Serve No Master: How to Escape the 9-5, Start up an Online Business, Fire Your Boss and Become a Lifestyle Entrepreneur or Digital Nomad

by Jonathan Green

  Selling services starts out with a lot of client chasing, but eventually the situation flips, and clients are begging you to take their money. So you’ll eventually take back a lot of power, but you’re still allowing other individuals to control and affect your revenue stream. If you go down this path, try to have at least ten clients on your roster at all times, as this diversity protects you from market shocks. If you lose one client only 10% of your revenue is gone – a blow to be sure, but one you can survive.

  There are a lot of ways to sell services beyond the technical. I mentioned earlier that I’d chat to you on the phone for an hour for a hundred bucks. To be honest, I know that in a month, I’m going to have to re-edit this book and push that number through the roof, but that’s how I’m feeling today. And even though it doesn’t sound life or death, it literally is. I’m selling an hour of my lifeforce for $100.

  If we hop on the phone, our conversation will directly affect the course I take in my business.

  Here’s an example of what I mean. If you ask me about writing email headlines, I’ll write a blog post to answer some of your questions – I might even record an entire podcast episode on the subject. The odds are good that if one person is asking me a question in person, a dozen people are thinking the same thing. I think of customer support as a type of a focus group.

  Once you get good with coaching one-on-one, you can expand into group settings. For my Kindle Bestseller Mastermind, I have a coaching call every single Monday at 8 PM EST. That software can handle up to 1,000 people at a time. In that situation, I can charge each person $1 and still make ten times more than I would on a one-on-one call. Obviously, that’s not the actual price, and I would never have that many people on a call, but I want you to get a feel for how dramatic the advantages of scaling in this type of service can be.

  Let’s do a bit of math together. You are going to get in the coaching game. That’s the service you want to sell. You like the sound of my numbers, so you’re going to charge $100 an hour for a private session. If you were to coach clients for forty hours a week, you’d be making four grand a week. Now, please don’t run off and do this – if you schedule that many clients we’ll have to break you out of an insane asylum a few weeks from now. Remember that you need to put breaks in between your clients or you'll burn out in the first week. New people often forget to put in breaks for eating and going to the bathroom and stretching their legs. But let’s just say we stay theoretical, and you’re making that four grand a week, which is pretty impressive. If you were to get into group coaching, when you notice that many people have similar questions, you could offer a two-hour session for just one dollar per person. You can now effect one thousand people an hour rather than just forty people a week. If you do four group sessions a week, you make the same as you did working full-time!

  Now we both know that people won’t pay $1 for a coaching session. The price is too low. You will probably have to charge ten bucks for group coaching and a hundred bucks for a one-on-one.

  All the math aside, if you can help a group of people at the same time, you can make more money while charging a lower price. That’s the power of scaling. When you are making over five hundred dollars for an hour of group coaching, you’ll want to reassess what you charge for a one-on-one. You will end up raising your rates because your time has become more valuable. This is how you can make more and more money very quickly.

  Some services simply don’t work in the group environment, and that’s ok. Over time you can continue to raise your prices and even take on some staff to handle the volume. Something glorious happens around that moment; you become the boss, and you’re working the least while making the most. It takes time to get there, but it feels pretty good to be at the top of the pile.

  60

  Sell Training

  Want to predict the success you’ll have in business? Add together the number of people you help and the amount you effect them. That’s the reason why I sell a combination of training and services. With training, you can help a lot of people a little bit, and with services you can help a few people a lot. I like to have a mix in my business model.

  Let’s say you start with selling a service. You might notice that people keep asking you to help them with the same thing. It doesn’t matter if you are helping people to study, train their dog or fix clogged toilets. Each of these services is something you can then convert into a product. You already know what people ask about the most because they have been asking you.

  So you start with services and then develop the ideal product. You can make a booklet on how to unclog a toilet like a professional plumber using tools found around the house. When someone contacts you with a clogged toilet, you can now offer them two choices. You can email the pamphlet immediately for a small fee, or they can wait however long it takes you to drive over and pay a lot more. This is the basic idea of selling training in addition to a service.

  There are several ways to provide training. They can read it, listen to it, or watch it. This book comes in two modalities. You can read it, or you can listen to it. There is not a video version, although I might try and figure out a way to do that on Amazon just to see if it’s possible. If you were to buy my Kindle training course on my website, you would get access to all three methods of learning. You get a video, an audio version, a worksheet, and even a transcript. I know that people learn in different ways, and I try to meet my customers at the point of their need. That’s also why that course is more expensive. The quality of the content and the quality of the delivery method will determine how much you can charge for something.

  One of the early mistakes people make when selling knowledge is overpricing. We decide that what we know is so valuable that we want to charge what we think it is worth. Instead, we need to realize the value of a large customer base and pay more attention to what the market will bear. I can sell infinite copies of this book through different mediums. I can sell my ideas for a low price and make my profit with volume.

  Structure a product business like a pyramid. As people work their way up the pyramid, they get an increasing amount of access to you. At the very bottom of the pyramid, you have free stuff you give away - blog posts, small reports, and podcast episodes. At this level, they get some basic information, but you don’t talk to them directly. A level above that you have your low-ticket offers. These are training courses that you sell for anywhere from five to one hundred dollars.

  Different markets require different prices. In some sectors, if you charge too little, people won’t trust you. Would you like to buy a Mercedes from me for ten bucks? Your first thought is that that I’m hiding something or trying to trick you because the price is too low. You want to research your market and competition as you are setting prices.

  As you work your way up the pyramid, you move from ebook products up to video courses and monthly group coaching calls. As you move up the pyramid, the number of clients goes down while the price goes up. Even though fewer customers step up to each higher level, the increase in price more than covers the difference.

  You might give away a thousand copies of your free report. From that, ten people buy your book for seven bucks. Then out of those ten people, only one buys your course for ninety-seven dollars.

  At this point, it’s all math. How many people do you need entering the pyramid at the bottom to generate the numbers you desire at the top. You can have multiple products at each level as your business grows.

  At the very top, you’re offering your time in the form of private coaching. I know people in the finance sector who sell coaching for over $100,000 a year. How are they getting away with it? They’re selling people access and increasingly valuable knowledge.

  This is the structure that most online businesses take, and it’s the exact structure of my own business. You just grabbed this book for less than ten bucks. A select few people might have even gotten it for free during a promotion. At the time of this writing, I have no idea what you paid for
the audio edition - Amazon sets the price only after the whole thing has been recorded, so I can’t put it here.

  Right now, you are at the bottom of my pyramid. You might decide that this book doesn’t fit what you are looking for. If you want to learn the technical aspects of running Facebook ads or setting up payment buttons, then this is not the right book for you. Many people want to learn things about marketing online that this book doesn’t cover. Hopefully, you knew what you were getting into, and this book meets your need.

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  Entertainment

  You can make a great living online just by being entertaining. Most of the time I’m online, I visit sites that entertain me. I read one news blog, a few lifestyle blogs and then I hit up a few comic sites that I like. Those are all entertainment. That’s how most people approach the Internet; they are looking to be entertained. All those people at work with managers who track time rather than results have to fill their days, right?

  If your main thing is video games, you can blog about that big time. Whenever I get stuck in a game, I hop online and do a quick search to find a solution. There’s opportunity in blogging about games or in writing guides. You can make blog posts, videos, or podcasts about anything you like. You can even record yourself talking while playing your favorite games. This is a new industry that has created quite a few millionaires in the last few years.

  When you follow the entertainment approach, the path to money is a little different. Often you can’t create something that your followers want to buy. But in the world of the Internet, nothing is more valuable than traffic, and if you can get people to see what you are doing, you can sell that traffic to sponsors. This is exactly what television shows do with product placements and commercials. As long as you don’t recommend stuff you don’t believe in, you can be very successful here.

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  Affiliate

  The odds are pretty good that you know how affiliate marketing works, even if you’ve never actually heard the term before. Have you ever recommended a movie to a friend? What about a car or a book? Well, that’s affiliate marketing – suggesting something you trust to someone you know. It’s just that in the past, you’ve been doing it for free! There are plenty of people who will pay you cold hard cash for telling people about something that you believe in.

  The most common form of this is Google AdWords. You put some code on your website, and Google shows ads that relate to your topics. You don’t have to do anything else, and you get paid each time someone clicks on one of those ads. The payment depends on your market of course – a blog about life insurance will make more money than a blog about your favorite musician - but you make a penny here, and a penny there and it can add up to something quite nice.

  You don’t have any control over the ads because Google shows what it decides is relevant. You don’t have to spend a lot of time researching the right products to promote. All you have to worry about is making the content and getting paid. Google has a ton of rules for advertisers, so you don’t have to worry about shady people making garbage and dumping it on your site. The downside is that you might be “sponsored” by stuff you don’t like.

  Let’s say you posted a review of an office chair, and you didn’t like it. Too clunky, too ugly, a total nightmare for your back. You post a brutal review, saying it was garbage. Google might stick a link to an Amazon sales page for that chair next to your article. That’s because their software only tracks the words on your page, and can’t tell that your review is negative.

  That’s the problem with automation. Computers still aren’t that smart. When you are getting started, this can be a good way to make a bit of money. AdWords isn't the best way to monetize your website long-term, but it is an excellent way to make that first dollar. The first time you actually make real money is a wonderful feeling. The sooner that happens, the likelier you are to stay the course and build something amazing.

  There are a lot of networks that run on this type of automated system. Many of the networks use visual ads rather than the pure text links that Google provides. You can find a network that you like and tell them the type of ads that fit your online presence.

  As you become more active in your advertising, you can lease commercial space on your website. You can charge a price per month for someone to put their banner ad on your site. It’s the same as reading a commercial at the start a radio show. Many people do this as a way to generate income from a free podcast.

  If you want a serious piece of the action, become a true affiliate. You get paid based on actions rather than just sending traffic. There are two markets for this. One is called cost per action (CPA). You send someone to a page that asks for some information. I used to have a KILLER website offering people free gift cards. I was doing great until Walmart sent me a cease and desist for outranking their website.

  As soon as people entered their name and zip code, I got paid around a dollar. If I wanted to play higher stakes, there was a second page that asked for the full mailing address. If people filled that out, I got paid four bucks. The deeper the action, the higher the commission. Filling out an insurance form will get you around 50 bucks while just getting a zip code might give you one.

  In the CPA game, you get paid for leads, not sales. Most of these offers pay you for getting them a new email address. They know their numbers, so they have a whole plan. They will send that person a bunch of different emails that eventually get the person to buy something. They know how many leads it takes to get one customer. They also know what that customer will pay them over the lifetime of their relationship. They do a bunch of math, and then decide what they will pay you for that lead. Most people that operate in this space are doing arbitrage. They buy traffic from one place and resell it somewhere else. That game is all about volume, but if you have a job that pays you well, and you’re looking for more freedom, you can dabble there for sure, and you’ll take off fast once you can sell traffic for more than you pay for it.

  I do a lot of affiliate marketing myself, but I work under a pay per sale system. I send you a hundred customers, and I get a commission. There are some great places to find reliable products to promote – that have a refined sales message, testimonials, and proof, and are just exciting to talk about! Clickbank is where I sell a lot of products.

  You can find stuff in any niche, check it out, and then promote it to your fans. They send you a direct deposit every Wednesday, and that’s pretty nice.

  The best way to make money here is not to send people directly to someone else’s website. Instead, you want to get someone’s email address and establish a relationship. The most valuable asset you can have online is an active mailing list. You want to give your readers a lot of value and only promote things that will improve their lives and fit their needs.

  The idea of being an affiliate is that you sell someone else’s product and get paid a piece of the action. I tend to do a mix of selling my products and promoting other people’s things. When you are starting out, it’s a lot easier to promote someone else’s products until you have time to create your own. They’ve got a lot of proof, slick production, and can be an excellent way to get your foot in the door with your audience. Affiliate marketing is a powerful way to leverage your audience, and it doesn’t require you to make anything to sell them.

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  Born in Fear

  I wasn't born with a sense for business. For a long time, I was TERRIFIED of the thought of starting my own business. I’m a natural entrepreneur, and yet the chains of fear we talked about earlier had a vice grip on my psyche.

  By the time I was in my late twenties, I was near the peak of my career. I was living in London, and I was chasing two careers at once. During the day I would teach at a university, and at night I would help men talk to women in the hopes of finding true love.

  I was making several times more money at night, and I helped tens of thousands of people, but the thought of financial “instability” terrified me. I wanted a respect
able job, the kind of thing that my parents could be proud of.

  I stuck with my educational career. I loved teaching at first, but after a while, it just became so boring. You have to teach the same lessons over and over and over again. It starts to feel like you are trapped in this weird Groundhog Day scenario, living the same day over and over again. I’m sure plenty of great teachers don’t feel that way, but that’s what started happening to me.

  As a teacher, you’re trapped by dozens of rules. Things you can’t talk about, words you can’t use and methods you have to follow. You have to follow a curriculum set by someone thousands of miles away, who has never even heard of your school, let alone met your students. I felt like a puppet, dancing on a very long set of strings.

  I had an anonymous blog at the time about my dating life. I set it up and just wrote about my experiences. I never used anyone’s real name and after a few years, I was shocked to realize that I was getting a LOT of traffic.

  I had no idea people would be interested in what I thought was my personal journal. It became popular, so I wrote a little dating guide to help people get the courage to talk to each other. I think I sold like ten copies. That was pretty cool, but it certainly wasn't enough money to be a real career. I found a few private coaching clients through word of mouth, and that was a lot more successful. Using the Internet to make money still baffled me.

  When my visa ran out, I returned to America with a brand new master's degree and fresh experience from a university with an impressive name in London. I cold-called a local community college to ask for a job teaching. I can’t explain exactly what happened. I went in for a job interview, and they gave me a work schedule. I was already hired. I also cold-called the local elite university. It’s one of the top twenty universities in America according to those magazines that make lists. They didn’t have a job opening, but I talked them into meeting with me. At the interview, they offered me a job that wasn’t even advertised anywhere. They said the job would pay a decent wage, and I would be running a small department with six teachers.