Cambell Baxter’s Story: Accounting, Music, Allergies And Internet Marketing
People always have interesting stories, even if they don’t think so themselves. And those stories usually involve unique experiences that make people experts by default.
An expert is generally someone that knows more than someone else… And this knowledge can always be turned into an information product and sold.
Cambell is one of those experts in many different fields…
Cambell Baxter’s Story
My name is Cambell Baxter and I live in Australind, Western Australia (just down the road from Ian).
I work 40 hours a week as an accountant and I am very interested in music, especially ocarinas and bass guitar. I enjoy using fountain pens and have a penpal who I write to often.
I also study part time at Edith Cowan University for my Business Degree – Accounting and Public Practice Majors.
I have never bought any internet marketing courses, but I follow your blog and Brendon Burchard’s.
I have run a few eBay selling programs, but nothing serious. All were successful, but the return was around 10% each time. I was selling action replay for Nintendo DS and R4i SDHC cards for DS.
I have a blog at AllergyMad.com
I have the site set up, Aweber ready to go and a small introductory opt-in product. But my main product is not complete. I would like to get to selling my product and earning about $300 per week from it. This would give me a great deal of freedom and choice. More would of course be great, but right now that is a great goal.
I would like a recurring, fairly stable income that I can use to supplement my current income.
My Comments To Cambell
Cambell, first up, well done on getting your WordPress blog set up complete with content and an optin form. Considering you have never bought an internet marketing course, that is an amazing effort.
As an Accountant, you will have a good handle on business and bottom line profits… You just need a good strategy and you’ll have a winner.
I know from speaking to you, that you have suffered with allergies for a long time, and that’s the inspiration for AllergyMad.com. As someone who also suffers, I know that I am willing to try almost anything to get over them. I also know that a search on Google provides a huge amount of information which is provided by some big power sites like Wikipedia.org, Medicinenet.com, Webmd.com and other high page rank sites.
I also found plenty of Dummies guides to allergies and hundreds of allergy books on Amazon… So, there is obviously a lot of money to be made in the niche, but it is very, very competitive.
The Dummies guides sell for around $19, so you should be able to achieve that price with a good ebook of your own. To make $300 a week you need to sell about 3 ebooks a day, taking into account processing fees, etc.
If you buy traffic, you will probably need about 6 to 8 sales per day. This is achievable with plenty of smart work.
The issue I have with a competitive niche, is the amount of work required to break into and make sales in the niche.
If you implement ‘free’ traffic strategies (which are never free, unless you don’t value your time), it is going to take a BIG effort to succeed. This could take you 12 months (or more) of consistent backlinking, article writing, social marketing, blog posting, etc. every day.
If you implement ‘paid’ traffic strategies you will probably have to pay $0.50 to $1.00 per click to get someone to your website. At an industry average conversion rate of 2% you would need to make $25 to $50 per sale to breakeven. At a $19 price point for your ebook you will lose money hand over fist.
To get around this, you need to find a way to increase the lifetime customer value from $19 to $100, or more… Just like I did with the model train ebook ($27) and creating a membership site ($120+).
What you need to consider, is if allergy sufferers will want to stay subscribed to a monthly membership. I wouldn’t because my allergies are seasonal, but people with allergies all year round might… It’s something that you could test.
It would be a good idea to build a subscriber list of at least 500 people and then ask them.
The other option is to consider your other skills, passions, and see if there is not some other lower hanging fruit that you could build a membership site using this strategy.
I look forward to your comments.
Have Fun,
Ian
