Category Archives: Content licensing

Tips Marketing – The Secret Sauce

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Got an idea for a great product or service?  Is your creative mind taking you all over the map with ways to expand the idea, to different formats, different languages, different audiences?

Short of discovering the secret to the fountain of youth, the secret to successfully marketing your tips and whatever other products and services surface from your knowledge comes down to this:

  • Simplicity
  • Enthusiasm

One of my favorite television programs of all time is Shark Tank. Inventors and business owners present their ideas to a panel of investors for funding and mentoring. Some ideas are obvious winners and prompt a bidding frenzy. Some other ideas seem completely illogical, yet get the support of one or more of the Sharks because the business owner keeps the idea simple and is highly enthusiastic in his or her presentation of the idea.

Of course the sharks include other considerations in their decisions, like the level of universal appeal across cultures, age groups, different applications, and more. And is the business owner open to input or stuck in their own point of view.

A recent business owner presented an idea so enthusiastically and couldn’t have been any more simple. He wanted his idea to be the next Pet Rock (are you old enough to remember that one?).  The sharks were all over it and the idea is taking off like crazy. It served as a great reminder that success can look so many different ways.

Next time you notice you are taking yourself oh so seriously and making things oh so complicated, take a step back. Can you simplify it? Can you be genuinely enthusiastic about it? You may have a winner on your hands with your tips!

“Turn your tips into products and your tips products into moneymakers.™”

Your trusty guide,

Paulette Ensign

http://www.TipsBooklets.com - main site
http://www.TipsProducts.com - blog
http://www.CollectionOfExperts.com - co-authoring

 

What Do You REALLY Want YOUR Tips to Accomplish?

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You’ve seen it and so have I — “Top 10 Tips For …” or “7 Great Ways to…”

Do you have a strategy for creating and circulating your tips? Or are you doing that because you see so many other people doing it? You figure there must be something to jumping on the bandwagon, though you’re not exactly sure what it is. And if you keep throwing enough of these tips against the wall, surely something good must come of it.

If you’re in business, the standard reason is publicity, to market your expertise, to let people know you exist and that you’re the go-to person for what they need. Nothing wrong with that! After all, if people don’t know you’re there, you won’t be “there” for very long!

The piece that many people overlook or have yet to discover is that those same tips can be a direct source of income while they are also marketing you. In fact, that’s what the blog at www.tipsproducts.com is all about — leveraging your tips into products to sell and/or to strategically give away.

This week I spoke with two different business owners who would find it completely appropriate to have a tip from their expertise put onto a tie. Yes, a tie — that garment that goes around the neck. A unique item, to be sure. In one case it could be sold to their client who is a large financial services company, to be distributed to their account executives as a way to promote a particular idea about investing. The other business owner is an image consultant for men. The same is true that  the business owner can sell a large quantity to a supplier of men’s accessories, for instance, to foster a particular concept for men.

The same tips that are on those ties can be licensed to the company who buys the ties, to use on their website or in other ways that would benefit their business.

These are examples of the thousands of ways YOUR tips can serve double duty for your business, both as a way to market you and to generate direct revenue.

Go see what else strikes your fancy and works best for putting your tips onto products that   simultaneously market you and bring you new income at http://tinyurl.com/tipsproducts You can get ties and thousands of other products here, and easily get your tips onto them. And you can do this one unit at a time.

Your trusty guide,

Paulette Ensign
“Turn your tips into products and your tips products into moneymakers.”

http://www.TipsBooklets.com - main site
http://www.TipsProducts.com - blog
http://www.CollectionOfExperts.com - co-authoring

 

 

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


 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

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

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