa. Let's take that a step
further. Let's look at what it is that you do and start thinking about all the other
things that your audience needs.
Let's go back to that freelance blog theme designer. What other products and
services do your customers need? Think about what they purchase before,
during and after their interactions with you:
Web hosting, article writing, SEO optimization, blog consulting, brand consulting,
PHP programming, shopping cart integration, mass media consulting, business
coaching, proofreading ... the list goes on and on.
Now, when they purchase all those services, how much do you earn as a
result? Nothing. Why? Because you're not being proactive. You're not inserting
yourself into the purchase cycle for those "other" services.
What if you took the time to develop relationships with people who provided
all those services, and you created a list of trusted providers for your
clients? How much high value would they get out of that?
First, you could provide a simple referral list, where you direct clients to
these providers and you get a commission for doing so. Or maybe you don't
get any commission at all, but you make an agreement where they'll
recommend their clients to you in the same way.
Second, you could package their services under your own umbrella and just
treat this as an outsource situation where you retain control. it takes a bit
more overhead managing on your own side, but it could open up a huge
income stream for you.
Think about this - this could be the game changer for your business and can help
you tap into other revenue streams that are in demand if you experience a
slowdown in people looking for your core skill .
When you download the free workbook, you'll have a chance to start
crystallizing what this might look like for your business. Read on.
This is taking the previous stream and flipping it on it's head. Instead of you
hustling up customers, you let others do the heavy lifting for you. Here's how it
works.
First, you look for providers of your service who are higher up in the food
chain. You're basically looking for people who charge significantly more than
you do, on average - people who have a clientele willing to pay premium
prices. These are the people who will be doing the work finding customers
for you.
Next, you find ways to position yourself in their value chain. If you're an
SEO copywriter, find an SEO firm and see if they will outsource to you at a
fraction of what they charge (I did this by contacting an SEO firm that billed
at 3x my rate - they do the work of finding the customers, I do the SEO
work). This is great because you don't have to spend time selling customers
on your skills, the person outsourcing to you already has that client's trust.
Finally, you find ways to position your referral list in their value chain. That
SEO firm has customers that may need SEO-friendly WordPress themes or a
new log design, or project management services. You have that handy
referral list. Mark up their rates, offer packages to the company you're
outsourcing to, and bam - they have something they can offer as an added
value to their clients.
This is a killer way to build a revenue stream because you can focus on delivering
value instead of hustling up clients. Again, it's overhead you have to deal with if
you do the last step, but if you can mark up services enough, it can be very much
worth it.
I say this with confidence because I’ve received so many emails and tweets from
people telling me how this mini-workshop has helped them build new revenue
streams.
(After you’re done with the worksheets and you start seeing results, drop me an
email with the juicy details, I always like to hear how lives are being changed).
And one more thing – if this has been a kick-ass experience for you,
please share this mini-workshop it others. Email this PDF to them, or
better yet, send them to http://thelaunchcoach.com/library.
Now, on to the worksheets. Thanks for reading, and I hope to hear of your
success via email real soon!
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