Like manyentrepreneurs, Joan Stewart is doing something very different than what she envisioned when she started her business nine years ago. She thought she would primarily do corporate consulting, focusing on media relations, and paid speaking engagements. But that quickly changed.
"When I left the newspaper business after 22 years as an editor at four different newspapers," says Joan, "the two things I wanted in my next job were speaking and writing."
So she started working with corporate clients in Southeastern Wisconsin as a media relations consultant,
teaching companies how to work with the media.
"I wasn't a publicist. I taught them how to pitch the media
themselves, how to generate story ideas themselves and
how to get their stories in print and on the air. And
most of the media outlets here had no idea that I was
working with many of the companies that were getting onto
their shows and into their newspapers."
But she quickly discovered she didn't really like having to
constantly find new clients. Because, of course, once Joan
taught her clients how to do it themselves, she worked
herself out of a job.
Finding new speaking opportunities was also a chore she hated "and the speaking business is SO competitive," she says.
"About two or three years after I started, I discovered the
Internet. And as soon as I did that, everything changed," Joan says. "I became an information entrepreneur."
Now, most of her clients aren’t in Southeastern Wisconsin. They’re in places like Australia, the U.K., South Africa and the Yukon. And she's never even met most of them. That’s because instead of focusing on consulting and speaking, she began to produce information "products." Her products aren’t cakes or widgets or cars. They are special reports, ebooks, recorded telephone seminars, and so on.
"My first product was a special report -- a 5-page,
single-spaced paper on how to do damage control when you're
working with the media. I started selling the special reports at $7 each. But it wasn't meant to be a special report," she says.
Let me explain.
One of the first things Joan did when she began her business
was to join the National Speakers Association (because, of
course, she wanted to do public speaking and she knew she
had to be very good at her craft to make money at it).
"And one of the things the people in NSA told me was 'If you
want to position yourself as an expert, you must publish a
book -- a book that you can hold in your hands'."
Well, that didn't interest Joan. Articles under her byline had been published hundreds, if not thousands, of times during her newspaper days. So there was no ego factor for her involved with publishing articles or a book. And she thought a book sounded like too big of a time commitment.
"I didn't want to do it just to be published. But I finally
threw up my hands and said, 'Okay, if I have to write a
book, I have to write a book. But I want to start making
money from it right away. So I'll write the book
one chapter at a time, and I'll turn each chapter into a
special report to sell from my website. When I get 20
chapters, I'll go shopping for a publisher'."
Shortly after she started writing special reports, she started publishing a free electronic newsletter called "The Publicity Hound’s Tips of the Week." (She still publishes this ezine and you can subscribe at her website.)
Much to Joan's surprise, the special reports -- each priced
at $7 -- started to sell. "Once I got the website and then started the electronic newsletter, the sales of the special reports just went through the roof. Everybody was buying them, many in multiples of 10 and 12 at a time. And when I finally wrote 20 special reports, I very quickly threw my idea for a book right out the window."
Why?
"Do the math. I was selling 20 special reports for $7 each, or $140 a bundle. If I compiled them all into a book, I knew I couldn’t sell the book for much more than about $25. So that would be crazy. I was making much more selling the special reports individually."
Joan says "The Publicity Hound's Tips of the Week" resulted in about $300 a month in product sales right from the start,
even with a small list. She now has almost 12,000 subscribers.
And almost from the start, she paid to join Internet marketing guru Tom Antion's mentoring program, which she says has made the biggest impact on her success. "I'd been communicating with him pretty much the entire time that I had my business, and I hooked up with him as a customer about five years ago -- right when I started the website. I joined his mentoring program shortly afterward and patterned my mentoring program after his because I was learning so much from him,and that really helped my business take off. I knew I could teach others to do the same."
Joan has now produced 48 special reports, several ebooks and
more than 50 recorded teleseminars, which are available on her website.
"I found out how much fun it is to do electronic marketing,
and it changed my whole business model. Now I don't work,
get paic...work, get paid. I work once producing a product, then get paid...get paid...get paid...get paid. My
income is no longer entirely dependent on how many hours I
work. And now, instead of me having to go out and pound the
pavement for consulting gigs and speaking engagements,
Internet marketing lets me position myself as an expert online, so that people who need what I have, find me instead of me needing to find them. And that's a much better
position to be in because when people seek you out for a
speaking engagement or a consulting contract, your fee is not as much of an issue."
Joan no longer makes cold calls to meeting planners. She doesn’t send out marketing materials. And almost every speaking engagement comes from someone who reads her ezine.
She has customers all over the world and has cut back
considerably on corporate consulting. A significant
portion of her income comes from selling her downloadable
products from her website and from other information
products she has created, like her recorded teleseminars, as well as from her mentoring program that includes a nun in Spokane, Washington and a priest in Detroit, Michigan.
By the end of last year, she was able to generate from $6,000 to $15,000 a month in Internet sales.
"And that's just the Internet sales," she says, "I think $15,000 a month is puny, compared with what some Internet marketers are making."
But her biggest success came this month, when she broke her all-time sales record. A special Liquidation Sale on her inventory of audio cassette tapes, advertised to her list of 11,300 readers, resulted in more than $20,000 in sales in only seven days. She got the idea from her mentor, Tom Antion, who did the same promotion just after Christmas.
"I don't want anybody to think this is easy work," Joan says. "It isn't easy work. It's very, very difficult work, but it's a heck of a lot more fun, sitting here getting smart, in front of my computer in my pajamas than waiting in an airport security line for 45 minutes, on my aching feet,
lugging my laptop."
Success comes at a price, however.
"One of the biggest mistakes I made in my business was balking for so many years to take control of my own
website because I didn't want to 'get my hands dirty' and I
was also scared of the technology. Tom gave me a huge kick in the butt many times, saying, 'You may as well just stand in front of your toilet and flush the money you're spending on your website. You really need to maintain control of it.'
So I very reluctantly went out and bought Microsoft FrontPage and began working with a web designer who teaches me how to make changes myself. It's made an immense difference in my ability to sell my products quickly and economically," says Joan.
Joan believes in paying people to do tasks she isn’t good at. She outsources graphic design, teleseminar
recording and production, and extremely technical issues
related to her website. She keeps up-to-date with software
programs and buys or downloads inexpensive programs that help her become more efficient, like ShortKeys, a very powerful macro program that saves hours of time each week.
She also has joined Tom’s Internet Association of Information Marketers and recommends that you join it too, even if you don’t want to sell information products but simply want good search engine ranking for your website.
Another low-cost, but excellent business forum to help you with all of these issues is the Success Secrets of Women Entrepreneurs Forum, which you can try for 10 days FREE.
Joan still does corporate consulting, but only if the
project really interests her. She turns down most work like
creating media kits and doing news releases simply because she doesn't enjoy the work and because Internet marketing is so much more profitable. Besides, she would much rather teach people how to create their own materials for the media by using her information products.
"When you sell products, the ability to sell one product is
limitless because you aren't selling your time. You’re
selling information," she says. "Product development is the
key. The first product I created is still bringing me money
today...and at a higher price," she says.
