One of the biggest questions we answer for customers and blog readers is:

There’s a big difference between content and useful content. People will happily pay for content that solves certain kinds of problems.

They’ll also pay more readily for content in different contexts. An ebook that gets complaints on Amazon for being too expensive at $9 may sell briskly from a blog at $29.

But just as weirdly, a short article-length piece that blog readers would refuse to pay a dime for will do nicely on Amazon as a $3 “single.”

How much money you can make online, assuming you’re willing to create (or partner with someone else to create) some useful content, can be seen as falling into four levels.

You can use the four levels in your business right now. See where you are today, then figure out how to climb to the next one. All of these jumps take work, yes, but it’s nothing you can’t handle.

Level 1: How to make tiny money online — Sell attention

Usually when bloggers talk about “monetizing” sites, this is the level they’re in.

Advertising heads the list here. You can plop some Google AdWords onto your site in just a few minutes. And that will translate into a few pennies that can go toward your hosting bill.

Banner ads are the next step. They’ll often make more money — but you need to get out and chase down those advertisers. Advertising rates aren’t great, so you’ll need to generate a lot of clicks to make this worth your while.

And of course, every one of those clicks sends your reader away from your business and on to someone else’s. If you see yourself as primarily a “blogger,” that can be OK. But if you see yourself as a business, it’s highly undesirable.

Sponsored posts also fall into this category. Bloggers with a big audience can get advertisers to pay for publishing a post about their product. This can be tricky to manage for your audience — it’s hard to make them feel like they’re not “for sale.” It’s also hard to get good money for sponsored posts unless you have lots and lots of traffic.

All of these offer relatively low return, so you need lots of readers to make them count. We don’t recommend any of these strategies — not because advertising is “evil,” but because we’ve consistently found that you can do a lot better.

So if you want to skip this one and jump right to level 2, I encourage you to do that.

Level 2: How to make ok money online — Sell someone else’s stuff

To make any real money online, you have to sell something.

Forgive me if that’s obvious, but a surprising number of people don’t seem to see it.

One good way to “dip your toe in” is with affiliate marketing. That means you make a recommendation for a product or service that was created by someone else. If people buy based on what you write, you earn a commission.

(This should go without saying, but never recommend anything you don’t think is terrific. Your audience is your most important business asset, so don’t squander that by making bad recommendations just for a commission.)

Affiliate marketing is a great way to test your market. You can make an offer for a good product and see if it’s the kind of thing your audience will pay for.

If the product is excellent and you can’t see how you would improve on it, keep selling it. Affiliate marketing may well remain part of your mix for the life of your business.

Some businesspeople make all of their income as affiliates. They know how to create great content, they know how to promote that content, and they know how to write good sales messages. If you approach it with a serious business mindset, affiliate marketing can turn into a “make great money online” strategy.

But very often, affiliate marketing reveals holes in the marketplace that you can fill with your own products or services. When you’re frustrated because you can’t find the perfect product or service that your audience needs, you’re ready for the next level.

Level 3: How to make decent money online as a side business — Sell your own stuff

When you can’t truly serve your audience with what’s out there already, there’s just one place to go: You need to roll your own product or service.

Take a look at this article I wrote on Apple vs. Best Buy. In the few months since I wrote that article, Apple has gone on to become the the planet’s single most valuable company, and Best Buy — which was hailed as “company of the year” in 2004 — is closing dozens of stores and bogging down in corporate scandal.

Even though those are huge multinational corporations, the key lesson there is directly applicable to your business:

You might offer a service that’s valuable to your audience, like coaching or graphic design.

You might offer a product, like a better baby blanket or handmade furniture.

Or you might offer an information product, like a book (whether that’s an e-book or the kind made out of dead trees).

Many, many people around the world make a nice living in this level. Some of them supplement income from a regular “day job,” others make their living doing this full time.

But you don’t actually have to stop here. There’s one more level, for those who want to take advantage of it. It takes more work and time, yes, but often the results gained by jumping to the next level far outweigh the additional effort.

(By the way, yes you can jump right to Level 3. This isn’t baseball, and you don’t have to touch every base to get your home run. )

Level 4: How to make great money online — Deliver more value

Remember when we talked about the foundation that never changes for successful business?

It’s about solving other people’s problems — in other words, delivering value.

If you want to go from “decent money” to “great money,” you have to deliver more value.

Delivering more value may mean that you identify a more meaningful problem to solve.

Example: Teaching kids good social skills is good. Teaching autistic kids good social skills is far more meaningful — and more valuable.

Delivering more value can also mean that you provide value over time, rather than selling a quick fix.

Example: Delivering an e-book is good. Delivering an interactive learning environment — with multimedia content, community support, and ongoing access to a subject matter expert to delve into thorny customer problems — is far more meaningful, and more valuable.

You get to Level 4 by building a strong foundation in Level 3, then figuring out how to deliver more value.

It’s not always easy, but it is that simple.

Sonia Simone
CMO of Copyblogger Media and Co-Creator of Teaching Sells

P.S.

I majored in history, and I loved every minute of it.

But would I go six figures into debt if I were 18 and doing it all over again?

Well … today I have options. (And so do your customers, which is what makes this so interesting for content creators and online entrepreneurs.)

Mark Cuban, well-known billionaire, “shark” investor, and owner of the Dallas Mavericks (plus lots of other things) wrote a blog post yesterday about The Coming Meltdown of College Education and Why the Economy Won’t Get Better Any Time Soon.

Here are a few snippets from that post that I think you might find interesting:

While colleges and universities are building new buildings for the english, social sciences and business schools, new high end, un-accredited, BRANDED schools are popping up that will offer better educations for far, far less and create better job opportunities.

As an employer I want the best prepared and qualified employees. I could care less if the source of their education was accredited by a bunch of old men and women who think they know what is best for the world. I want people who can do the job. I want the best and brightest. Not a piece of paper.

The competition from new forms of education is starting to appear. Particularly in the tech world. Online and physical classrooms are popping up everywhere. They respond to needs in the market. They work with local businesses to tailor the education to corporate needs. In essence assuring those who excel that they will get a job. All for far far less money than traditional schools.

I want to riff on a few elements of that today, because they matter for you and the business you’re building.

Branded schools are popping up that will offer better educations for far, far less

Mark’s post goes on to clarify that he’s not talking about the so-called “Degree mills” you might see ads for on TV … the ones that look a bit like budget versions of traditional universities.

He’s talking about highly specific, focused education (often delivered electronically as “e-learning”) that solves a specific problem for a specific market.

Instead of getting a “marketing degree,” smart 18-year-olds will now look for marketing education tailored to the kind of company they want to work for — or the kind of company they want to start.

The same goes for technology, for accounting and economics, for business analysis, for exercise physiology and nutrition. And I can easily see this eventually taking over the classic “liberal arts” topics like English, fine arts, music, and yes, my beloved history.

(The last thing an art major needs is a six-figure debt saddle he’ll have to work a lifetime to get rid of.)

“I want the best and brightest. Not a piece of paper.”

Why do most people go to college?

Because traditionally, that was the best way to get a great job and make a good life for yourself.

That’s crumbling. Rapidly.

Traditional universities are having a tough time keeping up with new economic and technology realities. It’s just not what they’re set up to do.

Great jobs are changing faster than universities can prepare students for them. Just think about how much has changed in the past four years — the amount of time it takes most of us to get an undergraduate degree.

Savvy business owners like Cuban want employees who are prepared for the real world … and very few of us would associate that with traditional university life.

Think about all of the things employees need to master:

• Technology
• Business writing
• Smarter public relations
• Cost-effective marketing
• Sales training
• Better cross-department teamwork
• Business ethics, anti-harassment policies, and other “HR” issues
• Staying healthy at work
• Productivity
• Time management
• Career development and professional growth
• Certifications required to comply with regulations or to stay competitive

That’s nowhere near an exhaustive list. And it doesn’t even approach the massive issue of employees who need to re-train for a different field or position.

The competition from new forms of education is starting to appear

Mark may not have been thinking of Copyblogger when he wrote his post.

But it’s people like Copyblogger readers who are leading this charge. Creating membership sites to teach everything you can imagine, from environmentally healthy gardening to SEO to copywriting to pet-sitting.

Mark’s writing from a business perspective, but there’s just as much demand coming from people who want to improve their private lives.

Everyone has something they want to get better at. And online education is, increasingly, the vehicle people are choosing to do that.

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago

And the best time to jump into online education might have been 5 years ago when Brian Clark first launched Teaching Sells. But remember the next line of the proverb …

This trend is moving now, and it’s picking up force with amazing speed.

And the helpful thing about starting today, versus 5 years ago, is that the market is ready for you now. You don’t have to explain to them that online education is actually slightly more effective than traditional face-to-face methods.

Also, there are a variety of robust technology tools now that let you build sites quickly and easily. (We’ve even built some of them.)

You’re not even close to being too late to join the party. But if you keep waiting year after year, your smart ideas are going to slip away as someone else executes on them.

Online education works for some surprising topics

We can all see how online education works for topics like social media marketing or technical certifications.

But … pet sitting?

Teaching Sells graduate Josh Cary has created a terrific little business around that topic … and he put a few fascinating twists on it that I think you’ll want to hear more about.

I’m going to be talking with Josh live this coming Thursday, May 17 at 4:00 PM Eastern U.S. time.

We’ll talk in depth about how on earth he created a business around this highly “niche” topic, what he thinks were the critical factors for success in his niche, and how he’s expanded the idea of education-based business to include some elements you might not have thought of before.

You can listen in on the call live on Thursday:

• Via web at this link
• Over the phone by dialing (214) 775-0917 and entering the PIN 349888#

We’re going to leave time for your questions, and yes, we’ll send you a reminder of the call so you don’t miss out!

And save the date for next week, because Chris Garrett and I are going to be holding a live webinar on Monday, May 21 about our Copyblogger 20-Step Road Map — your “cheat sheet” for building a profitable e-learning business.

Really looking forward to connecting with you on the call and the webinar!

Sonia Simone
CMO of Copyblogger Media and Co-Creator of Teaching Sells

P.S.

Get here from twitter, Facebook, or a link from a friend?

Why not grab the whole series? This is a limited-time series on building a great business in tough economic times.

We’ll be wrapping the series up in late May, and when it’s gone, it’s gone. So sign up for all the updates now (the series is free) to get articles, special reports, a teleseminar, and more.

Blogging is one of my favorite zombies (email marketing is the other one).

Why a zombie? Because it’s been declared dead over and over and over again. This thing has come back to life more times than Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The word blogging may indeed be showing a little wear. Or even worse, your audience may not really think “blogs” are something they’re interested in.

But frequently updated, valuable content controlled by a flexible, user-friendly content management system? My friends, that’s not going away any time soon.

5 reasons your business needs a blog

Various armchair experts like to announce from time to time that business blogging is on the decline.

That’s probably true, because most businesses don’t understand how to benefit from blogging (or more accurately, from content marketing). Which is excellent news for you.

Here are five reasons you want to create a content-rich site to strengthen your relationship with your customers. As we’ll discuss below, whether or not you call that a “blog” is up to you.

#1. You need to capture the attention of potential customers

The biggest problem virtually all new businesses face is how they’re going to get the word out … how they’re going to let potential customers know they exist.

One handy way to do that is to get yourself ranking decently in search engines.

And do you know what search engines really like? They like useful, regularly updated content that’s focused around a particular topic.

That’s a blog.

Another great way to find your potential customers is with social sharing and networking — with people Tweeting, Sharing, or Plussing you in their social media hangout of choice.

Your blog content is great for that as well. Rather than make the mistake some businesses are making and building your marketing platform exclusively on a site like Facebook, create some killer content on the open web — then make that content easy for prospects to share with their friends.

When you own your content asset (in other words, your blog), you don’t worry too much about what Facebook’s IPO is going to bring, or whether or not Twitter ever develops a business model. You’ve built your business on solid ground, and that lets you take advantage of any social platform that might come along.

#2. You need to show that you know your stuff

You can run an ad that says, “We’re really smart about our topic.”

Or you can show up on the web twice a week and publish a useful article about your topic — an article that solves a problem or answers a question for that potential customer.

What speaks louder — bragging, or actually helping people? You know the answer to that one.

Blogging shows you know your topic, it doesn’t just claim it. And showing is always more powerful than hollow boasts.

(Incidentally, a really good blog doesn’t just make a great impression on customers, it can also attract powerful business partners. And often, this is what takes a small online business to an entirely different level.)

#3. Blogs build customer relationships

I bought a car the other week. I had two choices of places to buy from.

One was an “official” dealer — where the employees were self-important and rude. The other was a little independent place, where the owner himself came with us on the test drive, and where they were really passionate (actually, kind of geeky) about cars.

You don’t even have to ask which one I chose to buy my car from, right?

The passion, the personality, and the friendliness of the independent dealership made it the natural choice when it was time for me to buy.

Your blog’s going to be the same. It lets you show off how much you care about your audience. It lets you be a bit “geeky” in your love of your topic. And it gives people a friendly personality they can get comfortable with.

(And yes, this is just as important for business-to-business scenarios. Remember, it’s always a human making that buying decision. People buy from people, even when they use the company credit card to make the payment.)

#4. Your audience will tell you what to build for them

This is one of the cornerstones of the Copyblogger model. You don’t absolutely need your own blog to listen to your audience (we talk about other good “listening posts” in the course), but there’s nothing like having an audience of your own who can tell you exactly what they’re having trouble with, and exactly how they would like you to fix that.

There’s an old marketing cliche — the best predictor of a successful restaurant is to put it in a neighborhood where there’s already a starving crowd.

And that means you don’t have to be some kind of marketing genius to sell to them — you just have to let them know what you have and what to do next.

#5. Smart content educates the customer … and teaching sells

Ever wonder why we call our course “Teaching Sells”?

Well, in the first place, education is a wonderfully marketable product. (Even more so now than it was when we created the course, which is kind of cool.)

Education (“teaching”) helps people make the transformations they want to make. It gets people where they want to go, lets them become the people they want to be. And that type of product is easy to sell.

(Especially when you created it after listening to their needs, like we talked about in #4 above.)

But we also mean that the act of teaching is closely aligned with the act of selling.

Good, ethical selling is all about educating your prospect.

Educating her about what she can expect when she does business with you. About the advantages of your service. About the good things that will happen in her life when she purchases your product.

And a blog is a tremendous teaching vehicle. It educates your audience so they can become informed, happy buyers.

When you have the right product, smart selling is really a matter of helping your audience see the benefits of your product, then letting them know what to do next.

You don’t have to call it a blog …

So, we think blogs are pretty great.

They’re an intensely powerful way to get your message out, to find new customers, to develop a tight relationship with your audience, and to educate them about the benefits of buying a product like yours.

But if your prospects don’t think they want to read a blog … don’t call it a blog.

Maybe it’s an informational website. Or a virtual dictionary. Or a community of learning. Maybe you’ll come up with some kind of cool term of your own.

Useful, valuable education will run through your entire business cycle. Because teaching sells at every point in the buying process …

Sonia Simone
CMO of Copyblogger Media and Co-Creator of Teaching Sells

P.S.

Get here from twitter, Facebook, or a link from a friend?

Why not grab the whole series? This is a limited-time series on building a great business in tough economic times.

We’ll be wrapping the series up in late May, and when it’s gone, it’s gone. So sign up for all the updates now (the series is free) to get articles, special reports, a teleseminar, and more.

Related Articles

• What is Teaching Sells?
• The Best Way to Make Money with Content in 2012
• How the Explosion in Online Education can Revolutionize Your Business
• Are You Working Too Hard? 3 Steps to Simplifying Your Business

Because the pace of change can be really intimidating. Technology, social relationships, communication, transportation, schools, the workplace, nutrition advice.

Is there anything that isn’t changing?

There actually is one thing.

That’s a quote from Zig Ziglar, who’s a sales trainer and motivational speaker with a 40+-year-long career.

Today, Zig seems a little old-fashioned. Zig coined that bit of advice in a sales training book published in 1985. It was relevant to salesmen pitching vacuum cleaners and insurance.

But it was also relevant in the 1800s, before Zig was born.

And the 1700s. And the 500s. And reaching as far back into prehistory as any of us can imagine.

Because all business exists to serve a market.

If you want to create a business, find a group of people who want something — a market. Then offer it to them, preferably in an interesting way that captures their attention and lets you stand out from other providers.

Once you see this, there’s no such thing as a “tough time to do business” or a “bad economy.”

(Ever wonder why some people seem to thrive no matter how badly everyone else is tanking? It’s because they understand this, and they’re always looking for that market to serve.)

This won’t change until we get to some utopia where everyone’s wants are being perfectly addressed. See that coming any time soon? Yeah, me neither.

Until then, there’s plenty of room for you.

What’s “content,” anyway?

For such a frequently knocked-around buzzword, the word content means a lot of different things to different people.

For you and me, in the context of building an online business, I’m going to propose a simple definition.

That means “content” isn’t a YouTube video about roller skating babies, however delightful we may find that. At best, that’s a clever ad, it isn’t content.

It isn’t your daily rambling on Twitter about how much you hate your day job.

It isn’t your unpublished novel … although that novel may be a work of brilliance, and may find a wide readership some day.

Content needs three things:

• An audience of people with a shared goal, …
• … who are paying attention, and …
• … who are moved to take action.

Content serves an audience. A human audience, with wants and needs and probably a short attention span.

The reason content is so powerful … and the reason that it isn’t ever going to go away … is that it gets people closer to a result they want.

That result could be a leaner body, a better relationship with our kids, a romantic partner, a promotion at work, six-pack abs, the phone number of a pretty girl, a better career, more money, freedom from disease, a more fulfilled life.

Some people want things that are trivial and some people want things that are profound.

Please remember that it’s not your job to judge what other people want. It’s your job to decide whom you can best serve, and how.

Find your hedgehog

Jim Collins writes interesting business books, and he’s developed an idea he calls the “Hedgehog Concept,” which he believes virtually all great businesses live by.

Your “Hedgehog” is the intersection of three things:

1. What you find exciting … Does it give you “juice”?
2. What you can deliver incredibly well … Can you deliver a remarkable result?
3. What you can build a profitable business model around … Can you make any money?

When I started as a student with Teaching Sells, the thing I probably found most valuable was that it gave me a strong framework for #2 and #3. All I had to do was figure out where my passion was — what I could stay “in love” with for the long haul.

(Side note: sometimes the part you’re in love with is building businesses. That can be an amazingly rewarding way to succeed — by helping other experts turn their passions into profitable businesses. We have some Teaching Sells students who use that as their primary business model. Just an idea.)

What’s different about 2012

If you haven’t seen it yet, go check out the post I wrote last week on the Online Education Explosion.

The most successful content-based businesses today are education businesses.

Sometimes education is what you sell.

Sometimes education helps what you sell work better.

Sometimes you give all of the education away for free, but you profit from the tools your customers use to put the education into practice.

As it happens, we offer ten different business models in Teaching Sells. And students have combined and re-combined those in countless different ways. (Remember Hedgehog Point #3. At some point, there has to be a model for how the money comes in.)

And unless you sell an IronMan-style robot suit, that transformation comes in part by changing their thinking.

It comes from education.

Audiences are readier than ever to pay for online education

Online education was a really good business model in 2007, when Teaching Sells was launched.

It’s an amazing business model in 2012.

Learning online gives people the results they want (in Teaching Sells we call these the “benefits of knowledge”). In the way they want it. On their own terms, when and where they find it convenient.

Millions of people all over the world are turning to online education to make the transformations they want to make.

Are you ready to serve them?

Sonia Simone
CMO of Copyblogger Media and Co-Creator of Teaching Sells

P.S.

Get here from twitter, Facebook, or a link from a friend?

Why not grab the whole series? This is a limited-time series on building a great business in tough economic times.

We’ll be wrapping the series up in late May, and when it’s gone, it’s gone. So sign up for all the updates now (the series is free) to get articles, special reports, a teleseminar, and more.

Related Articles

• What is Teaching Sells?
• How the Explosion in Online Education can Revolutionize Your Business
• Three Steps to Take Yourself from Good to Great (an expansion on the Hedgehog Concept)
• Are You Working Too Hard? 3 Steps to Simplifying Your Business

Do you ever have days when you’re too exhausted to figure out what you want for dinner?

You don’t get there through marathon training or spending all day at the gym. You get there by making too many decisions — overtaxing your decision-making “muscle.”

There’s all kinds of amazing research being done about willpower and the physical limitations of your brain.

And one of the most exhausting things you can do is to make decisions.

If you’re constantly reinventing the wheel, you’re going to get tired.

And when your brain gets tired, there’s no amount of willpower or “toughing it out” that you’ll be able to manage. Your poor brain literally doesn’t have enough fuel to keep making those decisions — so you’ll do what’s easy, or what you’ve always done in the past … or you’ll just do nothing.

If you’re going to build a business (online or offline, for that matter), you need to start working smarter rather than always harder. You need to cultivate some habits of simplification, so you can conserve your energy for the most important decisions.

The danger of reinventing the wheel

Do you know this story?

Back when NASA started launching manned spacecraft in the 1960s, they found out that the astronauts couldn’t use pens to write with while in space. The ink wouldn’t flow down through the pen in a zero-gravity environment. NASA decided to retain a man named Paul Fisher to design a pen that would work in space.

$1.5 million later, they had a solution. NASA now had a pen that worked in zero gravity, in a vacuum, and in a drastic temperature range.

The Russian cosmonauts had the same problem, of course. So they used a pencil.

(Note: this anecdote isn’t historically accurate, and has become a bit of an urban legend, particularly after appearing on the popular show “West Wing.” The truth is both the US and Russia used pencils at first, and Paul Fisher independently created the pen and sold 400 of them to NASA for a song. But the story’s still a good one, and it’s instructive.)

The reason the exaggerated story is so widely embraced is because it rings true.

All of us have done it — put out huge amounts of time and effort creating elaborate solutions to problems when a simple answer is right under our noses.

Here are some of the techniques we use at Copyblogger Media to get valuable, successful products out the door, year after year.

1. Use a proven framework

In our story about the space pen, the right answer was “use something that already works today.”

Now, this gets tricky because business today looks very different than it did even 10 years ago. Just like our rival space programs, we’re solving problems in a new context, which means we’re going to have to do a little bit of trailblazing.

But whatever kind of business you’re building today, someone out there has successfully done something you can learn from. Without directly copying, you can use their success as a rough framework for what you want to create.

We’re going to talk later this week about why online education is the smartest foundation for a business today. (And at Copyblogger Media, we’re confident that this is going to continue to be true for many, many years.)

And the truth is, one of the more flexible, proven frameworks around for online education is the one we’ve developed at Copyblogger.

From the early days until today, when we want to build something new, we use a framework. We call it our “road map,” and it outlines the steps we need to take to launch a new product or service.

By the way, we’re giving you that road map for free later in this series, along with a webinar that will help you figure out how best to use it.

So stay tuned and make sure you’re getting all of the Teaching Sells emails. (Mark us as a “safe sender” with your email provider just to be sure.)

You’ll still be making key decisions, of course. But it’s much easier to decide, “OK, what copywriting angle will we use for our launch” rather than, “Uh, what do I do next?”

2. Beware of shortcuts

One of my favorite business sayings is,

Don’t take shortcuts, they take too long.

Because business is complicated, there are all kinds of people who want to sell you “Surefire 30-Day Money-Getting Systems.”

They’ve tried to figure out every single step for you, so you can simply fill in the blanks.

Which is a nice idea … but it’s going to cost you time, not save you time.

That’s because every business is unique. You’re working with a unique combination of what you can contribute, what market you most appeal to, technical abilities, external realities like the economy or the SEO landscape, content creation skills, time, place, and topic.

No one can give you a step-by-step “system” for taking all of those highly individual elements and putting them together into a business.

Shortcuts tend to work for a brief time (if at all), eventually sending you back to square one where you have to start all over again.

And unfortunately, those “foolproof systems” are often what worked for that marketer in the past. Once they’ve squeezed all the value out of it, they sell it to you.

What worked then may not work at all now — and it may be worse than useless tomorrow.

3. Ready, Fire, Aim

I don’t want you to get seduced by silly shortcuts.

But I also don’t want you to put out content on your blog and in social media for year after year before you dare to ask for any money.

While you’re doing that, a nimble, smart entrepreneur is snapping up your topic and making a nice living.

Once you have your framework in place — your road map that tells you where you’re going and the key milestones on the path — you’re ready to start conducting some small experiments.

At Copyblogger, we’ve been big fans of the “Minimum Viable Product” model since long before Eric Ries wrote his great book on The Lean Startup.

A Minimum Viable Product (or MVP) is the smallest product you can release that still serves a vital need for your customer.

It can be challenging to find the courage to send a product out there that you know isn’t perfect. (We have a whole module on addressing those challenges, and we also help students out with that in our live group coaching sessions.)

Being brave enough to fire off your MVP — and then over time making it absolutely perfect for your individual audience — is the smartest way to both bring in revenue quickly and make the kind of remarkable product that 21st-century audiences demand.

Just remember to keep an eye on your framework. That’s what keeps the MVP model from devolving into “wandering around in the dark.”

Coming next …

The next thing we’ll be talking about is the single best way to make money with content in 2012 (and, we think, for many years to come).

It’s a massive trend and it’s only growing.

If you’re already on the Teaching Sells list, that article will be coming to your mailbox in a few days. And if not, why not jump on now? It’s free, and our aim is always to give you information that will help you reach your business goals as quickly (and enjoyably) as possible.

Catch you next time …

Sonia Simone
CMO of Copyblogger Media and Co-Creator of Teaching Sells

P.S.

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