So get out there and build your community!

The results were $398.99 for the month of October, so about $200 less than the last couple months, mostly due to less sales of Learn and Master Guitar.

This came from $57.89 from Google Adsense (YouTube video ads) and $341.10, mostly from guitar lesson related sales (Metal Method, Learn and Master Guitar and my own guitar lesson products from Online Guitar Coaching. No sales from Amazon and internet marketing materials (Ryan Deiss was minimal as I did nothing to promote them).

On the positive side, other than making WAY more on my IT contract (5 figures for about 5-6 week of half day work), I got re-inspired to add some new continuity programs – these will be some fixed-length modular courses (eg. Blues guitar level 1) that might last for 6 months as a membership program. Others will be ongoing such as a live video streaming guitar lesson each month, Guitar lick of the month, Song of the month (where I transcribe and analyze a guitar song and/or solo).

So I’ll be testing some new product offerings and seeing which ones are more popular. I’ve also focused on creating and expanding a Facebook fan page – and getting people to sign up by offering them a free live guitar lesson.

Another cool tool is the Wibiya toolbar that you can find at the guitar coaching site I mentioned -shows up at the bottom and I hope it increases the Facebook fans and I can also send them notifications on new webinars, sales, offerings, etc. Lots of exciting cool stuff happening!

The amazing thing is that it is more than just a way to find recent posts, share the post on Digg, or search your site as most sites have. The two coolest features at this point are the Facebook button and the Notification window.

The Facebook/community button allow visitors to join your Facebook community, but better yet go to your Facebook fan page (you do have one don’t you?). By becoming a fan of your Facebook page, your posts will show up in their News Feed, which many people visit multiple times a day.

The second and probably coolest feature is that you can send notification messages to your visitors from the Wibiya administration panel. You could send a welcome message encouraging them to explore the toolbar (for a while until the tool is fairly commonplace), or send notes about new posts, events (eg. live webinars, etc), limited time offers and so on.

Go to Wibiya for more information – you will need to apply for a key at the time of this writing, during the Beta phase. I got mine in about a day. Once you configure the apps you want, where your blog and Facebook page are, you just paste a small javascript snippet of code into your site just below the tag. In Wordpress this is easy, I just go into the footer.php file and paste it once and it applies across the entire site!

You can see it in action at my website Online Guitar Coaching.

So other than buying my IT consulting e-book, what else can one do to get these types of remote work jobs?

For me, remote work came after developing a relationship with one of my clients. I established myself as a competent developer in a niche market. Focusing on a niche is key because this means that clients won’t usually have this type of expertise on staff because they don’t get enough work in the area to justify a full time employee.

Scale to remote work over time. Try to introduce the concept slowly over time, like one day a week for example. Get a bunch of work done on a sick day and show the boss how well you did.

Consider working out of town for a while. When working out of town, I went from flying home every week, to every two weeks. Then I eventually went to one overnight visit per month and then fully remote. Usually working remotely means getting access to a Virtual Private Network (VPN), if you need access to the company servers. So if you get it for one day a week, there won’t be any more work involved to scale it up.

Wait until the current contract is over and you get offered a contract extension. If you’ve established yourself as a good resource in a niche market, this is a good time to make the transition to remote work.

Be willing to walk away. If you truly want to work remotely then you may lose opportunities if you stick to your guns. When I stand firm and lose an opportunity, I think of it as retraining the client. If they always get what they want, they will never have to change their mindset to other possibilities. Maybe it’ll help the next guy.

Believe that working remotely is better for everybody and that you can get approved for it. Don’t underestimate the power of visualization and belief. If you go in to negotiations thinking they will never go for it, you will be right!

To learn exactly how I went from commuting employee to highly-paid remote worker (with actual stories from each job) check out my IT consulting e-book.

To summarize, get your content on sites like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook and drive that traffic to your own website or blog. I’d also add that your focus should be to build a community around your products or services.

For local businesses (where you rely on local offline customers) also set up a Google Local Business listing.

People are spending more and more time on social networking sites such as Facebook. So as marketers we want to be on those sites. But rather than sending people to your normal Facebook profile you’ll want to create a Facebook page for your business. One of the reasons for this is there is no limit to the number of friends you have, as there is with a regular profile.

The beauty of sites like Facebook is that if someone is a fan of your Facebook page, they will see the posts you make from that page in their news feed. So they might see you multiple times a day in their feed whereas you can’t usually email them multiple times every day without annoying them. So this keeps you in their minds. Don’t just spam offers though, you’ll want to provide some useful relevant content to your following.

The idea behind this is to create a community around your content. The content itself isn’t as valuable as the experience of the community. Then you offer things for sale to this community and some percentage will purchase this from you.

So how do we get people to sign up for our Facebook page? Well at first I used to say ‘join my Facebook page’ in emails and not much would happen. Then I offered an incentive (free upcoming live webcam guitar lesson) and the signups started happening. This is the same as an email opt in page. You need to offer something of value. I got this idea from Ryan Lee who offered a free digital book of his when you became a fan and sent him an email with your Facebook user id.

To create a community around your content, encourage feedback, comments and a cool idea is to get video submissions from your fans. People can post on your Wall or create a discussion. Create a contest where people submit a video telling why they love your product or why they want to win the prize, etc and have them post it to YouTube and your Facebook page. Do things on your Facebook page that you don’t do elsewhere. Keep it useful, fun and subtle.

In a related post, Derek Sivers talks about a guy who just wanted 1% of the viewers of his advertisement to buy his cd. He pressed 10,000 copies ahead of time but only got 4 sales after a few weeks. Another depressing statistic outlining the fact that it is possible you won’t sell any (or much less than 1%). His point is that the math can be deceiving and difficult to achieve in reality.

If you’re trying to sell music or any other product or service, these statistics can be extremely discouraging. So what can we learn from this?

Sell what people are buying. Millions of people are buying things online every day. Find out what those things are and sell those products. Check the Amazon best sellers list for your category, check the better selling products for your favorite affiliate network of choice. Use your content (music, blog posts, tutorials, etc) to sell these popular products rather than try to sell your own products at first. Use ‘free’ to gain attention and draw traffic to your site.

Focus on a small niche. The long tail is crowded. Part of the battle will be just getting enough traffic to your site. Pick a really specific niche, find keywords that you can reasonably compete with and target those lesser competitive keywords. By lesser competitive I mean keywords that have around 10,000 pages in the search results, but still get enough daily searches. Find the cost per click for your keyword and multiply it by the number of daily searches to get a relative sense of the value of the keyword. If people are spending money on ads then it is a good indication that there is a market there. Market Samurai is a great tool for this type of research.

As you know part of my monthly income comes from having a membership site for guitar lessons. If you pick up a copy of the Wishlist Member plugin for your membership site (the one I use) during this month of October, you can get a free copy of Gary Vaynerchuk’s newbook called “Crush It”. The second gift is an exclusive interview with Gary. Later this month they will be interviewing Garyin person and during the interview they’ll dig deeper into Gary’s strategies for creating anonline following and how it relates to membership sites.

You can get more information about the Gary Vaynerchuk Special Offer on their home page (click the image).

This breaks down as follows:

$275.65 learn and master guitar dvd
$249.95 my guitar lesson products and overnight membership site
$13.94 metal method (metal guitar dvds)
$3.74 amazon (books/dvds from amazon)
$60.91 adsense (my youtube videos)
$8.91 ryan deiss (internet marketing)

I tried a bonus offer, created a new video explaining if they buy learn and master guitar I will throw in a bonus of one of my products. Got 2 sales that way. For my own products I offered a labor day sale in early september -50% off everything. Got a few sales that way. Got a sale of my Overnight Membership site course, which is a $97 video course on starting your own membership site. I sent emails to my list with an image of a youtube video in the email. I use SnagIt to capture the image.

The sites I have are Will Kriski (free with ads), Online Guitar Coaching (membership site with guitar lesson products too), The Wealthy Worker (affiliate and internet marketing related topics), Membership School (how to start and run a membership site), ManageBackPainNow (back and butt pain), and Engage Today Seminar (for the Engage Today Conference).

A big opportunity I was excited about was the chance to be an affiliate for the Engage Today Conference in my city of Calgary. I would be eligible to get about $700 per ticket sold to the event. I created a new website, and marketed it a lot. I had my wife and coworker email all their business clients. I also paid for a few facebook ads. But I didn’t get any sales. Since I spent a few dollars on a domain name and some Facebook/Google ads (about $30) I effectively made a bit less money this month. But it was worth it as I could have really blown away my record for last month of $604.39. Also I got on page one for keywords such as ‘engage today’ so that was cool. No regrets as I gave it my best! I’m also eligible for future sales of related videos/DVDs of the conference.

I’m thinking of doing a contest this month where I get guitarists to send me a video in order to win a memberhsip in my guitar coaching program. The video might be of them playing and explain why they want to get the membership, as opposed to the usual – show me how good you are. This way students that really need the help would benefit. Still need to think that through.

I’d like to add more videos of me playing guitar, not just teaching and do more emailing of my list with offers. But since I’m working part time (mornings) I won’t have as much time this month. Let’s see what we can do.

Let me know how you’re doing in the comments below – any success no matter how small.