Turn your tips into products and your tips products into moneymakers

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“Turn your tips into products and your tips products into moneymakers.” While this blog may be new, the posts will be a combination of insights, observations, experiences, opinions, and suggestions based on more than 20 years of doing this tips stuff in various ways and in various places.

As technology changes at warp speed, the challenge is to keep it simple yet thorough, as much of an oxymoron as that might be. How often have you written or read a “Top 10 Tips” article? Probably plenty of times. It’s such a popular format that even the American late night talk show host, David Letterman, uses it in a comedic way. Eventually he compiled those lists and published a book he sells. That’s turning his tips into a moneymaker. You can, too, and you can do it now.

Look at all the lists and articles you’ve ever created or thought about creating:

  • “7 ways to…”
  • “Top 10 reasons…”
  • “11 secrets for…”
  • “8 best ideas to…”
  • “12 super tips for..”

You send the articles out, for exposure. Do they generate revenue for you, either directly or indirectly? Probably once in awhile. When was the last time your local grocery store accepted exposure when you went there to buy food?  Right, never.

This blog plus the Learning Tools and Services we offer are direct routes to turning your tips into products and your tips products into moneymakers, with a huge return on your investment. It doesn’t matter where you’re located, what your area of expertise, how long you’ve been in business, what your age or circumstance, or what size budget you have. You can turn your tips into products and your tips products into moneymakers.

Your tips can be booklets, audio, books, journals, card decks, content that is licensed into endless formats online or offline, and much more.

You’ve already started on your journey whether you realize it or not. You’ve got content. Now let’s get started on making money from it.

While you’re at it, please introduce yourself so we can do some cross-marketing.

Welcome aboard for the journey of a lifetime!

Your trusty guide,

Paulette Ensign

 

3 Ways to License Your Currently Free Tips

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Licensing your tips is like renting out your information. You still own it, and someone pays you to use it for a certain period of time in a certain way. There are ideas right in front of you to make money from your tips that are in your articles you give away, ways that you may have had no reason to consider

Are you a tea drinker? Have you ever looked at the tag on the end of the string of that tea bag? Some companies put quotes on those tags. They could just as easily put one of your tips, or a whole lot of your tips over time.  And pay you for the right to use those tips.

How about Chinese fortune cookies? Remember the last time you cracked one open to see what your fortune would be? The fortunes inside those cookies can easily be customized to each be a tip for living a better, and sold by an advertising specialty company to businesses who want to give out something different to be memorable.

Do you have 365 tips on how to save time or how to exercise at your desk or, or, or? You can license those to a corporation to drip a daily tip by email into their employees’ Inbox or out to the company’s mailing list as a way to stay in touch with their clients and prospects. Some professional associations already do that with their members. The tips are pre-programmed so there is no “heavy lifting” for anyone.

And you recycle your content and make money from it. You probably thought of some other directions to go, too. And you’ll no doubt be more aware of opportunities than you were before reading this!

Your trusty guide,

Paulette

www.tipsbooklets.com – main

www.tipsproducts.com – blog

www.CollectionOfExperts.com – co-authoring

 

 

 

 

 

Placing Your Tips Promotionally

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‘Ever notice the articles in your favorite publication (print or online) that are based on the model of ”7 Great Ways to ______” (on any topic)? Or see a sidebar of tips accompanying a longer article?

Journalists love articles like that. In fact, three times a day, five days a week, journalists’ queries are delivered by email right to your Inbox from a free service at www.helpareporter.com You’ll find a range of topics, many of which will be a match for your expertise.

Having your tips ready from the products you created with them lets you quickly respond to those queries. You’ll get your name, your business, and your expertise out into the world, into a wide range of publications small and large, online and offline, bringing you more business at no cost to you.

It’s also not uncommon for the journalist to start with a request for tips and then go into more depth and even come back to you later for another interview. The deadlines on these queries are frequently short, so act fast.

Turn your tips into products and your tips products into moneymakers.

Your trusty guide,

Paulette

 

Tips Lead to Results Only When …

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…you take a crucial step.

You can:

  • post tips on every social media location you can identify.
  • send your “top 10 best ways to” article to the best article directories that ever were.
  • create a checklist of vital things to remember, out to every current and past client.
  • create various ways to deliver your tips beyond only articles.
  • compile the tips from your articles into a booklet or an audio program.
  • be the most creative person on the planet in putting your tips out there.

You can do all of this and more, yet still see no increase in business. The missing piece?

Tell people what to do next after they read, hear, or experience your tips!

What do you want them to do next??? Do you want them to go to a particular page of your website, or phone or email you, or attend a teleclass or webinar, or something else?

You can have the greatest information available on the planet in your area of expertise, and leave out that one very important thing. It makes a huge difference in sustaining and growing your business.

So simple, yet so vital.

While we’re at it, why don’t you go to www.tipsbooklets.com to receive a tip in your inbox every Monday? You’ll see a purple box in the left margin. While it refers to booklets, you’ll find the tip you’ll get each week applies to many formats of distributing your tips for marketing and for making money.

If you’re already getting those weekly tips or want to skip over getting the weekly tip, give me a call or pop me an email to explore the best next step for you. You’ll find that contact info in the About section of this blog.

Your trusty guide,

Paulette

3 Great Reasons to Share Your Tips

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As you look around at people you admire for whatever reason within and outside your area of expertise, you find yourself wondering what’s the point of sharing information you know oh so well. And beyond merely sharing the information, would anyone actually buy it! After all, isn’t what you know common sense? Doesn’t everyone already know this?

Well, here are three great reasons that definitely support your sharing your knowledge:

  1. Some people know some of what you know.
  2. Some people know a lot of what you know.
  3. Some people don’t know any of what you know.

Share your tips anyway, in whatever ways you’d like. They can be in articles, booklets, audio, licensed, or other product formats and other venues like speaking and interviews.

As simplistic as that all may sound, there is always more to learn. In some cases it becomes confirmation for them, that someone else (you, the expert) is affirming what they know.  That has value.

Your information can also remind them of what they forgot, information that is now useful to them again or for the first time.  One pearl of an idea can be the perfect thing to help them in this moment.

Even in a topic that has a lot of information available, there is no way anyone could possibly have ALL of what there is to be had. Think about someone interested in Italian cuisine, who loves to cook. It is impossible for them to have every single Italian cuisine cookbook ever published. Create yours anyway.

Keep in mind that something you view as common sense could be rocket science to someone else, and vice versa. There are topics you struggle to grasp that someone else finds easy.

Create your tips anyway. Share them by giving them away strategically and by selling them. Not sure how to do that? You’ll find great guidance at our Learning Tools.

Your trusty guide,

Paulette

 

Passive Income, Recurring Income, or Both

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Many people who trade time for dollars as an employee, a consultant, a coach, or other primarily service provider longingly talk about wanting to create passive income —  money that is earned while sleeping rather than money that is earned from showing up someplace at a certain time.

In making the transition from trading time for dollars, it quickly becomes apparent that there is nothing passive about selling products, no matter what sales and marketing methods you utilize. It takes time — somebody’s time, whether it’s yours or someone you hire. And if you hire someone, it takes your time to interact with them to train them, to evaluate how things are going, and make course corrections. Yes, there is heavy lifting on the front end to set up the marketing and follow up with the sales. Nope, nothing passive about any of that.

So while the sense of freedom from scheduling looks appealing, it is not, in fact, passive. No more commuting on a busy highway, train,  or airplanes. No more boss placing unreasonable demands. Agreed.

The bigger and better thing, though, is to create income that repeats itself with as little effort on your part as possible. That’s the ideal combination. Some ways to do that:

1. License your tips content to a company for a certain time span for their promotional use, on a renewable basis. They may want to drip a tip on their mailing list each week, for instance.

2. Have choices of content for that same company to use so they can have a quarterly campaign with different content. They license one set of tips for the first quarter of the year, a different set of content for the second quarter, another for the third quarter, and yet another for the fourth quarter.

3. Create your content in different formats. The same quarterly idea can apply, just with different formats like a booklet, an audio file, just tips, and some interactive format.

By having these choices, you can create a year-long arrangement that can be automated delivery from you and have a renewable element in it to provide you recurring revenue. These suggestions are to get you thinking of the endless additional ways you can craft your business to provide you both passive and recurring revenue, the ideal combination.

Let’s explore specifics for your company.  Feel free to share your suggestions here in the “Reply” section below.

Your trusty guide,

Paulette

 

 

 

 

 

Business Tips – Give them away, sell them, or both

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The last “7 Great Tips to …” article you wrote to promote your business online or to use as a bonus when someone purchases something from you or attends a teleclass you gave immediately served several purposes simultaneously:

  1. It gave samples of your knowledge, whetting people’s appetite for more from you.
  2. The article positioned you as an expert, letting people know you’re the go-to person.
  3. You have the beginning of a product.

It’s that last one that frequently gets lost in the shuffle. Writing those lists to give away is often the easy part, both in your thinking and in your doing:

  • Create a numbered list of good, solid tips.
  • Bookend it with a brief intro and a brief ending.
  • Put your contact info and copyright notice at the end
  • Boom, you’ve got an article.

What if you compiled those articles? Better yet, what if you outsourced compiling those articles to a Virtual Assistant? The number of products you can create and sell from those tips is endless, starting with a tips booklet that can be licensed to a company to use digitally or have printed, in English or any other language. Let’s say you have “52 Ways to Organize Your Home.” Don’t you think a manufacturer or retailer of home organizing products would be interested in seeing what you’ve got, for them to use to promote their products, buying or licensing hundreds of thousands or even millions of units at a time from you?  Yes, many companies would definitely be interested in saving time and money to do it themselves, and leverage your presence as an expert in the field of Professional Organizing.

And that’s only a printed booklet or PDF. Plus you created those 52 tips from originally writing them in articles or through posting them one at a time on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or all of those.

You can always start by giving them away, with the intention of re-purposing them into a range of products. So an answer to the quandary of whether to give them away, sell them, or both turns out to be BOTH! Find step-by-step guidance on how to do that in the Learning Tools created especially for you.

Your trusty guide,

Paulette

Create a New Product and Market Your Business a Minute at a Time

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You’re thinking about how enticing it is to turn your tips into products and your tips products into moneymakers. Right now your tips are probably only passive promotion for your business. How can that article you wrote –  ”Top 10 Must-Do Tips for Success” - and the other hundred articles you wrote or are thinking of writing, how can they convert to money makers?

And you’re a bit overwhelmed. Who has time? You’ve been writing articles forever, and have been posting them wherever you can. Plus you’ve got lots of other raw materials. Any of that bringing you much income?

Or maybe you haven’t written any articles at all. You don’t like to write, think it takes too long, think you’re better at speaking than writing, or whatever you’re telling yourself.

Either way, where to start?  Think in units of one – one tip, one minute.

Let’s say you have no articles, yet you just chatted with a prospective client, or you did an interview, or you gave a class. You definitely shared at least one tip about your expertise in that setting. In fact, you probably shared a lot of tips once you reflect back on it.

Post ONE tip onto Twitter. You are limited to 140-characters on Twitter, which is less than 30 words. After posting it to Twitter, cut and paste that tip into a newly created Word document, with whatever abbreviations and/or acceptable poor grammar you used. It can be edited later.

How long did that take? Probably only about a minute or two. What you accomplished in that minute was the start of a new product based on your tips while simultaneously marketing your business — all in a minute or two.

You’re attracting new followers who are interested in your topic, followers who will be the market for this new product once you’re ready to sell it. Plus those people will want more from you once they get a taste of your tips.

Create a workable pace for you to post tips each day. It may be one a day or two or three each day. You’re creating a product and marketing your business a minute at a time, simultaneously.  So much for the idea that it takes chunks of time to market and to create a new product!

Share your first tip with us here to get additional marketing exposure for your business as you move forward in creating a tips product that’s a moneymaker.

Your trusty guide,

Paulette

 

 

Tips Products Format Depends on Audience

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Those Top 10 Tips lists you’ve decided to recycle into a tips product can take on many formats, both hard copy and downloads. The temptation is high to go the least expensive and fastest route — which may be ideal, or it could totally miss the mark for the results you and your buyers want.

Some surveys show that entrepreneurs still want to hold a printed paper-based product in their hand to read it as their preferred format. Other surveys indicate “books on tape” now outsell books, with people preferring to learn by listening so they can make good use of time when they cannot otherwise read like while driving or jogging.

A company who wants to use a tips product (by the hundreds of thousands) imprinted with their company name and contact information as a promotional tool has longer “shelf life” in front of their market with a hard copy product than by sending a PDF of a customized tips booklet that gets filed on a hard drive or immediately deleted once read. However, dripping a single helpful tip once a week to their online mailing list’s inbox and/or through social media also helps stay in front of their buyers.

There is no single answer to the best product format for recycling your tips into moneymakers. It’s usually a combination of several approaches to achieve the results. Survey your people rather than play guessing games that can be hit and miss. You can still develop additional formats as downloads to have at the ready without going into production and unnecessarily sitting with inventory. Or you can do a short run of tips booklets or audio CDs or other hard copy versions to have as samples.

Think about how you can turn your tips into products and your tips products into moneymakers now. And let us know your progress and your questions, would you?

Paulette