by: AskPat 430 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: What up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 430 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week. We have a great question today from Tara.
Before we get to Tara's question, I do want to thank today's sponsor which is Lynda.com. That's Lynda, which is an awesome online learning platform, the best one out there, where you can learn from over 3000 on-demand video courses. These aren't just little YouTube videos that people put together in their home. These are studio-quality. They fly in experts to do studio quality videos to help you strengthen your business technology and creative skills and help you meet all your business goals. Whether you are an entrepreneur, or you're working your nine to five, or both, you can learn quickly and easily with the tutorial over at Lynda.com. You can check out all the videos for free, complete access for 10 days by going to Lynda.com/AskPat.
Alright, here's today's question from Tara.
Tara: Hi Pat. I'm just wondering if, in terms of info product, you think that ebooks are too old school, that we should be making fancier products like video courses and things? Thanks.
Pat Flynn: Hey Tara, thank you so much for the question. Are ebooks too old school? They're not too old school, and of course there are different types of ebooks we could talk about. There are some that are working very well for you today, but I think it depends on what you're goal is. Whether or not ebooks would support these goals. Now first of all, ebooks as a lead magnet still completely works. I'm still generating couple hundred subscribers a day on my websites overall using ebooks of various lengths and of various topics to help drive people as an incentive to subscribe to my email lists. That works very well. Ebooks, as long as they're valuable and the content is great, that's a great . . . one of the great ways you can provide a lead magnet, again to generate subscribers to your email list.
Now ebooks are also essential in terms of building an audience and also a report. Through your lead magnets which are free, and through paid ebooks as well. There are, of course, ebooks that you could share and sell on your website like Nathan Berry does at NathanBarry.com. He makes quite a good living, almost six figures, actually more than six figures a year, by selling ebooks on his site at NathanBarry.com. He also has different packages which go along with them for instance there's a one tier where you just get the ebook by itself, and then the second tier where you give bonuses and other things like that. The third tier, which is the most expensive, which has all the bells and whistles. So you can package your ebooks, and in that way it's not old school at all. As long as you're providing value.
Now there are also ebooks that we can talk about on Amazon.com. Those are ebooks, they're electronic books and Kindle, and that sort of format is working out very well for a number of authors as well. So in that sense, ebooks are not old school at all. Now they are sort of old school if you are trying to deliver the best kind of value to your audience to help them achieve some specific goal because ebooks are just text only. There are some hybrid models where you can include videos or have links in those ebooks to videos or audio files, or both. That can work very well. I did that with my book Let Go. If you are trying to build a course, for example, an ebook won't serve or do it's best at serving you're audience in that way because a course could be perceived as more high value if there are videos and audio in it. A book alone, even though it may still contain the content that it would need to succeed in whatever you're trained to teach them . . .
Now I feel like we're at a point now where if you really want deliver a ton of value and have it be perceived as being high value, and at the same time generate more money because of that perceived high value, having some sort of course with videos is probably the best way to go. Don't be scared if you think that's a little bit too much work. Yes, it's a little bit more additional work than creating an ebook. However, for some people, once you get going with the content creation via video or audio, it's actually not as much work. And with the software that's available to help us package these videos and audio files into a course online, it's actually sometimes much easier to package then creating an ebook. There are course software out there like Zippy Courses. If you go to AskPat.com/ZippyCourses. There's also course software called WP Wishlist if you have a WordPress website, also WP Courseware is also very good too. David Siteman Garland has his own course material as well.
Again, all this software does is allows you to create a course on your website, where you can plop in videos and create different modules and lessons and have it be something people have to pay for to get access to. Again, very simple and easy to do, high perceived value, definitely a win for everybody all the way around. If you are selling a course in this way, through your videos and audio and things like that, you could add ebooks on top or within those courses as bonuses to make the course even higher value. Ebooks, of course, is just another form of content generation. You could also create ebooks out of the content that you have on your own site already. A lot of people have done this and continue to do this. They take the transcripts from their podcasts and put them in as ebooks and sell them on Amazon or on their website. They do the same thing with a compilation of blog posts as well and that can work out well too. Again, I feel like if you are going to be delivering a course and you're trying to teach people how to do something to it's fullest extent, videos is one of the simplest and quickest and also highest value deliverables that you could give. The cool thing about videos is if you're scared, you don't have to be completely scared because you don't have to put your face on camera.
Now I would recommend doing it at least once, at least at the portion of your course, where you're welcoming people in and showing people around. Even just if it's 10 seconds, people like to know who's on the other end. For example, you could do screen recordings using tools like Screenflow. AskPat.com/Screenflow is the one you could use if you have a Mac and you want to record what you are doing on your screen, which is a simple thing you could do to show people whatever it is you're trying to teach them to do, as well as teaching them how to go through your course. You can use Camtasia Studios if you are a PC user.
That's it. I'm not going to keep blabbing because I think I answered your question. And again, just to recap: Ebooks, yeah, they're kind of old school, but you know what? They are higher perceived value than they were before, just with the way Amazon has been working, and you know the cream always rises to the top with those sorts of things. If you are trying to teach your audience something doing it with videos and audios and things like that, other forms of media, it's definitely going to work out better for most people. You'll be able to charge more as well, and people will feel like they're getting a lot more for their money too.
So Tara, I wish you all the best, and I can't wait to see what you do with this. For having your question featured here on the show, we're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt, and we do that for everybody who's question gets featured here on the show. So if you're listening to this right now and you have a question you'd like to ask me, just head on over to AskPat.com. You can ask right there on that page. Just hit the record button. Doesn't matter what kind of mic you have. Your audio quality doesn't matter as long as we can hear your question because my job is the one, as the host, is to have the good audio quality. You know, we just need your great questions, and without your questions this show wouldn't exist, so please ask your questions at AskPat.com.
I also want to encourage you to leave a review on iTunes, if you haven't already. Thank you all so much for listening and your support, and a really quick payback is to just head on over to iTunes look up AskPat and leave a quick and honest review there. It would help out very, very much so thank you in advance for that.
So as always, we love to finish these AskPat episodes with a quote, and today's quote comes from Scott Dinsmore. He said, “If we don't know what we're looking for, we're never going to find it.”
We love you, Scott. Cheers, take care, and we'll see you in the next episode of AskPat.