060: Graphic Dashboard Case Study: How to Make Money Selling Your Systems, Checklists, Notes, Templates and Tools

Robert Plank 0:00 Robert Plank Show, Episode 60, graphic dashboard, case study, how to make money, selling your systems, checklists, notes, templates and tools. I want

Robert Plank 0:17 to welcome you back to the Robert Plank show, where we talk about making money. And if you're finding us on iTunes or Stitcher or some other place, you can access all of our episodes at Robert plank.com I'm Robert Plank, obviously, and what I do is I create membership sites, I run webinars, and I sell software because, well, I didn't want to continue working for someone else and earning an hourly wage and getting a yearly salary and taking a vacation when someone else told me to I wanted to be in charge of my own destiny. Maybe that's you too. And maybe what brought you here is stuff about internet marketing or software or the strategy in general. And today we're going to be talking about how to take that idea you have and maybe even take an existing product you have and go back and reiterate over it and make more money from it, and squeeze more blood out of the turnip, so to speak. And maybe you might have put out that course and thought, okay, great, I'm going to I'm going to have an idea. I'm going to teach someone stock trading. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to create some videos showing them how to sign up for a stock brokerage account, teach them about different types of stock trading, like buy and hold or options trading, or some of the more advanced stuff all that, like derivative stuff, mutual funds. So I'm going to make videos showing all that kind of stuff, and I'll plop those videos inside of a protected membership site, and you can use our member genius plugin and PayPal to take your payments and set that all up on WordPress. And then you can then create a sales letter that says, well, here's what my stock trading course is all about. Here's all the stuff that's in it. Here's why I want you to get it. Here's what you'll get out of it. Here's the stuff in the package, here's the price. Click and buy it. That's called a sales letter, and you use our paper template plugin for that, and we show you all that all encapsulated in our income machine. Course, we actually set up a whole business from scratch, and that includes the membership site, sales letter, taking orders, all that good stuff. And even if you're brand new and you don't even know how to register a.com name or get web hosting. Well, that's in there as well. So maybe you did something like that. And you figured, okay, well, you did all that, and then you sent a few emails to your email subscribers and a few messages to them. You got a few affiliates on board. Maybe you did some guest blog posts, ran some pitch webinars, ran some guest webinars, and after about a month. He said, Man, I'm so tired. And maybe you pulled out, you know, 1020, grand out of that. And then he said, Well, is this it? Am I off to the next thing? And what I'm here to talk about with you today is how to create an everlasting, or an evergreen, kind of product that combines the best of both worlds. Because, I mean, when we talk about this thing called Evergreen. That means, like, say, if I sell a course on podcasting, which I do at podcast crusher.com you can make a very own show, just like this one. Well, if I were to make a podcast course in, say, the year 2016 and then if I wanted to, then still continue selling that in the year 2025 or 2026 right, 10 years later, well, what would I have to do? Well, I would have to be really careful about what I showed and real careful about what I said, and it would be so watered down and so generalized that I would just be showing you a couple of PowerPoint slides. And unfortunately, the majority of products out there, that's what they are. They're PowerPoint slides, or they're a guy standing in front of a green screen, or even a written report, giving you some like the general ideas for stuff, but they don't actually show you how to do it. But then see, then the issue is, well, if you put out a course, then that shows screen by screen, step by step, click by click, how to do something. Well, then if, if you know, iTunes changes their interface later, or Libsyn, which we use to to host our podcast episodes, if they change their interface, or if Upwork changes their name, or if fiver changes their interface, or whatever. Well, then what do we do? Well, then in six months, a year or 18 months from now, you might have to go back and re record videos or put out version 2.0 of the product with more stuff, and the same kind of idea of even go more in this direction, more in this extreme of having some kind of template, or some kind of a software even Well, then, you know, a software program might break, or people might realize it doesn't have all the features you want. So you have to go back and reiterate. And so I think that you need to be thinking in terms of your product creation, membership sites, product launches, all that good stuff, more in terms of a system and a checklist, more in terms of, well, you could have it just be some videos, right? You could have it just be, let me show you how to sign up on AmeriTrade or on iTunes. Or on GoToWebinar, and that's, that's a good start, but what you need to have is a step by step system and a checklist. And I want to see the way that you actually do it. And I mean, a few years ago, I bought a course on how to sell an Amazon this was a quite a while ago. And this person, I guess the product was something like how to how to make a bunch of money around Christmas time on Amazon. Well, great. I just, I want to buy the course. I just want to see how to do it. Because I could, I see a place to go and get an account, but I don't know what kind of account to get. I don't, I'm not all I thought in my head was, Well, what I'm expecting is a couple of videos, not nothing too fancy, but I just want to see a video of you setting up your account, a video of you shipping some stuff in, because I don't, because I don't know how to navigate that. And then a video on even like once you've shipped a few things in, then how to decide what to ship in, and how much and how often. I just want to see the behind the scenes, almost, of how you do it, but shown in the context of, here's know how you repeat that? And I joined, and there were some audios, and there were some videos and there was some written stuff, but it was all in a question and answer format. It was like, welcome to Q and A call number 15. And then people just had, like, the weirdest, most random questions about how to sell grocery items on Amazon, how to sell toys and Amazon, I was like, Well, it's great that you're answering questions, but how do I actually do it? And I mean, I bought a course once on membership sites just to see, like, what was there? Anything I was personally missing when it came to membership sites, I've always opened new ideas, and it was all audio based. And I thought, well, membership sites, you can get pretty technical if you want to, and it usually involves clicking around on a on a screen and missing the software and missing around a WordPress and you're telling me in an audio recording, will click on this sidebar and click on this button, and I'm just like, there's no way I could even ever follow this. And I mean, it might be helpful for you, because you see your screen in front of you while you're recording your audio. But, I mean, it's, it's like you're trying to give me turn by turn directions when I'm driving a car almost. And I also have bought a course on WordPress. I bought some resale rights. So WordPress course, I thought, well, I already have some videos teaching WordPress, but WordPress updated their interface, and I just want to buy someone else's rights and put them in to replace the WordPress videos I happen my membership site and just, you know, spend 50 bucks on it and call in a day, as opposed to recording of the two hours of video. So I bought this and surprise audio course on how to use WordPress. Okay. I mean, imagine if you were trying to figure out how to use Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Word or something, and it was audio based. So that doesn't help anyone. And so the answer here, what we want to do is show, first of all, okay, so you want to explain the theory first of all, right. And what we use for this is a system called w, w, h, w. It stands for, why, what? How to what if? And we want to, want to go through all the, all the steps in this, but have the How to component of this be the media, and that means, if you're going to be showing someone, just to make it simple, a one hour video on how to set up WordPress, when we spend five or 10 minutes on you know, why use WordPress? And here's what the end result is going to look like, right? And because, and the reason, the biggest reason use WordPress is because you don't have to edit code and you don't have to mess with all the other alternatives. You don't want to go into the details about the other alternatives. Just say, well, in a couple of minutes, here's what the end picture is going to look like. And we want to use WordPress because of all these great features, great move on. Now. The what this is like, the What steps are you about to take? And you say, Well, what we're going to do here is we're going to go and log into our website Control Panel, we're going to install this thing called WordPress, we're going to add a couple quick blog posts, and then we're going to add a couple quick plugins, then we'll be done. And you do that so that later on, when you're showing you actually going through the steps, it actually makes sense, and that someone can follow along in how far along in the process you are. And you know when you're done too? You know when you finally got to the finish line? Because it's really frustrating when someone gets to like, a hour, eight or nine of their big, long course, and they're they're patting themselves on the back. They're congratulating themselves on how hard they worked and how many hours they've labored, showing you every nook and cranny in detail, the encyclopedia version of how to sell on Amazon. I'm just like, but it would have been so much more helpful if eight hours ago, you just gave me a little context and then jumped right in and showed me what we're going to create. And when you're making your membership site, you know, I messed around on a few years of what do I want to call these videos or lessons or things like that. And it's better at our sessions, and it's better to just lay out your membership site in what we call modules. And it would help if you if

Robert Plank 9:51 you decided on four modules, just to keep your course real short and to the point. And if four modules really won't fit, then go. With eight. And it's kind of like your course is split into, like the simple half and the advanced half. But in most cases, four modules is more than enough. Four modules of about an hour each, and it's okay if you go a little bit over, but it's about an hour each, and each of these modules goes through the WW, h, w, a little bit of why, a little more of what, mostly how to and then finally, the what if, which is just like the assignment or the challenge at the end. And so, so this and each of these modules is a different milestone in the process. Okay, so if you were teaching podcasting like I have the podcast Crusher course, then the first module could be that your first podcast episode is up and running and online, and it's done just a quick five minute episode with no editing, no music, no frills, just boom. You recorded a quick podcast, you installed the right plug and uploaded the file submitted to iTunes. Okay, cool. Those are the steps in the end. The end of the first module is now we have our first podcast episode up and online. Then the next module could be able to make a an interview episode or a longer show with, you know, with URLs you're promoting, or with sponsors, or with music or some editing. Okay, cool. Now that's your next milestone. Then the third milestone could be something like traffic or getting more listeners or getting a bunch of content piled up and on and on, but so many people just have the mistake of, well, a module for them is five or 10 minutes, they're stuck in PowerPoint, and then there's no clear ending point, because they didn't actually explain the steps they're going to take, and then there's no clear milestone. They say, okay, seven minutes and don't look this video off to the next video. And I'm just thinking it would have been so much more helpful if, instead of me having to click over to the next video every five or seven minutes, if it was a one hour thing, and I was it was 100% clear what the milestone was that I would personally get out of it, what stage I personally would get to when it comes to say, podcasting, and because we don't want to get stuck in theory land, we don't want to talk about some theoretical mystical stock trading. Course you might have, but you can understand that this will work in pretty much any niche. If you're teaching weight loss, real estate, playing the guitars, another good one where you can get to, you can make the first module as simple as possible, so they get just a little result, but it's a bigger result they've ever than they've ever gotten. Now they're at that milestone, and they can take a little bit of a break, and then when it comes time to get to the next logical step, that is the next the next milestone. So let's get out of theory land and get into real world land. We're going to talk about a course that we put out called Graphic dashboard. I mean, you should pick it up. Okay? It's at graphic dashboard.com and by the way, if you are ever stuck with in your blog posts or podcast episodes, if you're stuck about what to talk about, just name one of your podcast episodes, the name of one of your products. What does this do? Well, it makes it it makes it easy to promote something. It makes it non awkward to promote one of your websites, one of your web addresses, URLs, and you can talk about some of the real struggles. You can tie it into all kinds of cool lessons without you having to get into marketing speaker, get into theory land. So graphic dashboard.com, if you want to pull it up while I'm here, I don't mind if you want, if you could multitask, pull up graphic dashboard.com, so this is a course that shows you how to use a website called pixler, p, i, X, L, R, and what we could have done is we could have just said, All right, so Pixlr,

Robert Plank 13:41 this is an image editor that you can use to create graphics, and we could have said, All right, so here's how to create a new blank image in Pixar. Here's how to make a square image. Here's how to make a wide image, a big one, a small one, a white one, a black one. And that could have been fun for us, but that would not have helped you. I bought going back to the resale right. And by the way, if you don't know what resale rights is, a site that's not mine, and I know I should just find one that gives me an affiliate link, but master dash resale dash rights.com not my website. I don't get any kind of commission. I wish I did. So this is a site where you can pick up resell rights. You can buy the rights to videos, reports, articles, software, things like that. You can pay 10 or 20 bucks and then get a product you can sell for 100 bucks over and over again, and usually it comes with a sales letter, download page, extra bonus stuff, but master resale rights. And so I've bought and sometimes I buy them just to add them into my different membership sites. Like, sometimes I'll tuck them into the members area of Double Agent marketing.com which is a website where we meet on a webinar once a month and fix people's businesses. And I say, Well, you know, if they're paying month to month, I'm gonna sometimes buy some resale rights. And. Some videos, some extra training that looks good, to hold them over and tie them over until the very next meeting. So I bought some resort rights on Photoshop, and it was just, it was really bad. And there's, there's one where this guy spent 20 minutes in the beginning of the very beginning of the Photoshop videos, and he had Photoshop open. I left that great. And he starts talking about different different ways you can rearrange the toolbars. And he was talking about how you might want to use Photoshop for 3d image editing. And he went on like about this for 20 minutes, and after 20 minutes, he said, Well, you know, you're probably not going to want to use that. I thought, well, just rambled at me for 20 minutes and talk to me about 3d images. I'm not even good enough for 2d images yet, and you're telling me you don't even do it. I'm never gonna need to know it. So can I get my 20 minutes back, please? And so, so, but so, but it's always good, though, to like to look at the competition and build a better mousetrap, because you do want to get in these niches where people have already established themselves and you can just do an updated job or a shorter job, or a simpler job, or a better job than they do, and usually it's because they don't have a checklist, they don't have a system, and you do. So I said, Okay, well, I've actually wanted to sell a course on graphics for a very, very long time, and I used to have, about 10 years ago, I used to have a diagram. If you ever use a program called Microsoft Visio, you can create flow charts and mind maps and spider webs and things. I had a huge, huge map. I think I might have had a print and put on my wall, but it was just a spider web of all the products I had created and wanted to create, and what things was were up sold into other things. And it was just a huge mess. And it was kind of like, if you've seen train track maps, if you're taking the train, you see, like the the different rail lines, and then there's like a dotted line for areas where they have not yet built. I kind of have that I had all the stuff, and also, if I wanted to build and one of the dotted lines was a little box that said, Photoshop on crack $97 I want to have a $97 course teaching Photoshop. So let's think about this. Well, first of all, when you create a product on Photoshop, you don't want to go on for 20 minutes, about 3d editing, or about the toolbars. You want to say in that first hour. And really it's 30 or 40 minutes. Is the only time you have within the hour for the how to stuff, because you got to say why it's important what you're about to do, do it and then give them the assignment. So really only have 30 or 40 minutes to get your point across. So in that first module for my Photoshop Training, I'd say, Okay, well, I want to show them how to actually make something that actually use, right? And so one of my mentors really, really early on, when I was, like, 17 years old, he kind of made fun of me selling programming products. I'd sell products on how to how to code in PHP, which is a way to, you know, make your web pages have, you know, pop ups and countdown timers and different and surveys and things like that. And he kind of made a point of it, because he said, Well, you know, you're gonna sell to the geeks who don't have enough money, and they're probably just gonna buy your your plugins, your scripts, just because they were just paid 500 bucks to code something up. So they're gonna buy that thing for me for 10 bucks and then slap it on someone's page and get paid 500 bucks a word. So this guy told me that you need to have, you need to show people how to make a million dollars in five minutes. And he was being really, you know, pessimistic and kind of a jerk, but if you think about that, what's the equivalent of selling or teaching someone how to sell a million dollars worth of something in five minutes. And so we want to apply that to whatever niche we're in, even editing graphics. So thinking about that, okay, what's, what's the a million dollars in five minutes, equivalent to graphics? Well, not playing around with with graphics. It could be making a logo, or, even better, making an affiliate banner, because you could say, well, let's go to a site called Clickbank or JVZoo and find a product to promote, and we can say, okay, cool. I found this weight loss product, and I'm going to put put some colors in here, put some graphics in here, put some text in here. Cool. In five minutes, I just made an affiliate banner. I just took something that might have cost me 500 bucks, or 100 bucks, or 50 bucks, to pay someone else to do it, or if I did, it might have taken me five hours. Now it takes me five minutes. And this is why, when I sell my copywriting course, speed copy, calm. It's kind of the same thing. It's this, there's this thing called Writing a sales letter that you used to think took one or two months, and I'll show you how to do it in about 30 minutes. So we want to, so that's the first thing about it is you want to to teach the equivalent of making a million dollars in five minutes. Show these different milestones, and then the milestones should be all of like the best thing. So looking at the sales letter for. Or graphic dashboard. We show you in the first module, how to create affiliate banners, and the second module how to how to list your services on a site called fiverr, so that people can pay you money instantly, even if you don't have a list. And that adds up to a lot of money, especially if you can get five or 10 of these orders a day, and you can have different upsells, so that way you get paid 20 or 30 bucks for a banner times five or 10 a day. There you go. I mean a huge full time income, or a decent full time income just from clicking around a little bit. Then we have the third module of digital 3d product covers. And then the fourth module is that are things like book covers and DVD graphics. So by having these actually interesting modules in the course, it makes the sales that are a heck of a lot easier to sell, because it almost sells itself. I don't have to, I don't have to have a module about different kinds of Photoshop brushes and try to explain someone how this looks exciting. It's already built in. There's all these ways that they can make money from it. And then the other thing that you might notice about graphic dash, one of that I've even been saying, is that we don't teach Photoshop, we teach a free alternative called Pixlr. And now, what's the reason for that? Is because, well, if someone comes to my sales letter and it's all about how to use Photoshop, what's the problem? Well, they already need to own Photoshop, which is, I think, $700 or $10 a month if you use the Adobe Creative Cloud. So we say now we've limited ourselves to people who already own a photo shop, which I think is not a lot of people. It's not, it's definitely not as big of a universe as people who have their own website.

Robert Plank 21:42 And the other thing is, I don't want to have to convince someone to use Photoshop in my sales letter, because then they'd have to say, maybe I convinced them to use Photoshop or to buy photoshop, then have they'd have to go and leave my site and buy photoshop on their own and then come back. It's just, it's a whole it's a whole problem. If you can bundle the thing you're teaching into the course that you have right there. And so we have our we teach Pixlr, and Pixlr actually does most of what Photoshop can do. And I would even say it does more than Photoshop can do, because we build our templates into the members area. And if you want to check out the demo video on graphic dashboard.com. If you're if you want to buy it and log in, we have a whole wall dashboard as a name suggests. Of difference, different affiliate banners, first of all, and you can click on the one you want, and using some special, special secret sauce I've put in there, you can click on the banner you want, and it pops open this free pixel editor, but it pops it open with our template already open, and you can just click on the different areas and change the text that's already on there. And same thing with, say, DVD cover. You can click on the DVD cover you want, and then just change the text, and now you have a beautiful looking DVD cover, just like I have on mine, or a Kindle book cover or a Create Space cover. It's all exactly made to the size you need for those kinds of services to sell a digital book on Amazon or sell a physical book. So most people, they only think of terms of one or the other, right? They're either going to just teach Photoshop and not really think through the milestones and the things people will get out of it, or they'll just sell the templates. And it's a weird thing, because I mean videos, just about, just about Photoshop, are worth what? I don't know, 20 bucks, 50 bucks, templates just with Photoshop. Or, I don't know 20 bucks, 50 bucks, but you combine them, and now you're talking about $100 $200 or a higher kind of program, if you can combine not just the training, but also the templates here. And so the way that I've been thinking about it lately, and the way that I've been thinking about especially the way that graphic dashboard came about, well, it came about because me and Mr. Lance thomashiro were goofing around on a site called fiverr. And you know, we always wanted to have a course on how someone can just join a site like Fiverr and start making money right away. And there were a few courses on that, and they all suck. They all go, here's a site called fiverr, here's the link to click to sign up. And then they go, and they they show you signing up, that takes about an hour. Then they go back to PowerPoint and say, Well, what if you sold SEO Services? What if you sold article writing services? What if you did all these different things? And then they say, what if this made 500 bucks, and this made 5000 bucks, and it's like the next hour is all about the calculator game, and, you know, all these what ifs, and then you go and check out them on the site called fiverr, and you can't even find them. And so maybe, you know, maybe they use a different username, or maybe they use it for a while, but then they quit, or things like that. And, I mean, that's the thing too, is sometimes you're gonna have a course where the stakes are real low, right? Maybe you're just gonna have a course. We're showing someone how to make 100 bucks, 500 bucks a month. I mean, if you sell that for 50 bucks, if I can pay you 50 bucks and find out how to make 100 bucks a month, that's more than worthwhile. So we don't have to teach everyone, like how to change the whole world, but we want to actually get them there right, as opposed to just wasting their time. And so the way I've been thinking about it is that you want to be goofing around on your own, but you want to get to the point where you've cracked the code, right, and you've actually made some money. And so the way I'm thinking about this is whatever kind of skill, and I mean, that's the thing too, is your products and your membership sites are there to teach a skill. And I know that this the word skill is kind of a loaded and scary word, because skill sounds like freelancing. Skill sounds like having 20 bosses instead of one boss. Skill means not a lot of money for a lot of work and but skill can mean a repeatable skill, or a leverageable skill, or an automatable skill, like a skill could be email marketing, and I teach you how to make an email marketing sequence, and then you load it up in your autoresponder sequence, and then that pays out over and over again, because the traffic comes in, the emails get sent out, the sales come in automatically. But then, if I teach you email marketing, well, you can also get hired as an email copywriter and make 500 bucks an hour just writing some quick emails. And you don't necessarily have to be like a churn and burn chop shop, $2 an hour article writer. So there are four stages when it comes to figuring out your hook and your modules and your all the good stuff in your membership site. And it's this stage one is the hobby mindset and messing around. Most people stop here. Stage two is where you crack the code and actually get the result you wanted and make money. Stage three is to systematize it so you can go back and actually repeat and do those things that made you money. And then stage four is to trim the fat to make it fast, fun and profitable. So stage one, hobby mindset. Stage two, crack the code. Stage three, systematize and stage four, trim the fat. What I mean by that is, well, we are goofing around on Fiverr and trying to figure out how someone, anyone, can quickly make even just 1000 bucks a month, right? Even just to swing for the pensions, but even if it was 200 bucks a month, bucks a month front, with no list, with no real skills, with nothing, then we're gonna goof around. And it actually, actually will be a waste of time early on. I'm just gonna put that out there right now. Is that whenever you, whenever you want to make a course on someone, or maybe, or maybe you already have some kind of skill, maybe it's a waste of time for you already, right? I mean, I hate to say it like that, but, I mean, we want to try different things and figure out what's going to sell. Maybe, like if you were, if you were in real estate, maybe your first house flip lost your money, right? Or when I was first programming PHP stuff or WordPress plugins, well, the first few plugins I made kind of sucked, and I really didn't get paid because I was freelancing. I really didn't get yet paid the amount of money I wanted to and then once the job was done, I was like, well, great, now I have to start from scratch again. But then the first real money I made, and when I was 17 years old, the first time I saw over 1000 bucks in my PayPal account was when I would install plugins for a living. And so I partnered with a couple guys on a piece of software, and the first day, we made $8,000 in sales. And this was like early 2000s and after someone bought then it said, Well, you here's the stuff you bought, here's the videos, and here's the software itself. You can install it yourself, or you can hire this guy to install it for you. When I believe it was $75

Robert Plank 28:53 if it was on two or three particular web hosts we were familiar with, or $100 if it was on a different kind of web host, and all, literally, all I had to do. Well, first of all, the they paid me money, they filled out a question our form that just had like six or seven quick questions, like, you know, what's the login details for this site, and what folder Do you want it, and stuff like that. And then I, as soon as it came in, if I saw that that 75 or $100 sale come in in the morning, then I would just go and log in. And usually the majority of the so called work for this was uploading files. So I would go and I would have this folder on my desktop with the software they just bought, and I would go and log into their site, drag the folder over, and because internet speed was slow back, then I'd go, and I'd just take a break for 510 minutes come back and then do about five more minutes of clicking around. And then it was completely set up. And so thinking back on it, now, what I would do is, if I were to teach so called PHP. Programming I would think of, well, let me think of ways that people could apply this and actually make them more than their money back from that they've paid buying the product. By the way, never call your product an investment. That's just kind of you don't want to, you don't, you don't want to put that in your sales letter, just because there's, there's like, FTC rules and things like that. So instead of using the word investment, we just want to, like, put ways in their head of how they can apply this. And so I could teach PHP, you know, programming and, you know, and if I were to go back, I would and do that again. And, you know, re have a time machine and repeat the past. I would build in a lot of ways for people to make money by by using my plugins. I would give them a PHP version and a Wordpress version of the plug in. I would have a module on how to how to set up your services as a freelancer, and tell them I have a routine to contact other people who sold software and offer my services as a as a plugin installer and things like that. And so there's those four stages, messing around, cracking the code, systematizing and trimming in the fat. And so me and Lance. I mean, this, this fiber thing. I mean, here's the thing is that any anything new, any kind of new avenue you go down, it's always kind of fun at first, because it's new and it is a distraction from when it makes you money. But we can't go down the ship, and we can't just keep on doing the same old thing we've always been doing, because, well, we'll get bored. Even if it makes us a lot of money, we'll get bored of that. So take advantage of the newness. And if there's some new way of advertising, like, if there's some new form of Google ads, will then, like, spend those couple of weeks goofing around and messing around, and it might be a waste of time at first, but then once you've cracked the code and figure out, for example, how to make money from Google ads, how to make $100 for five minutes of work from installing plug ins once you've cracked the code. Now that's where the the second wind, or the excitement will come back, because the first win is the newness, right with the second windows when it actually starts to work. So that starts to work. But then the problem, though, is if you keep on down that path? Well, you're going to be a five or maybe not a $5 right person, but you're going to be a glorified freelance worker, and you're going to have built a new day job for yourself, right? You're going to be clocking in at nine, clocking out at five, and making a set amount of money that will never, ever grow. I mean, the big reason why you want to have membership sites, passive income products and a list is because if you have double the number of products, it's double the income, double the list, double the income, double your conversions, double the income, double the traffic, double the income. It can actually scale so you don't want to get stuck at just stage two after you've cracked the code. You want to systematize it and figure out what you did correctly so that you can repeat it over and over again. And that means you say, well, I go to the site called fiverr, and I'm going to create, for example, a gig. What they call it, on delivering voiceovers. And so here is the exact template that I go and put in for my voiceovers. And then you can go and say, Alright. And then in this site called fiverr, they allow you to place a video on your page talking about your services. So what I do is I record using this piece of software, and I read this exact script and I put it on there, and then when a sale comes in, then I can have this for the questionnaire, when someone buys from me, and then once someone tells me they want a voiceover with this script and all this stuff, but I use this other piece of software to record the voiceover, and then I deliver it. And just Yeah, even though it seems like child's play to you, you need to to just not even in the real quick document, but you can probably summarize, and maybe a page or two, what you actually do on Fiverr to, for example, to deliver these voiceovers so that if you forgot about it for six months and had to pick it back up, you could, if you were to hand this off to your son or your daughter or brother in law or friend or your mom or whoever they could just go and use the steps, use the templates and paste it right in. And so this was our attitude with graphic dashboard, when we said, Okay, well, I want to show people how to make money by having affiliate banners. So here are our 10 templates, and we just show them. Here's how to click on it, here's how to change the text, here's how to change the colors. You save it. Now you are all done. Now, do we show an exhaustive encyclopedia kind of kind of thing? Well, no, because that's not going to help anyone. That'll make anyone. That'll make you feel good, because you feel like you record a lot of videos, but it's not going to actually get someone to pick up this new skill. So systematizing, it is so important because, I mean, people aren't lazy. People are going to try to find the shortcuts. So if you just tell them here, this. Go down this list, right? Go down this list when it comes to making a new graphic, making a new voiceover, making a new WordPress site. So that way it's almost impossible to screw up, and it's impossible to skip steps as well. And then stage four is trim the fat to make it fast, fun and profitable. And that just means that you might have noticed that you made a big, long to do list of things to do, but some of some of the things in the checklist don't need to be there, or some of the things in the checklist are of such a low priority that you can, you can move them to the final module of your course. And this is huge. I told you to make a four module course for your membership site, right? So if you're teaching podcasting or graphics. In the case of graphic dashboard, it's best if you can fit it all in the four modules, that way you'll be done with it, and it'll be action packed and still enough stuff where people can actually feel like they're getting a lot, but they actually will finish. And if you say, Well, you know, I've got way, what I'm thinking of is a 12 or a 16 module course. Well, is it, and even if it was, is it possible for you to you to move some of those things to the bonuses and so?

Robert Plank 36:12 So for a sales letter, I just have the most fun. I have the easiest time. If I have a course, and it's a four module course with three bonuses. And if, once again, if you look at the sales letter for graphic dashboard, it looks like there's five bonuses, which I think I added to over time. So the bonuses for graphic dashboard is first, there's a two hour Pixlr Crash Course, and so, so graphic dashboard is basically the end goal is for you to make money with graphics. So that's why we show affiliate banners and freelance sites and 3d covers and physical products. But then I have a, what we call a quick start video that just shows everything from Pixlr. And I go and I retouch a photo, I make logos and banners. So in the in the what we call the Quick Start videos, the pressures off a little bit, not all the way, but a little bit the pressures off to make money right away. In our membership cube course, we have a video called the wish list Crash Course, which just shows how to set up and do all these things in wish list member, even though, in the course itself, we go back and start from scratch again. But if someone just wants to know about wish list, someone just wants to know about Pixlr in podcast Crusher, I think there's a podcasting crash course in there as well. In our make a product course, which is where we show you how to get a best selling book. There's just a Kindle crash course in there. There's just a Create Space Crash Course video in there. And so some of those things, like we said, If you can't narrow it down to four modules, you might be able to just move it to one of the one of the four bonuses. So back, back on track, four modules, right? The first module is going to be the quick instant result. The second module is going to be the even bigger result, which is a thing they really want. So in graphic dashboard, it's the instant income. Now, the third module is going to be something that's still exciting, but you kind of had to sneak in what they really need. In this case, it's digital 3d product covers to create, if you've ever and well, I mean, you can see what it looks like on graphic dashboard.com but if you've ever seen someone have a sales letter and it showed like a book or a box or a DVD case, and it was kind of tilted and kind of 3d looking, that's what I'm talking about. For 3d product coverage, just on the off chance that you're not viewing graphic dashboard.com. If you're in your car or walking and you can't load the web page, there are these 3d kind of box looking things. And so if I just sold a course on that, I feel like that would be kind of, again, a narrow audience. So that's why we moved it to module three, and then module four. Are the things that didn't really fit in anywhere else. And in this case, it's physical product graphics. So I don't know if you were able to tell, but I've just I've had all these templates that I've created and bought over the years, whenever we had to create a book or a manual, which is a thicker book that sells for more, or a CD or a DVD, and I had all these different products that we had created, and I thought, well, what if I just gave them the template from our dropship CEO book, or from our video sales tactics DVD, and they could just change the words, well, now those are some really cool templates. And so the whole point of this is that the final module in the four module course are going to be all the things that didn't really fit in anywhere else, or just kind of wrap up the course in general.

Robert Plank 39:42 And so that's the that's the case study right there for graphic dashboard. That's how we came to actually go from boring Photoshop stuff to something interesting, of actually making money using graphics. And then what you can do too, is once you've gone on these four stages and actually created the course, which means now you have your four milestones. You have your. Four videos. You have your little assignment at the end, right? Because we said to do, why? What? How to what if? Why is important? What are we about to do? How to do it? Which is the bulk of it? And then now, finally, what if I have this new training? Now, how can I go and apply it? So you go and make that, make the sales letter, pitch it on the webinar, get an affiliate program going, get some paid traffic, going some recharging pixels, make a bunch of sales repeat. And then remember how in beginning, we said, Well, geez, now, now what? What do I do after that first month? How do I make more money from it? We can go back and reiterate and do your best to poke some holes in the offer, and then go back and refill the holes and then update the sales letter or have a new pitch, because that way you now have news, right? You know that word news? I don't, I think, not sure. I'm not an English major, but I think the word news has the word new in it. I think that's how they come up with term news. It's all the new stuff, right? It's not just one new thing, it's new stuff. So if you had some new new stuff about your offers, that's a new reason to make a blog post, make a podcast, make a pitch webinar, telling people about this new stuff. And in copywriting, you can call this objection, so just fill in the objections. So if we had accidentally made graphic dashboard a course on Photoshop instead of Pixlr. Well, then that would be a huge hole. That would be a huge objection why people might not have bought it. So we might go back and redo the Photoshop part of the course and do it in Pixlr. If we didn't want to do that, we can make a bonus video just showing Pixlr. So that way now that reason for them not buying is is scratched off if we had forgotten the profitable the money making part. Or maybe we'll even discover a new service to provide on Fiverr that you can use with graphics that could be a new bonus module showing people how to quit their J jobs by using Fiverr, or something like that. If I go back and add in 10 new banners or 10 new templates, well, that is some news I can go back and put in there. And so we've done that with all of our courses. Like for example, we have a webinar Crusher course where we teach GoToWebinar, but it's not just videos on how to get your GoToWebinar account. Here's how to unmute a speaker, here's how to show your screen. We actually show the step by step process. We show how to use webinars to create products using membership sites, how to pitch on webinars, how to get monthly income from webinars. And so that's the bulk of the courses. Those are the modules. But then I have a recording of all of our webinar pitches and the PowerPoint templates that I use in those and I even took the best ones and template ties to them. So if anyone was creating a new pitch from scratch, they could just open this PowerPoint template and there's about 20 slides, and they would just go and edit the PowerPoint slides that are already there and fill in the text and then cool. Now they have shortcut all the months it would have taken to make a pitch webinar and do it in a few minutes. I have my speed Copy Course, which is training on copywriting, how to make a sales letter, if you want to call that a pitch page, landing page, whatever, and it the four modules go through those that process of making a quick sales letter, adding to it, adding audio and video, split testing, all that good stuff. But think about this. Well, that was a $500 and it still is a $497 course. And when you buy it, you get a free copy critique from me. And if you want to use that the day you join a month from now, whatever. But people send me URLs and i What do I do? I open up the web page and I show what I would change. Now think about this. I was probably gonna have an opinion on someone's sales letter anyway, so why not record it? Why not tell them something that'll help them? And not only do they get that recording, but I can then add that to the membership site and have a whole library of these copy critiques. Now it's really important to separate your core training from these bonuses, right? Because we don't want someone to join and have to wade through all the hours of copy critiques or Q and A, remember, I told you about that Amazon course I bought where I just wanted to know how to send something in. And it would have been great if I first joined, and the first video was how to send some stuff in. And if I got past that, then I could go and listen to the individual questions. But when I'm talking about have copy critiques, I'm saying I have this four module course that gets them from point A to point B. The copy critiques are off to the side. We have a webinar Crusher course which takes them from point A to point B. I had to do classes, pitch webinars, monthly income, all that stuff. But then the templates are then what they would use after they have consumed that training. Speed copy also has a thing called behind the letter. So when I make a new sales letter from scratch, I just record what I'm doing, because I'm doing it anyway. Might as well record it, and then that's an extra bonus in there. Speed copy contains my. Lit test results. So I can say, here's a list of things that that you should do on your sales letter, because I've scientifically proven it. Speed copy contains my swipe file, which are my best headlines and bullet points. So you can literally just plug and play my tools instead of me having to do it from scratch. Now, if I hadn't systematized my process, and if I hadn't figured out what actually I actually do in what order and what works, then it would just be some kind of wishy washy copywriting course, and it wouldn't be easy to duplicate, and it wouldn't be easy for me to teach you in a short amount of time. And so that's the mindset that I want you to get into when I'm talking about these different case studies is you do have these you could teach all kinds of crazy stuff, but what if you were just to get someone to four different milestones when it came to podcasting, copywriting, graphics, webinars, whatever it is For your own niche. Okay, so you're gonna, at first need to actually do it yourself, because you don't want to get stuck in PowerPoint land. So treat it as a hobby. At first, mess around and play around and do new things, but then crack the code, figure out what you're trying to do, which is usually more money or something, figure out how to get to the money stage. And not necessarily, not necessarily thinking about the amount of time or the amount of work it takes, so to speak, just focus on the money making section. What if you had a course on how to become an Uber driver, and you just started off, and then you're just gonna have to start off by driving around on Uber, and then you might say, well, maybe different hours or better. Or maybe if I drive over to the next big town, that'll be better. Or maybe there's little things like maybe a certain type of car is important, or maybe I gotta put gum or water bottle in my car, or I gotta get a certain kind of insurance so that I don't get screwed over. And then actually have to get approved by Uber so they have to, like, inspect the car and things like that. Maybe I'll ride an Uber so that I can, so I can, you know, get a feel of how the process actually should go. And then, so your first goop went around. But then you start to crack the code and say, well, maybe I drive an Uber car only on weekends, at late hours during surge pricing in a popular city, in the part of city where there's the different bars and stuff. So now I'm starting to make money from Uber. So now you've cracked the code, and you're at the point where, if you were just telling someone about Uber extemporaneously, and like an interview or podcast or something, you'd you'd missteps, you'd tell steps out of order. You'd forget things and all that. We want to systematize it so that way someone can say, Okay, well, either you rent this kind of car or use this kind of car. You then sign up on this screen real quick, and then the next steps are going to be to get this stuff in order for your Uber inspection. And then you're going to want to, by the end of the first module, have, you know, run your first Uber. What would you call it, your first Uber transport, or whatever. Okay, and then, so you just have this whole checklist where, if anyone wants to become an Uber driver, they just go through and do this. And then, and then, in your final stage of trimming the fat, you remove all the things that don't really matter. Like, I mean, you don't want to tell people about, well, get this brand of bottled water or this brand of tissues. And this is really silly, because when, when we were figuring out how to teach people how to sell on Amazon, because we actually put out our own Amazon course a couple years ago called dropship ceo.com

Robert Plank 48:42 there's a few steps, not a lot, but a few steps when it comes to to mailing items in the Amazon we were just trying to figure out, well, do we want to get so detailed that we tell people what brand of mailing labels to get, or do we just want to say, print your mailing label, take some scissors, tape it on a box, right? Or do you want to tell people to buy a special shipping scale? Or you want to just tell them stand on your bathroom scale, figure out what your weight is, then hold the box with your weight. That'll get it done, right? So there's, there's definitely a point where a template or a checklist gets too crazy, and we laugh at some of these other Amazon courses that literally tell people, like, what brand of scotch tape to go get? It's like, dude, any kind of tape will work. And we'll tell you to have tape and scissors, but we're not gonna tell you that. Here's the links to go and get your Scotch tape. I mean, it's, it doesn't have to be so detailed, but it starts to confuse people, right? And, I mean, you can apply this to anyone, like, I mean, I would like to see someone put out a course on Airbnb. Maybe they already do. Maybe there's something out there on YouTube. Like, Airbnb is a service where you can rent out your whole house, or a room in your house, or a couch, or you could, you know, rent an apartment and then re rent it out for Airbnb. I. I'd like to see someone put out a course on that and say, Well, I'd only do air, mean B in these cities, and I would only rent out the whole house for these reasons. And then the checklist and going through this would be, first of all, clear out all the personal stuff, hire this cleaning service, advertise in this way. And then the first module would be, now your A or B, now your property is listed on Airbnb. And maybe I don't want to know a little bit about the legalities, or maybe just like, Who do I even call to figure this out? Don't go into too much detail, but just, how do I, how do I fix any issue that I would personally have in my own city? Then the second the milestone of the second module would be to have your very first guest on Airbnb, right? Like, what like, how do you get people to to book with you? Like to book your house or book a room, or book the couch or whatever. And so does that mean, like, I have to price a certain way, have certain kind of pictures, certain kind of listing, and then when the if people message me asking questions, what do I say in response? So then the end of the first module is, then you get your you get your first person book. Now the third module could be, then if someone stays over, so then it's like, well, what is there a template of what I need to tell them? Should I give them my phone number? Should I give it to my key? How do I do it? Where I don't even have to be there? Should I be there? Should I meet them? Should I be living with them, or should I be just leaving them alone? So you can kind of get the idea of any kind of any kind of service or website. There's going to be a million questions and a million possibilities of where to go next, and so you are going to be there to remove the choices and add in your own checklist, but it's a refined checklist, so that people don't get bogged down on what branded key to get made for their the lock for their house, for the Airbnb listing, stuff like that. Or there are, I believe that there are services where people like certain companies will hold onto a key for people, so that if someone's if someone's staying over at your house where they were gonna be, and you're out of town, then you can have your key on file with a certain, I don't know what you'd even call it, but a certain like Office, and someone goes into this office to pick up their key, or maybe you have to get a special. There's a special, you know, front door locks for you punch into code, so you have a way of adding their temporary code. So your thing. But the final module for this hypothetical Airbnb, course, could be, how do you automate the whole thing and make it so that you don't even have to be hands on? You just have the whole thing of, well, the cleaning lady comes in on this day, the keys on the file. So I give the office this person's name on this other day, and that's how you go from having just the weak generalized PowerPoint videos to teaching a step by step system that's a lot easier and faster, also because it has your templates, but it also includes the core training so someone can get started and get there fast. It's gonna be pretty evergreen, but you might have to go back and, you know, make an updated version of the course in a year or two, if that gets out of date. But after a year or two, you've already made a bunch of sales. So that's a good problem to have if you actually put it out there, and then you can pile in whatever bonuses you have afterwards. But I think the thing about bonuses, and the thing about having extra videos is you have this course you're gonna make Do you really think that if you have 20 bonuses, it's gonna sell a lot more than if you had 12 bonuses? I really don't think so. So I think a lot of times you overthink your your thud factor, right? You overthink how impressed people are going to be when you say, there's 20 hours of video. So because you put a lot of effort into it, right? You put in all the sweat, you put in all the planning on this. But I think at the end of the day, what's the most important is that someone actually gets a result from you. And people say, Well, why should I give them a result? Because then they bought from me, and that's it. Well, get them a result now for your Airbnb course, and then you can sell them on your Uber course. That's another way for them to make money that way as well, or your advanced Airbnb course. And the same thing with our graphic dashboard course. You want to get people making money from Fiverr, from freelancing, from a graphic so that when they want to make more money, they'll then join income machine and get their sales funnel in place. Then they'll join membership cube, and that way they can get a full blown course created. Then they'll join webinar Crusher, and that way they can promote the course so there's more stuff to buy. But I think you need to be thinking a little bit bigger. Have a little bit more of an abundance mindset, and don't, don't hold back, but combine the the strategy with the How To step by step with the template, without the template being too, too convoluted and crazy. So that's the graphic dashboard case study, how to make. Money selling your systems, checklists, notes, templates and tools. I'll see you on the inside of graphic dashboard.com where you can use the templates to make any kind of graphic you want, from banners to book covers create space and Kindle to DVD covers and web page three graphics. So don't be a stranger. Listen to us at Robert plank.com and check us out@graphicdashboard.com I'll see you in the members area. And thank you.