Services
Services are the easiest and often best-paying products you can offer. Though they usually don’t scale like books and courses, they’ll get you practice and proof of your concepts—and that ignites confidence in the products that do scale. Testimonials of satisfied customers will endow your products with a deeper level of validity.
If you are unsure what product to start with, a service is often the answer.
I’ll briefly touch on three types of services:
Done with others (community or cohort)
Done with you services
Done for you services
Done With Others
People love to connect with like-minded people. And if you make money finding and gathering them, you’re running a done-with-others service.
This could be a community of people excited about anything from journaling to drumheads. I host a group of independent insurance adjusters asking questions about the job.
There are many ways to run your community, but realize it is always a service. It takes time.
Another kind of done-with-others service is the cohort, a group of people taking the same online course or lessons simultaneously. I like teaching cohorts because they don't promise you'll always be available like a community implies. You have to be available for only a limited time. I've experienced this with the Ship30for30 Cohort by Nicolas Cole and Dickie Bush and it was a great format.
Cohorts are great for kickstarting your services without long-term commitments.
Done With You
Done-with-you services are more involved than their done-with-others counterparts.
You meet with a single person or small group and work directly with them to accomplish a goal. You provide advice, organization, and accountability to help them succeed in their mission. This is the bulk of what coaches and consultants do. Shiv Shenoy has a done with you writing cohort. He blends the cohort model with helping you with your specific book. I do the same with my coaching program for insurance adjusters.
These are the easiest types of services to start.
Done For You
If you’re running a done-for-you service, you take the responsibility squarely on your shoulders. You accomplish the goal of your customer without a need for their involvement.
Think of these examples:
“I’ll take your old resume and perfect it for your dream job.”
“I’ll design a hundred social media posts.”
These are often the highest-paying services because they take a lot of time.
Software
Sometimes, done-for-you providers look at their jobs and see ways to automate their frameworks. They might start developing software, another popular done-for-you service.
Think of a program that rewrites a resume, builds a landing page, or tracks a user’s weight.
As always, there are pros and cons. Development of software takes a lot of upfront money, energy, and time, but it also provides consistent, effortless revenue. If you charge a monthly subscription, software can be extremely lucrative. I have a software for my adjusters that fills out one type of form instantly for them. It generates $700/mo. like clockwork.
Decide which type of product is the right start for you, and soon your SIMPLE Online Business will be humming.
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