Products and e-Books

If you have an extensive amount of knowledge on a given topic, you can capitalize on that by creating and selling products and e-books, like Chris Guillebeau at Unconventional Guides and Naomi Dunford at IttyBiz.

You could create e-books, audio books and even things like workbooks and planning kits. For instance, if you were an organizational expert or a virtual assistant, you might create kits that help your customers organize different areas of their life and business, like a project management planning kit, or if you were a fitness expert, you might have a weight loss planning kit.

The Pros: The great thing about products and e-books is that they are completely automated and can literally sell while you sleep. Once they’re created and on your site, they can continue selling for you over the life of your business. Also, as you create more products, there’s the opportunity for cross-selling, up-selling and bundling.

The Cons: The bad side is they can take a lot of work on the front end to create, so for instance, if you’re wanting to write an e-book, it might take you several months or more to actually generate the content and format the book. There’s also the delayed gratification. It won’t start generating income for you until you have it on your site. Of course, if you’ve created popular products in the past, you could have an advanced selling list, where your followers can purchase the product or book (perhaps with a discount of other incentive) before it releases.

A Membership Site

As with products and e-books, all you really need to start a membership site is extensive knowledge of a topic (and, of course, the willingness to build up your subscribers). Yaro Starak at Entrepreneurs-Journey.com, Dave Navarro at The Launch Coach, and Darren Rowse at Problogger have all created successful followings based, at least in part, around membership sites.

It doesn’t have to be an overly-complicated setup. You could have a members-only blog, send exclusive emails or have a members-only forum, and it could be a really fun way to stay engaged with your following. If you were a personal trainer, for instance, you might have an online fitness club that provides recipes, exercise videos and support for your subscribers. The possibilities are limited only by your creativity.

The Pros: The great thing about membership sites is that you don’t have to create the content in advance, so if you are able to generate a lot of initial buzz and interest, you could theoretically start generating additional revenue for your business right away, without having to wait for the content to be created. Also, you can create products and e-books from the content as you go.

The Cons: Naturally, generating interest and acquiring subscribers can be a challenge (although the same will be true of getting customers to purchase products). Another disadvantage might be the commitment required from you. If it’s a year-long program, for example, you have to at least deliver on what was promised for the program for that length of time, but that can take as little as a few hours a week to maintain.

Tele-seminars and Workshops

Laura Roeder has created a successful model for her business by offering online classes geared toward her target audience. You can create your own targeted tele-seminars and workshops that use audio, video and articles (or a mix of all three), and you can choose to have them completely automated or with you as the facilitator.

As with a membership site, this is another great way to stay engaged with your customers and clients, and again, the possibilities are only limited by your imagination. This is a great way to break down frequently asked questions or areas within your business where people often contact you for free advice or consulting.

The Pros: The great thing about tele-seminars and workshops is that you can create the content once and simply repeat it time and time again, whereas with membership sites, you have to continually create content, depending on your setup. Also, they can be really quick to implement. You don’t necessarily have to create quite as much content as with a product or e-book, and you can use a lot of ready-made services to get it going, like EventBrite, Calliflower and WebEx.

The Cons: Generating interest is always going to be an issue, regardless of the content model you choose, but aside from that, the other possible disadvantage for tele-seminars and workshops is your own boredom — especially if you actually facilitate the events and host them with any regularity. Of course, you can always alternate the events that you do, or get someone to help you with facilitation.

There are a variety of ways to build additional revenue streams into your business using content, and the great thing is, you’re probably already creating content through your blog, newsletter, or podcast, so you should have a good base of material to start with.

What ways have you used content marketing to generate income in your business?

Photo by Flickr user Kanzeon Zen Center, licensed under CC 2.0

The notion may seem anti-social, but in fact I think it has more to do with an evolutionary principle. If I seek out things that I need or run errands when there are less people about, there will be less competition for available resources, and I won’t be nearly as stressed out as I might otherwise be. Obviously, because of work schedules not everyone has the ability to do this, but it’s one of the major advantages of working from home.

While the Cat’s Away, the Mouse Will Work

The holidays are not a great time for doing much of anything. The malls are packed, transit is unbearable, and even the gym gets prohibitively busy for about three or four weeks following Christmas and New Year’s Eve celebrations. When there’s downtime for most, I spend the least amount of time on personal an leisure activities. Instead, I turn to work.

Work is the one refuge for the beleaguered loner during the holidays, for the very simple reason that almost no one else is doing any. This is especially beneficial if your job in any way involves competing with colleagues for publication space, as it does in my case, but it can also be useful in many other ways to any number different types of remote workers.

Less Distraction

During the holidays, and especially the Christmas season, I’ve noticed a significant decrease in the amount of Internet chatter going on. Twitter is a much less active place, as is Facebook, at least in my personal experience.

Even the news cycle seems to lull around Christmas, or maybe I just hear about it less because of the dip in social media activity. TV is totally bereft of any new content, and becomes a veritable wasteland of holiday special repeats and marathons of shows that last for 16 hours and can be pretty tedious, even if you’re a fan to begin with.

Your inbox fills up at a fraction of the pace you’re used to during ordinary working days, too. There was a day just recently when I received only five emails, total, for example. I can’t remember the last time that happened, but I guarantee it was long before I started making my money working online.

Less Competition

I know I already mentioned that there is less competition over the holiday period which can be good news for writers like me, but it also applies to other fields in less obvious ways. For example, holiday cover work is a great opportunity to make some extra money during a time when many people are on vacation. You’re especially well-placed to take advantage of this opportunity if you don’t yet have a family, or are semi-retired and don’t mind the time it takes away from your holiday.

In order to get some extra work over the holidays, make your employer and coworkers aware of your desire to help out long before the Christmas season actually hits. If you have to, make sure you put in some time beforehand training up and asking about how to go about doing the jobs you might be asked to cover when the time comes. If your organization is aware you know how to do the job, it’ll make their decision to use you when needed a lot easier.

A Gift for Yourself

While it can be hard to summon the motivation to go to work when everyone else around you is in the process of unwinding completely and enjoying the season, it an also be very rewarding. Just because the world slows down when the year winds down, doesn’t mean it stops completely. There’s still plenty of gears that need turning, and best of all, you’ll be in a much better position to pick and choose from a relative wealth of work.

Don’t get me wrong, I still crave a break. And a break I shall have, but it’ll be a time-shifted one, designed to take place at a time when everyone else has gone back to work.

Did you work over the holidays?

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Before you get your hopes up, let me warn you that this post isn’t going to turn into an episode of “Weeds.” Instead, it’ll provide some much more tame (but workable) suggestions about how to make a little passive income on the side while you continue your main pursuit of a career on the web.

Write and Publish an e-Book

It may seem like a daunting task to write and distribute a full-length e-book, but look around. Just about everyone who works with social media seems to have managed to release at least one e-book. The reason it appears to be such a popular endeavor for those working in the social web is the multiplicity of angles there are on the subject. Your own specialized area is probably ripe with topics that would merit covering in a book-length work.

You may not even have to actually write a book to create a book. Check your existing IP to see if you have enough material to publish. It could be an archive of blog posts, or something much more technical, but if you think an audience may exist for it, go ahead and publish it. Actually creating an e-book and posting it for purchase requires almost no overhead, so any revenue you generate is profit, even it it’s only a small amount.

There are various services online that will publish and distribute your e-book. Take a look around and find one that’s right for you.

Rent Out Your Extra Space

This is definitely not a problem I have personally, but some web workers may find that they have tons of room at their home/office that they just aren’t doing anything with. You could fill that gaping hole with cats and/or flea market bric-a-brac, or you could offer it up to other, more space-challenged individuals in exchange for cash.

You can find renters yourself via an ad on craigslist or Kijiji, or you could use Sparefoot, a new web site specifically designed for the purpose. On Sparefoot, you can create an account and list for rent any space you’re not using, including rooms in your house, a garage, parking spot, empty lot, shed or whatever other square footage you might have.

On the other hand, if you’re like me and find your belongings need more nooks and crannies to be crammed into than you have available, Sparefoot also provides great search tools for finding space to rent. That doesn’t generate any income, but it might pay dividends in terms of peace of mind.

Rent Out Your Car

I suspect people will be far less inclined to rent out the use of their car than they would be to rent out extra space, but as long as you do it intelligently there’s no reason it can’t become a profitable way to get some income out of that depreciating investment sitting in your driveway.

I live in a major metropolitan area, so I don’t actually own a car myself. I used to, for the better part of my life, when I lived in a much quieter, less densely populated area. As a result, I got used to the immediacy of private transport. Not that I don’t like public transit, but sometimes you just want to be able to pick up and go somewhere, on your own schedule instead of on someone else’s.

That’s why I occasionally give a friend of mine $25 to rent the use of his car during the day (he uses transit to commute to work, and generally only needs the car on weekends), plus the cost of giving it back to him with a full tank. He doesn’t feel like the cost of maintaining a car in the city is wasted, and I get to experience the freedom of car ownership once in a while.

There are countless ways to generate so-called “passive revenue,” but those I’ve mentioned above are specifically tailored to people who work from home. They generally don’t require too much extra effort on your part, and they take advantage of your position as someone who doesn’t have to commute to an office for work, or who can be on site as a facility manager at your home during most hours of the day.

Do you have any other suggestions for generating additional revenue? What are some creative solutions you’ve come across for supplementing your income?

Photo credit: Monochrome

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As a freelance online community consultant, I spend a lot of time thinking about ways to stabilize my income to reduce the ups and downs that come with having my own business. The most obvious solution is to manage your pipeline to make sure that you have new projects to replace the ones that are completing, but it’s also a good idea to have alternative income streams to complement your main client work and fill in any gaps.

In an ideal world, you finish one project on Friday with your next project ready to start on Monday; however, we don’t live in an ideal world, and even our best planning efforts occasionally go awry. While my client base has been fairly steady, I’m always concerned that I might have gaps. I would rather have plans to fill those gaps rather than being caught off guard and unprepared, so recently, I have been experimenting with alternative income streams that will generate regular revenue without relying entirely on client work.

This isn’t a new topic on WebWorkerDaily. Georgina recently wrote a great post with some of her recession avoidance techniques: saving more, managing debt and spending, and strategies for finding new work and staying motivated, while Anne Zelenka wrote a great post with 10 new ways to make money online, and Mike and Aliza followed up with 10 more new ways to make money online. However, I wanted to write about my personal experiences with alternative income streams.

Regular blogging and writing gigs in your area of expertise are a good place to start. I started blogging here on WebWorkerDaily last December, and I have really enjoyed the experience. I can do the writing whenever I have some spare time, in between client meetings or in the evening, so it doesn’t interfere with my regular client work. In this case, I get to do something that I love and I get paid for it, so the revenue stream from blogging was an easy first step for me.

My second regular income stream comes from a self-published book. Late last year, I decided to take the online community content from my blog and turn it into an e-book: “Companies and Communities: Participating Without Being Sleazy“. While I started this project as a PDF e-book, it eventually snowballed into something bigger with Kindle and paperback versions now available. This was a great experience in a couple of ways.  Not only is the revenue from the book useful, but by taking the existing content from my blog, updating it and reorganizing it, I found several gaps in my writing where I had talked about the later steps in the community-building process without first outlining the work that needs to come before. You need to be a little careful with this approach, since you must make sure that you own the rights to the content before republishing it. If you are blogging for a company, you probably don’t have the right to republish that content.

I am also experimenting with training classes. I held my first Yahoo Pipes training class last week in Portland, Ore., with about 10 students. As a first class, it went pretty well, but I still need to work on the course content to make a few improvements before I do a second class in late June. I’m hoping to expand my training classes with face-to-face training on other topics, like online community management, and I also hope to reformat the material into an online course, too. Offering it online would allow me to make it available to a wider audience and, hopefully, increase the frequency of the class.

These efforts have come with a whole new set of challenges for me. The biggest challenge has been pricing, which seems to be part art form, part science that I have yet to master. I tend to make the rookie mistake of pricing things too high and then needing to offer discounts or lower prices later. I am starting to get a better feel for pricing these types of products and services, so hopefully this should get easier. My second challenge is marketing. While I do a pretty good job of promoting my work and getting the word out via social media, the people who need more training and my book are not the people who live and breathe social media, so I need to get better at finding traditional marketing channels to augment my marketing strategy.

What are your alternative income streams? What are your success stories, and what challenges have you experienced?

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When I think about projects, I always separate them into two categories: revenue generating and non-revenue generating. A non-revenue generating project is almost always going to be a professional development activity, although revenue generating activities can be classified as professional development as well.

VirtualVocations: Paid Work

Finding revenue generating projects is probably the most difficult. My number one source is, unsurprisingly, the internet. Sites like Problogger.net provide great job boards where all of the work is done remotely, but it can feel a bit crowded there. I recently came across VirtualVocations, which features different kinds of job listings, and has a smaller user pool, meaning more chance to land any given job.

VirtualVocations features a lot of the more common teleworking positions, including marketing specialists, transcriptionists, writers, and programmers. As with many sites of this type, listings are a little hit-0r-miss, and sifting through them is mostly left to the job hunter’s discretion,

The nice thing about VirtualVocations is its community support. Possible scams are quickly flagged in the user forums, and members share job information and their experiences readily. There are also some handy resources available from the forums, like this rate sheet detailing how much you should charge for transcription services.

[places for writers]: Professional Growth

I’m not always out to get paid. Sometimes I want to hone my craft, which in my case means improving my writing. Places for writers offers me the opportunity to do so, and to contribute to the online literary community in the process.

Obviously, this one is a little skewed towards those of you working as writers, but there is no field of web work in which good writing skills will not pay off. The written word is still the primary means of internet communication, and in all cases, the better you are at communicating, the better you will be at your job.

Places for writers offers opportunities for those interested in all types of writing, from poetry to non-fiction. It features open calls for submissions from small press and literary publications, a few job listings (though these are not often updates), information on how to pursue writer’s grants, and resources for writers.

A lot of the content is Canada-focused, but in most cases, the information and resources are available and applicable to all those interested in improving their writing and adding to their clips.

I love having multiple things on the go, and sites like those I’ve listed here today help me achieve that. The only problem is avoiding a situation where I’ve taken on much more than I can handle, but that’s an entirely different article.

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The problem, as is always the problem with internet advertising, is finding a simple, cost effective way to bring my ads to potential customers who’re actually looking for my services. Google Ads are one way to try to insure you reach the people you intend to, but advertising networks are another.

Design Ads is a brand new network (doesn’t officially launch until 2009, in fact), which provides a targeted solution for those in the web design field. Ad network models are successful because they ensure a healthy cycle of targeted material that will remain fresh and relevant to viewers, so you’re ad won’t become stale or melt into the background by virtue of visitors seeing it every time they go to a specific site.

The people behind Design Ads clearly know their target market. They list among their discriminators for publishers the fact that the advertising is simple, and clutter free. Design blogs and online magazines will, after all, be more concerned than other outlets about the effect of advertising on their site’s layout. Revenue rates are reasonable, and are priced according to unique visitor statistics, not click-throughs.

One-at-a-time ads is a boon for advertisers, as well, since they will get the the exclusive focus of visitors to member sites. Cost of ads is variable, depending on a number of factors, including network membership and traffic numbers. Design Ads currently projects a cost of $2,500 per month, which isn’t that much if the network becomes your primary advertising outlet, as it is designed to be.

Design Ads is just getting started, and whether you’re looking to advertise, or you have a design site and want to generate some extra revenue, it might be a good time to get on board.

Full disclosure: Design Ads is operated by David Appleyard, who is a freelance contractor for TheAppleBlog, part of the GigaOmnimedia network.

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Today, Freshbooks announced that it is releasing industry benchmark data as an added benefit to freelancers as well as micro and small business owners, arming them with information to better manage business revenue and growth. Based on the anonymous aggregation of data based on input from FreshBooks’ clients, the new reports illustrate billing trends.

Data in the reports includes

• average monthly revenue
• invoice size
• time until payment is received
• percentage of clients paying online vs. via mail

The input from over 500,000 businesses make up the data which used to only be available top clients but will now be made publicly available on a quarterly basis.

Recurring Revenues Rule

The report shows that 20% of the businesses using FreshBooks have recurring revenues.

According to a FreshBooks spokesperson, “recurring revenues can be unique across professions, (so) it is really more a factor of how much of your revenues are recurring and that can smooth out your cash flow.”

Knowing where your business stands on recurring revenues in comparison to your peers can influence how you look at your business model and lead to positive changes and growth. From a Web working perspective, recurring revenues could be represented by Web hosting, monthly retainers, or monitoring fees.

This report has made me think not only about the importance of identifying recurring revenue opportunities for my own business, but also made me realize that I haven’t been properly set up the recurring revenues that I already do have established.

Web Worker Data

Web Workers can access relevant data for Web Professionals to access Q3 data. Sample data includes the amount invoiced last quarter ($18,961.68), the average time to collect payments (16 days), and the average amount invoiced per client billed ($2680.23). Web Professionals – which includes Web developers, Webmasters, Web Analysts and Online Community Managers – received 35.1% of revenues from new clients and 11.9% recurring revenues. Data from IT professionals has also been compiled.

While the company won’t reveal what percentage Web workers make up out of their overall clients, they do say that the percentage is very high due the nature of who is more likely to use SaaS and that Web workers are at the heart of FreshBooks.

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