The companies that survive longest are the ones that work out what they uniquely can give to the world, not just through growth or money but their excellence, their respect for others, or their ability to make people happy. Some call those things a soul.

Charles Handy, management expert and author

You’ve now seen how to use the latest online systems to get yourself known for what you do. You’ve also seen how to define the people you want to be known by. The question now is, what will you offer them? We looked earlier at how important it is to know the problems you want to help people with. This chapter will help you work out what solution you can provide for those problems and what form to deliver it in. Once you know that, you’ll have something to offer that allows you to get paid to play. Here’s an example from UK-based business The Money Gym.

Getting paid to play means doing something you really enjoy while providing something people are happy to pay for. Your job now is to find something you can offer that people really want. And what people really want are solutions to their problems. Look back at the list of problems you wrote down in Secret five. What can you offer that solves these problems or at least goes some way towards helping with them? What results can you promise for people who have this problem? Remember that it’s the results people are really paying for when they buy your product or service.

People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!

Theodore Levitt, Harvard Business School marketing professor

The clearer you can get on the results you provide, the easier it will be to get paid for them. Here are some examples. If you’re a virtual assistant helping clients with the problem of being too busy to organise their business appointments and sales meetings, you could solve it by doing all of it for them. The result for your clients could be more business – and more money coming in.

If you’re a hypnotherapist you could address the common problem of fear of flying. The result for the client is that they can finally travel further afield to warmer holiday destinations, enjoy the journey, and arrive already relaxed.

If you run a blog about Bali-inspired interior design and you import related crafts and furniture, you can solve the problem for people who love the Bali style but don’t know how to create it in their own home. The result for your readers and customers could be a beautiful lounge or bedroom featuring some of your unique pieces not found anywhere else in the West.

The more significant your results and the more impact you have on the problem, the more valuable you are. And the more valuable you are, the more you can get paid. If the problem you address is boredom at work, you can have a small impact, like making people laugh for a few minutes with a funny blog – in which case you might make a fraction of a penny per person off advertising. Or you can provide someone a complete out-of-the-box business opportunity to allow them to escape their job altogether – in which case you can charge hundreds or thousands of pounds.

Once you know what the results are that you provide, the question then is how do you deliver them? You could provide your results by offering a physical product, a printed book, or an online information source, or you might do it by working with the client directly. You can provide a similar result in lots of different ways. The Money Gym, for example, provide their expertise as a printed book, an online home study course and face-to-face coaching, with very different prices. Different people will choose different methods of delivery.

Here are some simple ways of delivering the results you’re interested in providing. None of these have the hassle of running a full-blown business requiring staff and premises or a large financial investment. Even if you’re currently looking to find another job rather than go self-employed, you might find that experimenting with one of these channels helps you to create your next role (we’ll look at this in greater depth in a later chapter).

Providing a service

A lot of people start their journey into self-employment by providing a service to individuals, groups or organisations and charging for it by the hour, day, week or project.

People who charge by the hour include counsellors, life coaches, complementary therapists, accountants and plumbers. Contractors and consultants often charge by the day. Others such as web designers and computer programmers might charge by the project. There are now some people who charge by the minute and websites like Greatvine.com and LivePerson.com exist to help you do exactly that.

To get known, practise the steps laid out in Secret six ‘How to play the fame game’. Share your thoughts about your field of expertise on your blog, Twitter or other channel as described. This allows potential clients to understand your perspective and approach.

Advantages: If you have the skill, this can be the fastest way to turn your value into money. There is no complex business plan to write, no premises or systems to organise. It can be a good place to start because it puts you in direct contact with your target market so you get a sense of what’s on their mind, what their problems are and what they want. This knowledge can support you in later creating a product or business to deliver the same results without needing to work with them directly. If you have specialist skills that are in high demand, you can earn a good income compared to similar people in a job. With a high enough rate, you can afford to take some time off in between projects.

Disadvantages: Selling your time is like running on a hamster wheel: you can get going straight away; the money’s fine while you’re working but as soon as you stop, the money’s gone. Also, it can be difficult to find time to win your next client while you are on a project. It can end up feeling pretty much like a job. When you factor in unpaid holidays, sick leave, training time and times when you can’t find any work, you find your annual income is not as great as it first appeared. And if you want to get really rich, this is not a good route because you only have a limited number of hours per month you can charge out. You won’t see anyone in the annual rich lists who sells their time.

Ways to make it work for you

Here is a great tip if you’re going to sell your time by the hour. If you sell every hour individually, you may end up talking to a prospective client for 30 minutes to sell them one hour of your time. Instead, package a number of hours into a solution and add in other items like physical products or information products. For example, a massage therapist, rather than selling a one-hour massage for £50, can sell the ‘Ultimate relaxation package’ of three massages, a relaxation CD, a printed guide to destressing your life, and some relaxing bath oil to use at home – all for £170. Not everyone will go for it, but some will buy it just as readily as the one-hour offering. Productising your services in this way can make them much easier to sell, particularly if you can clearly quantify the results a client can expect from it.

When working on a project basis, if you can charge enough for your time, you can start to take time off between engagements. Rather than ‘Time is money’, this means ‘Money is time’; the more you charge, the more time you can take off. If you can earn four times your living expenses, then for every month worked you can take three months off to do other things – go travelling, write your novel, record an album.

Some people work this model very well. There are IT contractors who do a six-month contract and then take six months off to travel the world. Ultimately, if you do not enjoy the paid work then you are not getting paid to play. You simply end up dreading your return to work! Worse than this, you have to spend some of your time off marketing and selling yourself into work you don’t really want. Remember the aim is to find a supporting income stream that is enjoyable.

Consultancy

Consultants are hired for their specialist expertise for short durations of a few days to a few months. They often charge by the day and can be paid £1,000 a day or even more. My experience of being an independent consultant is that although people hired me for my specialist expertise, many times that expertise simply allowed me to understand their language and their business. A lot of what I provided was actually common sense. I would ask people what was going wrong, what they thought would work better and write it all up in a report. The answers to a company’s problems are often available right there within the company itself, so don’t imagine you always need to bring some radical new insight.

It’s not always the most skilled person who gets the work. Never underestimate the value of simply being around at the right time and being a likable and reliable person to work with. I’ve been hired purely, as someone explained, because ‘I know you’ll do the work on time’ (even if they didn’t know that I worked late into the night to finish it).

If you have a good level of expertise in an industry and you would enjoy being involved with cutting-edge projects, start going to conferences and networking events and meet people who could hire you. ‘Consultant’ is a very broad label; it really pays to know the problems you help with and the solutions you can provide so you can communicate just what you do for clients. A good way to start is to fill a recognised role like project manager or technical architect.

A good play project for you if you’re looking to move into consultancy is to write a white paper – an article demonstrating cutting-edge thought on a current hot topic.

Now for some really exciting stuff. How would you like to be able to make some of your income without having to turn up at all?

How to make money in your sleep – or the wonders of passive income

If you’ve spent your whole life turning up somewhere in order to get paid, it can be a dramatic shift to start thinking about getting paid without being there. Passive income is income from a project that once you’ve set it up, keeps paying you without any further work – think of royalties on a book or a song you’ve written. We’ll look at several more modern ways to create your first passive income in a moment.

When you earn your first piece of income without being present, it is quite a thrill. I remember waking up one morning to read an email telling me that that while I was asleep someone had paid £15 for a downloadable audio recording from my website. The recording had already been automatically delivered to the buyer without me needing to do anything. It’s a small sum, but it was without doubt the best £15 I have ever earned. (Fortunately the amounts have grown somewhat since then!)

Passive income is a subject of much hype. In reality, almost no income is 100 per cent passive. When you’ve written your book, you have to promote it. Even if you own a property to let out and have an agency manage the tenants, you will still occasionally have to talk to them when something unexpected comes up. I prefer to call this ‘low-maintenance income’ but I’d take this any day instead of turning up to the same place to do the same thing day in, day out. It’s also a great way to support yourself while doing something that might not pay (e.g. your art, writing or travel).

The internet is probably the easiest and lowest-risk way of creating a low-maintenance income stream. Here are four ways to get started.

1. Information products – the new way to sell your expertise

If you have a good level of expertise in any subject and a knack for sharing it, there are now a multitude of ways to make money without turning up. They all use the internet as your broadcast channel and the vehicle is information products. An info-product is simply your expertise captured as text, audio, video or graphics distributed in a number of possible formats – ebook, MP3, video file, video broadcast or teleconference class.

The wonderful thing about information products is that they cost almost nothing to produce and distribute: they purely require your time. This means you get close to a 100 per cent profit margin. Not only that but, also, because they are specialised to address a small niche of people, they can often be sold for considerably more than a physical book or CD! When you consider that you might only make 50 pence from a traditional book sold through a publisher, earning £10 or more from an ebook suddenly looks very appealing. And many information products are sold at ten times that price. This makes info-products far more appealing to offer than physical products which carry the problems of manufacture and distribution.

What kind of subject can you write an info-product on? Anything a large number of people have a problem with. Look back at your list of problems you want to help with and make the content of your info-product how to solve one of them.

To make it pay, you need a large number of people to tell about your product. This means a large list of email addresses of people interested in your topic, or a lot of website traffic, or a mass of followers on social media. The previous chapter showed you how to create this but if you don’t have a large list of followers yet, you can do a deal with people who do and pay them commission on sales. For instance, approach someone who has an email list of several thousand people who are likely to be interested in what you offer (people who are similar to your picture of an ideal client) and ask them to email their database offering your information product. You then pay them up to 50 per cent commission on the resulting sales.

There’s a lot of ‘get rich quick’ hype on the web about info-products. The truth is that creating one of real value takes time and effort. Persuading people to buy it requires expertise too. Info-products are, however, a great addition to your other income streams. If you are an established hypnotherapist, a downloadable relaxation recording might be a good addition and a nice introduction to your style of working for people who might go on to have a session with you.

Don’t consider yourself an expert?

You don’t even need to be an expert to create information products. If you have a passion for a topic and an angle you want to explore, you can create valuable and high-profile content simply by interviewing people who are recognised experts. Interviewees will usually give their time for free because it helps promote their other work.

Some internet marketers have simply identified a specific problem people have and then hired someone else to write an ebook about it.

Simple ways to create an information product

Info-products come in many different forms. Here are a couple of simple ways to make one.

Ebooks – write out your expertise on a subject in a word processor and convert it into an Adobe PDF file for easy download. You can then sell it on your website or place it in a repository like clickbank.com which provides the ordering system for you. Ebooks typically sell for anywhere between £10 and £50 depending on the topic, the amount of content and any additional elements such as downloadable recordings.

Audio recordings – downloadable interviews, audio classes and so on usually in MP3 format. Two of the easiest ways to make them are to interview an expert and record it (or have someone interview you about your expertise), or run a teleclass and record it. A teleclass is a teleconference call with you and your participants (perhaps 10–20 people or more) on a conference line. Talk on your subject of expertise for 20 minutes then take questions from people. You might charge a small amount for people to take part in the teleclass, or provide it for free to prospective customers. You can then give away the recording, sell it on its own, or include it in a larger package of products. Always warn people in advance if they are taking part in a recording of any kind.

2. Affiliate marketing – or how to sell a product without having to make it

If you don’t have a product of your own, you can now make money by promoting other people’s products and receive a commission payment every time someone buys one. There are people who make a good living just doing this. If you’re in the habit of recommending other people’s good stuff anyway, why not take the commission they’re offering? Sounds good, huh? A lot of people seem to think so. As a result there is a lot of competition out there for affiliate marketers so, just like anything else, you’ll need to become good at the skills required – online advertising (to attract website traffic), copywriting to describe the product, and choosing the right products to offer. But if you like fiddling around on the internet, it can be fun to learn it all. And the skills are useful for marketing your other streams of income too. Affiliate marketing can be a great addition to your other lines of work.

When you see a product that helps with the problems you are addressing for people, look for a link to ‘Our affiliate programme’ or similar. Often you can join immediately by filling in a simple form. You are then given a unique link to that product. Send an email or write a blog post explaining why you recommend it and include your unique affiliate link. When someone clicks on it to buy the product, you will automatically earn the commission, usually paid by PayPal.

You can go a step further and use an affiliate portal like Commission Junction or Affiliate Window. When you register with these sites, you can then search for any kind of product you want to promote, join as an affiliate very easily and start promoting their products. This includes services and physical products from big name chains.

3. Blogging

As we saw in Secret six ‘How to play the fame game’, there are many reasons to get into blogging – it’s a way to play out your ideas and it’s a great marketing tool. And, yes, it can even directly make you money. Very few bloggers make a significant income directly from their blogs because you need a huge number of readers to make it pay, but it’s worth understanding as part of a larger business strategy.

Blogs are monetised in a combination of ways: with affiliate marketing (as we’ve just seen), by showing adverts (using a service like Google Adwords), by promoting and selling your own info-products, or by turning your blog into a membership site as we’ll see next.

4. Membership programmes

A membership (or continuation) programme is any income stream where you charge customers at regular intervals, usually monthly or annually. In return, you provide useful information, training and support on your topic of expertise. This could on be how to train dogs, how to change career, how to set up your first online shop and so on. Membership programmes give you the chance to have a deeper and longer-term connection with your customers. Sometimes they operate as a community around a common interest. Fans of American TV and film director David Lynch, for example, can join his own membership site at DavidLynch.com offering exclusive access to his film, art, music and animation projects for $10 a month. Or membership programmes can be built around a common problem or goal, as in the case of The Money Gym that we saw earlier.

Membership programmes are exciting as a business model because once you’ve convinced someone of the value of being a member, they keep paying you until they actively unsubscribe. Imagine you charge £10 a month, and in return you provide a training video, teleclass or downloadable audio. If you can attract a hundred members, that’s £1,000 a month of revenue. Find 500 and you’re making £5,000 a month. Many people charge a lot more than £10. (Charge £21 a month and if you manage to get 2000 members, you’ll make a million pounds a year!) As ever, you need to provide great value, be able to attract a lot of potential customers, and then effectively communicate the results members can expect so that they want to join. Fortunately, these are all things you can learn in the course of your play projects.

A membership site can grow out of a blog. If you can write valuable content regularly, and start to attract a good number of readers, you are in a good position to create exclusive membership content and start to charge for it. If you don’t have enough content or expertise yourself, you can partner with someone who does.

Advantages: The great advantage of these passive income streams is the ability to do the work once and get paid repeatedly for it. They are a great addition to other things you might offer, such as hourly sessions or consulting time. They are also a great way to build a product funnel: a range of things to offer from free to the low-priced to the most expensive. This allows people to get a taste of your work at a low price and decide whether to move on to buying something more expensive.

Disadvantages: Creating a good info-product takes time and it’s all too easy to put it off while you focus on earning money in the here and now. Make it a play project to find the easiest and most natural way for you to create your first info-product; perhaps recording a talk or workshop you are already committed to delivering. Or take something you’ve written for another purpose and expand on it to make an ebook.

There is more on all these strategies at ScrewWorkLetsPlay.com.

Other ways to deliver your solution

There are lots of other ways you can deliver solutions to people’s problems: you can invent a product design and license it for manufacture; you can self-publish a book; run events and workshops; sell your photos to a stock library; create a software application (or hire someone to do it on elance.com or rentacoder.com) and sell it on the web; or you can develop an online service which charges for usage or makes money through advertising. Whatever it is, find a way to play it out, experiment with it, and use the techniques in Secret four ‘How to guarantee your success’ to ask advice from people who know the specific challenges and strategies of this kind of project.

Remember from the principles of Wealth Dynamics in Secret two that you don’t have to provide everything yourself. If you enjoy marketing, or editing, or building websites, you can do this for other people’s products and services rather than create your own. You can team up with someone who has good content or has very different skills and create something together.

You now have the basic formula for getting paid to play: if you can deliver a great solution to a pressing problem and do so at a price people are happy to pay, you will have created an irresistible offer. In the next chapter we’ll look at how to launch your offer onto the world and win your first playcheque.