The Key to Long-Lasting Online Success

Here are a few tips to achieve the following:

“When you think every boss you ever had isn’t as smart as you, when you feel like you can do it better, then you’re an entrepreneur,” asserts Chef Todd Mohr, whose own entrepreneurial tendencies led to a tenfold increase in income.

Mohr’s site, webcookingclasses.com, earns upwards of $20,000 per month. It’s a nice change for a guy who used to earn about that much in a year as a chef for the National Security Agency (NSA).

To be fair, Mohr’s online business wasn’t his first entrepreneurial venture. After helping to feed “15,000 people breakfast and lunch everyday” at the NSA, he opened a catering company, which, he says, “led to me opening a cooking school because I love to teach cooking.”

As part of his marketing strategy to attract clients to his local cooking school, Mohr began putting videos on YouTube. “But foolish me,” he says, “you put videos on YouTube, they don’t just go to your local audience, they go all over the world.” Although the videos attracted attention well beyond his local area in North Carolina, he continued to add videos to his YouTube channel, attracting thousands of followers in the process.

“I wound up with 200 cooking videos on YouTube,” he adds. Then one day, somebody came to him and asked, “why are you giving this all away for free? This is such great information.”  It was the question that would literally change Mohr’s life, prompting him to begin thinking about how to “monetize these free YouTube videos.”

With no prior online marketing experience, Mohr did what smart entrepreneurs do everyday. “I sought out people who knew more than I did,” he says of his foray into Internet marketing.

The transition from free YouTube content to a paid business model was, admittedly, a bit rocky. He first took “the 200 videos off YouTube… much to the anger of the YouTube audience that wanted it for free.” He then transferred those videos to digital media, starting with a DVD series. “My feeling was that because I give you so much free content on YouTube, you’re all going to buy my DVD, right?  Wrong!  It didn’t work out that way.  Few people bought the DVD out of the thousands of YouTube subscribers I had” Mohr admits.

However disappointed at his initial attempt to make money online, Mohr persevered, fueled in part by his own belief in what he was doing. “My videos were unique, because there’s not a single recipe involved. It’s all cooking method. If you know how to do a sauté, it doesn’t matter what you sauté. [Learning cooking method] empowers people to cook without recipes,” he says.

Still searching for the right business model for his cooking videos, Mohr decided to test a new marketing strategy. He began giving away the DVD along with “a free trial [subscription] to webcookingclasses.com.”

It was a smart move—one that reflects a current trend in Internet marketing, according to Jeff Leget, Vice President of Business Data Services at ClickBank. “We’ve seen a big shift in our vendors and publishers going to subscription-type products,” Leget comments.

In Mohr’s experience, subscription-based services provide significant advantage to your bottom line. Rather than relying on individual DVD sales, Mohr says, he is able to profit “week over week, month over month,” with a subscription-based business model.

Making the transition from free YouTube videos to a paid service has also bolstered Mohr’s marketing strategy. “When you’re paying for something, you have a lot more ownership in it… You’re a member of a community… there’s a lot more emotional contact,” Mohr says. It gives him the ability to build a trusting relationship with his subscribers, who are then more likely to continue their paid membership.

It’s a marketing strategy and business model that can add nicely to your bottom line—not just for today, but for years to come.

Be confident and be patient. Remember, it was the tortoise who won the race. Good luck with your internet business!

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Luis

www.internet-home-business-builder.com

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