Category Archives: Booklets

Fun Moneymaking Products from Your Tips

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You know all those tips you put into your booklet or are thinking about putting into a booklet someday to expand your tips business? Depending on your topic, there are endless ways to instantly expand your product line and bottom line, with very little (if any) cash out of your pocket. A few somber and serious topics don’t lend themselves to what I’m about to share with you. Most topics work just fine though.

For years I’ve been teaching booklet authors to actively get into tips marketing by licensing their content to companies and associations for all kinds of uses in a range of formats, for both online and offline products and applications. That is still always an option, and more so now than ever because of social media and online marketing. However, there’s more you can do, from a different direction, right now.

‘Ever noticed you’ve had that flash of a thought about how perfect one of your tips would be on a t-shirt or coffee mug or note cards or an iPad case (!) or calendars or tote bags or an apron or stickers or a zillion other things. It makes it a fun way to offer more to your buyers from information you’ve already put together, from the brain power you’ve already generated. It opens the door to go back to companies and individuals who already bought from you, without your going deep into product development both time-wise and money-wise, not to mention creativity-wise.

Plus you weren’t sure how to go about doing this at all, much less how to do this so you can easily and quickly create a SINGLE sample of your tip on a product? Well, I discovered a place that will do just that for you. Or they’ll sell you thousands of units if you want, or anything in between.

You can order as few as ONE unit of a product, with a 30-day guarantee of 100% money-back or replacement, and they ship within 24 hours of getting your order to wherever you want. That means you don’t have to maintain any inventory and you don’t have to get involved in fulfillment.  How fabulous is that?! All you do is place the order any time of day or night on their site and invoice your client whatever you’ve decided (and they’ve agreed!) to charge them.

While the advertising specialty industry (READ: any item that has your customized name/logo/photo/copy on it) has been alive and thriving for decades, they typically can’t accommodate single-item customized products at reasonable prices and terms like this. And that’s totally understandable. This resource does. They are set up to do that.

Many folks use such items for promotional purposes for their company, adding to the expense side of your bookkeeping. You’ve gotten things (freebies to you that cost the company to buy and ship) in the mail and at trade shows just as I have.

There is no reason you can’t add this to the REVENUE side of your business bookkeeping by expanding your product line with sales from single samples you show people at your speaking engagements, from photos on your website, and through product sheets you develop to pre-sell these things.

Go take a look through this link right now. http://tinyurl.com/tipsproducts

Your imagination is the only thing to stop you from expanding your thinking and your bottom line!

Your trusty guide,

Paulette Ensign

www.tipsbooklets.com – MAIN

www.tipsproducts.com – BLOG

www.CollectionOfExperts.com – co-authoring


 

 

 

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

 

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

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

 

 

 

 

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