You know those headlines that scream out you can earn XXX amount of dollars by simply “pushing a few buttons” or “sending a few emails” or some such? Well, this case study is actually about someone doing almost no work and yet banking close to $5,000 a month.

In fact, she might be up to that amount now. The $4,400 was how much she earned when we spoke, and she mentioned that her income is increasing every single month. Yet she does almost no work whatsoever.

And by the way, OPA stands for Other People’s Artwork.

Here’s how it works:

I’ll call her Sally because, well, when I talk to her she giggles a lot and sounds kind of silly. Sort of like a high school girl, and yet she’s in her mid-twenties.

Sally has several different identities on Etsy and Ebay. Each identity sells a certain type of artwork. One sells paintings of animals, one sells landscapes, one sells abstract art, one sells hearts (I’m not kidding!) and so forth.

She has a real life assistant (we’ll call him Gorgeous George because as Sally tells it, in addition to working for her George also does some modeling and fitness instruction.) George makes all the listings for the artwork, gets the prints made from the originals, fulfills the orders and handles any customer service requests.

What does Sally do? She outsources work to several artists who do all of her paintings for her. Just like hiring a ghostwriter to write a book which you then sell, Sally is hiring “ghost painters”. She has them sign a non-disclosure agreement that gives her all rights to the paintings. And she never tells her artists what she does with the paintings, either.

If I were doing this business model, I might consider giving the artists a percentage of sales, but Sally likes to simply pay one fee up front to keep things simple.

Sally chooses the styles for the paintings by finding examples and showing them to her artists. She then asks them to replicate the style and not the actual painting. She sells the original paintings for a good price ($300 to $1,000) and sells limited edition prints for a lower price.

Her listings never claim that she or her persona is the artist. She’ll use generic language such as, “This painting was created May of 2021 using pastels on canvas.” She has her artists use several mediums, including acrylic, watercolor, pastels, ink, charcoal and so forth.

She also has a virtual assistant who has one job: Promoting the artwork through various social media channels. This is why her business is growing so fast, because word is getting out via social media. And she’s very good at picking her subjects, too, some of which are extremely timely and most of which prove popular.

As you can see she has expenses: Her real life assistant George, her virtual assistant, the artists and selling fees. But even after all this, she pulled in $4,400 in profit the month she revealed her system to me, and like it said, it’s increasing every month.

The real key here is to choose subjects that will sell. That’s why she likes animals, hearts and landscapes because they always do well. And her paintings aren’t super elaborate, either. An experienced painter can likely create one in a short afternoon.

One of her best-selling stores sells paintings that are somewhat cartoonish, including caricatures of real people as well as animals doing silly things. As mentioned earlier, one sells hearts. I suspect this artist probably does 4 or 5 paintings in a day because they are that simple. But they sell like hotcakes because people love hearts and bright colors.

This business is easy to replicate and if you use assistants, it takes very little time at all.

Boys and girls, there was a time when calculators weren’t apps on smartphones – they were actually stand-alone hand-held electronic gizmos that did nothing but calculate numbers. (I’m dating myself…) Some of these calculators were even what you might call “desk sized” because they were so big you had to set them on something to use them.

One day a salesman found himself stuck with a gross of these large desk calculators. Nobody wanted to buy them, so here’s what he did…

He told his customers they were giant “ice scrapers” they could use to scrape ice off of windshields. The customers would object and say, “No, they’re calculators,” and he would reply, “Oh ya, I suppose you could use these as calculators, too, but they’re really great at removing ice!”

People would laugh and then buy one, and within days the calculators sold out.

Do you have a product that’s not selling?

Maybe you can find new positioning for your product, or a new and imaginative way to describe it.

For example, do you have a course on how to drive traffic via social media? Reposition it for one particular niche – dating, health, mmo, chiropractors – you get the idea. Do you sell a course on how to make art? Reposition it as art therapy so that it’s now about the process and not the outcome.

Almost any product can be targeted to a new audience or even rebranded as something entirely different.

Time and again I’ve seen new marketers complain that they’re not earning 5 figures a month. So, I ask them what they’re selling…

$7 reports…

$17 ebooks…

$27 video sets…

“Okay,” I say, “let’s do some math. Five figures a month is $10,000 or more. How many $7 products do you need to sell to make $10,000?”

“I don’t know,” they say.

The answer is 1,428.

What about $17 ebooks?

If you sell 588 of those a month, you’ll make five figures.

Yeah, but what about $27 video sets?

You only need 370 of those a month. That’s 12 or 13 sales every day.

If you convert a whopping 5% of your visitors, you’ll need 360 interested visitors a day to achieve that.

That’s going to cost money to drive that kind of traffic, which means you’ll need to sell a whole lot more products.

You see where this is going.

If the basic structure of your business prevents you from earning the income you want, then you’ve got to change your business.

It’s like buying a car that only goes 50, and then feeling disappointed and mad when it won’t go 100. It’s just not built for that kind of speed, and your business might not be built to earn 5 figures a month, either.

Low priced products are great for building a list of buyers and essential for self-liquidating paid advertising. You pay $100, you make $100 but you’ve got a list you’re building, or rather two lists because one is subscribers (which can be good) and the other one is buyers (which is where the real profit is made.)

But if you want to make five figures a month, you’ll need to either sell something more expensive like a $197 course or a $500 coaching program, or else promote affiliate products.

Let’s talk about that $197 price tag – to earn $10,000 a month, you need to sell just 50 of those a month. Or you can sell 20 of the $500 coaching.

The point is, if all you’re doing is selling nickel and dime stuff, then you can’t complain if you’re not making any REAL money.

It’s time to step up your game. Whatever is holding you back from selling more profitable products, knock it off.

Don’t tell me your list won’t buy expensive products because I know they will. They’re already buying more expensive products from other marketers, so why not from you, too? Build trust and rapport with them and some of them will buy anything you offer.

But the first step is getting your own mindset in shape and believing that you can sell big ticket items.

And if this is too much of a stretch for you right now (you’re not alone) then you can at least get on the right track by adding multiple products to your line. Add a continuity membership site, paid newsletter and/or paid podcast. Add products that sell for $47, $67, $97 and more. Find affiliate products you love and believe in that earn good money per sale. This way you can work your way up to the big-ticket items.

Heck, I know one marketer who won’t sell anything that costs less than $1,997. He doesn’t have a list of 500,000 because he doesn’t need one. He’s got a couple of lists of about 5,000 each and he is absolutely CRUSHING it because every single sale brings big money to his own pocket.

His mindset is that $17 products are a total waste of his time, and he’s right. To earn $1,997 he can make one sale or he can make 117 sales. He chooses to make one sale and even as I write this I realize that I, too, need to focus more on the higher priced products. I guess there is a lesson in here for all of us. 😉

What do most people like least about buying tangible goods online? I think it’s the shipping costs. Sure, you’re ready to pony up that $20 for the item you’re dying to have, but do you really want to pay the $7.99 shipping fee? Maybe not.

Then there’s another factor we might want to look at – remorse. Not the remorse that comes from buying something and then regretting it, but the remorse that comes from NOT adding something to your order.

Sure, you got the Super Duper Widget and the Super SUPER Duper Widget Accessory, but darn it, why didn’t you get the Super Duper Case to go with it? Blast it all, now you feel like you blew it. Except…

Except there is a company out there called Zulily that has an innovative solution for both of these obstacles. When you place an order with Zulily, you can order again anytime in the next 2-3 days and pay NO additional shipping costs.

This means you can go back and get the items you wish you’d purchased in the first place, and it won’t cost you a dime in additional shipping.

Zulily also offers to split your payment in half. You pay half now plus shipping and the other half in a month. They have your credit card on file, so the risk to them is extremely low. And I’ll bet the increase in business is substantial.

Is there a way you can apply these super consumer friendly practices to your business, and increase your bottom line in the process?

I couldn’t find the download anywhere. I checked my email, I clicked all the links and went to all the pages, I set up my new, free ‘membership’ and still the download wasn’t there. But they kept telling me to be sure to download it as soon as I watched the video. So I watched the video, but the download still did not appear.

Do you know what DID appear?

An email.

“We noticed you still have not downloaded the XYZ Document. If you need help, just click this button and someone will call you to assist.”

Ah-Ha!

Sneaky clever, don’t you think?

Here’s what they’re doing:

They’ve created an outstanding video that teaches a marketing technique. To get you to watch the video, they promise you a free download of one of their internal documents that’s made them millions.

But you can’t get to the document until you watch the video (it’s a long one) all the way to the end. You watch the video and… WHOOPSIE! Haha!

No download.

Next comes the super nice, super helpful sounding email. This is where they get you on the PHONE and sell you on their expensive program.

It’s a bit diabolical, but still I have to acknowledge their creativity.

They almost didn’t add the upsell because it was too expensive and most of their buyers wouldn’t be interested… Or so they thought.

The main product was a super cool software plugin, priced at $47 for use on one site and $67 for unlimited sites.

Most people bought the $67 version.

The upsell was developers’ rights to the plugin.

Most people won’t buy that, right?

The two partners argued about it for three days before finally adding the developer’s rights as the only upsell to the funnel.

The promotion ran for a week, had plenty of affiliates promoting and guess what?

You know it – they brought in an extra $13,396 just from the upsell.

Maybe it wasn’t a fortune, but it’s extra money they otherwise would not have made.

Plus, it didn’t cost them a dime to offer that upsell, either.

What are you not selling right now that you could be in your sales funnel?

I’m gonna wring this guy’s neck and I don’t even know who the heck he is. Gimme a second to decompress…

Deep breaths…

Okay, here’s what happened.

I get an email with a topic that sounded good. Real good. “Go check out the product,” it says. So, I click it. I’m trying to read the sales page. I mean I’m REALLY TRYING TO READ THE SALES PAGE but he, whoever this guy is…

… WON’T LET ME READ THE SALES PAGE!

I am his prime prospect.

I want the benefit he so eloquently offered in the email.

He’s worked hard to get me on his list, get me to open that email, get me to click the link…

… but the result is I wanna strangle him.

Why?

Because every two seconds there is another pop-up that says:

JOE BLOW JUST BOUGHT THIS PRODUCT!
SUSIE Q JUST BOUGHT THIS PRODUCT!
JEDI MASTER JUST BOUGHT THIS PRODUCT!
FREDDIE KRUGER JUST BOUGHT THIS PRODUCT!

Sigh.

I closed the page and came here to write you this note.

While it’s terrific to show your prospects that your product is flying off the shelf, I’m not so sure that continuously interrupting them while they read your sales page is the way to do it.

Plus, between you and me, I’m not sure I even believe he’s making all those sales.

It comes out to about 1 sale every 2 or 3 seconds, and that just doesn’t seem likely, does it?

But here’s where I advise you to not take my advice…

(Wait… let me think about that a moment…)

Those super annoying pop-ups that tell you everyone and their brother are buying the product… (I hate to even admit this)

… actually increase sales.

Yup.

I am the exception here and NOT the rule.

People are naturally influenced by what other people do. It’s the herd instinct, and it’s hardwired into us for reasons of survival.

People see that others are buying the product and so they buy the product, too. I’ve seen data on sales launches where there is a big surge at the opening bell of people buying. This is typical behavior in a successful launch. Most people buy the first day or the last day, and in between sales sharply taper off.

But when these annoying sales notifications are added on the second day, suddenly sales go up again. More people who visit the page are buying right then and there rather than putting the decision off.

You can get the software to do this at fomo.com or other software providers. Just sign up for an account, implement the code, set your parameters for how you want the software to appear and act, and if all goes as planned, sales will increase.

But please, please make the notifications unobtrusive. The idea is to gently let prospects know that other people are buying the product.

If the pop-up is continually stopping the person from reading the letter, you will lose sales to people who don’t have the patience to put up with the distraction. Like me.

First let me say that $3,000 is an ultra-conservative guess. I suspect this guy (we’ll call him Mike) is earning 3 to 5 times that much, but let’s be conservative and call it $3,000…

Mike has found a way to earn residual income that is right underneath all of our noses. In fact, it’s a method that’s been taught for a couple of decades or more, and yet very few marketers do this.

I’m almost positive you already know of this technique. But I’m also pretty confident that you are not USING this technique, at least not to the extent Mike is using it.

On the technical side, all you need to make this work is a squeeze page and an autoresponder.

Remember, residual income is what you earn for work you do ONCE and get paid for over and over again. If you write a hit song, you get royalties every time that song is played. If you sell software as a service or a membership site, you get paid every month until that person unsubscribes.

And if you’re Mike, you do what might be the simplest thing of all: You create specially made autoresponder sequences that last for YEARS, keep subscribers interested and continuously sell, sell and sell some more.

Mike’s ENTIRE business model is built around autoresponders. It’s not just a sideline for him, it’s what pays his bills, bought him a second home and put his kids through college.

Here’s what Mike does:

He chooses a niche. His favorites are weight loss/health, along with making money online. But he works in a couple of others as well.

He writes a follow up sequence that goes on for years. YEARS. Naturally he doesn’t do this all at once. Once he targets a niche, he writes follow up emails for the first couple of weeks prior to going active. Then he adds to the sequence on a regular basis until it’s about 3-5 years long (I’m not kidding!) He sends out about 1 email per day on average, although sometimes he sends out 2 emails if he’s promoting something hard.

If you’re freaking out about writing all these emails, remember two things: You just have to write enough emails to stay ahead of your earliest subscribers. And you can always outsource the work.

Mike’s emails are a mixture of information, content, observations, humor, jokes, quotes… pretty much whatever he feels like writing that he knows will interest his niche not just today but also in years to come. And every single email does something else, too. It sells.

Sometimes the entire email is selling. Other times the selling part comes in about halfway through the email. Once in a while he doesn’t sell until the P.S. But the point is this: He delivers content his readers WANT and he never stops selling, either.

He chooses evergreen products that are likely to still be available well into the future. ClickBank is his #1 source for these.

He sells one product per week. That is, he spends 7 days talking about just one product, what it can do for the reader, anecdotal stories of what it’s done for others, common questions answered and so forth.

And here’s a little trick he uses: Because each week focuses on just one product, he makes it look like a new product launch. Mind you, he never SAYS it’s a new product. Nor does he say that the product will no longer be available after the week is over. But he does give that impression in order to give the reader a sense of urgency.

To create even more urgency, he also offers a bonus that is good for that week only. His bonuses are usually built on PLR that he’s repurposed just for this.

And here’s where it gets even MORE interesting: 5-6 times a year he promotes a PACKAGE of products that are all his. These are the same products he’s been giving out as bonuses, all with big price tags attached so they look high value. He bundles about seven of these together and offers them for one ‘low’ price. And of course he gets to keep all the profits when he does this.

Offering these PLR products as bonuses and then packaging them together to sell is optional to the system, but it does bring in more sales and revenue and it doesn’t take all that much time to source good PLR products and rename them.

Now then, this all sounds great but you’re probably wondering how he gets people to join his lists so he can send them all these emails on autopilot. And the answer is awesome lead magnets.

In fact, this is where he spends his real time and energy, because the better the lead magnet is, the easier it is to get subscribers. Often, he’ll buy the rights to a product that’s sold well and offer that as his giveaway for joining his list. When you can say that a product sold 3,000 copies at $297 but the visitor can get it for free just for subscribing, your conversion rates can get pretty high. For his non-IM niches his conversion rate is over 70%, and for his online marketing niche it’s about 50%, which is still excellent.

By taking the time and expense to get the lead magnet right, he doesn’t just increase the conversion rates on his squeeze pages. He also builds a lot of goodwill and credibility with his new subscribers, which makes it easier to get his emails read and his links clicked.

This all sounds great, right? But what about traffic?

Good question. Mike pays for all of his traffic because he likes being able to turn on the traffic switch whenever he wants for as long as he wants. He already knows what each subscriber on each list is worth for the first six months they’re on the list. Any sales that come in after six months are just gravy.

His method is to spend as much as 50% of what he will earn in the first six months on advertising. So for example if the average subscriber earns him $3.00 in six months, he’ll spend as much as $1.50 to get that subscriber. But most of his subscribers stay with him for years, so in the end he actually earns a good deal more than just $3.00 apiece.

He buys his traffic from solo ads, Facebook ads and Google ads. He also uses several less well-known methods, two of which I was able to pry out of him. One of these is paying Facebook Group leaders to promote his free offer to their members. And another method he uses is to pay product sellers to offer his free product on their download page. Since everyone who hits the download page is a buyer, these tend to be especially good leads.

Naturally Mike uses a tracking service to find out where his squeeze page traffic is coming from so he knows what’s working.

Once a new subscriber joins one of his lists, that subscriber automatically receives emails for a long time from Mike. But the emails never look dated because they’re written in a style that makes it look current. Mike does have to check and make sure the products promoted in his sequences are still active. If one of them is no longer available, he simply finds a similar product and substitutes out the URLs and the product name.

And Mike does a lot of cross promoting, too. For example, if he has a list of people who use social media for online marketing, he’ll promote his free video marketing lead magnet to that list to see if he can get them on a second and even third list. Yes, this can mean a subscriber is in maybe three different autoresponder sequences simultaneously, but the profits far, far outweigh any unsubscribes.

As you can see the hard work in this business model is getting things set up. But once you do, it takes very little work to keep things running smoothly. And if you decide to take a month off, it shouldn’t affect your income, either.

Here’s maybe the most interesting thing about this entire case study: Mike had no previous marketing or writing experience prior to setting up his first squeeze page – autoresponder funnel. He was good at technical stuff but never did any kind of sales or marketing before.

And I wonder if this didn’t help him to succeed, because his writing is very basic and sounds like it comes from that slightly weird ‘guy next door’. He just writes about what interests him in each niche, because he figures that same stuff will interest his readers. His grammar isn’t great but he tells new subscribers up front that he’s no English professor; he’s just a guy like them who enjoys doing XYZ just like they do.

It works for him. And if you choose an evergreen niche that interests you, then I think you could easily build a hands-free funnel like Mike’s and start earning some of that residual income on autopilot. You set it up, send a continuous stream of new subscribers and get sales. It’s so simple, most people overlook this – but it works.

You’ve got a forum or a Facebook Group or some sort of social media platform that is keeping you super busy. So what do you do? You ask a couple of your most loyal members or followers to act as moderators for you.

Or maybe one of them even volunteers. “Hey there, I’m on this forum all the time and I know you’re busy… how about I act as a moderator to help you out?”

Wow, that’s awesome, right?

You get free help from one of your biggest fans – someone who knows your stuff and wants to help you tell the world about you and your products.

Except…

Except sometimes these helpful moderators are really wolves in sheep’s clothing, ready to take you down, get you banned and even put you into legal trouble.

Yes, I know I sound like a crazy, paranoid doomsayer, but this really happens. In fact, it costs companies millions or possibly even billions of dollars a year in lost revenue.

Take the case of Bob’s* Facebook Group account. Bob runs his own online marketing business, teaching people how to use social media to get new customers.

Bob is a social media marketing expert, and the last person you think would lose his business because of a social media marketing mistake. But that’s essentially what happened.

Bob sold his highly acclaimed $1,997 social media marketing course to someone we’ll can Suzie. Suzie turned out to be something of a pain, pestering Bob several times a day with questions and demanding far more attention than any of his other 300 students combined.

Rather than watch the course and implement what Bob taught, Suzie seemed to think she was entitled to one-on-one teaching 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Essentially, there was no pleasing her. Exasperated, Bob refunded her money and politely told her that the course was not for her.

Suzie was furious. She sent out numerous messages on social media telling anyone who would listen that Bob was a fraud, his course was a waste of money and so forth. But apparently this wasn’t enough for her.

Unbeknownst to Bob, she joined his Facebook Group with an entirely different identity than her own. Keep in mind that his Facebook Group was how Bob communicated with everyone who purchased the $1,997 course.

This identity seemed very friendly and helpful towards Bob and everyone else in the group, so much so that Bob eventually made this other identity a Group moderator. And once she had moderator status, she immediately began subtly undermining Bob and his social media course. She managed to personally contact everyone in the group and lure many of them to her own Group while gaining their confidence.

Long story short, she used her authority as Bob’s moderator as well as her authority within her own Facebook Group to cast doubt on Bob and his course. Refunds began skyrocketing and new sales plummeted. Her final act was to make several posts that were completely against Facebook’s terms of service, thereby getting Bob’s Facebook Group and Bob himself banned from Facebook.

Bob has asked Facebook to investigate and hopes to restore his ability to be on Facebook but restoring his good name and reputation will take a great deal more than that. By becoming one of his Facebook Group moderators, this woman managed to virtually destroy Bob’s business.

And this is not an isolated instance, either. I’ve heard horror tales of social media moderators doing things that created lawsuits, lost sales and put businesses in trouble with government agencies.

If and when you allow anyone else to have moderator control on any of your social media type accounts, you need to KNOW who they are and that you can trust them, because it only takes one moderator from hell to potentially ruin everything you’ve built.

*I changed Bob’s name because the poor guy’s been through enough already.

Why is it when we want to be at our most creative and innovative, we resort to using the most worn-out cliché at our disposal? “We need to think outside the box on this one!”

Ugghhh.

First of all, that ‘box’ is there for a reason. It gives us boundaries and guidelines on what we want to accomplish. For example, if I say I want you to write an article on new ways small businesses can use social media, I’ve just given you a ‘box’.

But if I tell you to get to work and give you no idea what to do, you’re going to be totally and utterly lost.

Second, if we want to be more creative, let’s start by abolishing the “think outside the box” phrase and make a pact, just between you and me. From this point forward, if you or I say or write ‘th*nk o*ts*d* th* b*x’, we owe $5 to our favorite charity payable immediately.

Agreed? Good.

Now then, what can we say when we want to express our desire to think differently, get off the beaten track, search for an innovative approach, break new ground and take an imaginative leap?

Seriously, I’m asking you for your help on this one. Even the phrases I used in the previous sentence sound worn out and tired.

I did have one thought, but if you’re a Star Wars fan then you might not like it. For whatever reason, people seem to either gravitate towards Star Wars or Star Trek. I’m told Star Wars is for dreamers and Star Trek is for science geeks. This might be wrong, but I can see some truth to it.

Here’s what I do know: In the very first Star Trek series during the opening credits, we hear Captain Kirk saying…

“Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its 5-year mission: To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before.” What do you think?

Can we boldly go where no one has gone before?

It beats thinking outside some cliché box.

Whoops! That’s $5 I owe… now where did I put that checkbook… 😉