Expanding Your Personal Enterprise with Additional Products and Revenue Streams

People are looking for credible guides who will connect them with what’s good, what’s real instead of fake or poorly researched, and most of all, what’s important to them.

One of the key benefits of reaching the minimum-viable-audience milestone is that you begin getting indications of what product to create. Specifically: 

You’re gaining enough insight into the audience’s needs to solve their problems or satisfy their desires beyond the free value you’re providing. In other words, you begin to see what they want to buy. 

The Personal Enterprise Growth Framework takes a more intimate approach. By having a co-creation mindset while you work closely with clients, you get accelerated access to the “voice of customer” firehose. 

Yes, you knew you were going to create a course or other training program. That’s because expertise in client services will almost always lend itself to an education-based product. 

For example, a freelance writer specializing in creating marketing content can position themselves as a consultant who also performs the writing. The “consultative” aspect is the expertise that can be packaged to solve the same problem at lower price points for a broader audience. 

On the other hand, a freelance web designer would likely go broke trying to make a “best” offer to people who want to learn design. This person should go after business people with a completely different set of problems that need to be spoken to and dimensionalized. So, the resulting training product wouldn’t be “how to design websites yourself,” but instead a program or paid event on broader aspects of design-driven marketing and conversion. 

In this sense, you’re still figuring out the product even if you know what category of product you intend to make. The particular positioning and expression of the content is the product when it comes to selling education. 

From here, you’ll look to the audience for clues of other opportunities and ventures. You’ll be surprised at how clear the indications can be. 

Rather than expecting you to take my word for that, let’s look at ways to make the indications more obvious. The place to start is the next step up on the Personal Enterprise Pyramid after productizing — and that’s affiliate marketing. 

A Natural Extension of the Mentor Mindset 

The idea behind the mentor mindset is that you act as a guide for your audience in the context of the problems they’re trying to solve. So it stands to reason that you would also guide them to products and services others provide as an affiliate. 

People are looking for credible guides who will connect them with what’s good, what’s real instead of fake or poorly researched, and most of all, what’s important to them. And they want to be guided by trustworthy humans, not algorithms. 

Adding affiliate marketing to your revenue mix can substantially boost your products. For example, Joanna Penn is a self-published novelist. She also sells self-publishing guides and courses for other aspiring authors. In addition to those primary lines of business, Joanna makes a healthy six figures in revenue from recommending complementary products and services as an affiliate. 

And there’s more to affiliate marketing than simply adding to the bottom line. While it has benefits as a revenue model, over time, you may find yourself wishing certain things were different about the products you’re recommending, including:

• Obvious ways the product could be improved. 

• Better positioning for your particular audience 

• Improved customer support 

• A better offer and snappier copy 

If so, you may find yourself thinking about your affiliate marketing efforts as an effective form of market research. This research leads you to believe you should create your version of this solution yourself. 

And don’t forget, you are in a great position now on the other side of affiliate marketing. We’ve already touched on paying affiliate commissions from your “best” offer to people who help promote your catalyst event. You can do the same with both your cohort training and self-paced course to grow your audience and revenue. 

The Art of Doing What’s Indicated 

During the decade spanning 2007 to 2017, I was directly involved in developing a string of highly successful digital products, including online courses, membership communities, software, software-as-a-service (SaaS), WordPress hosting, conferences, and workshops. 

The way all of those things came into existence was the same — we simply did what was indicated. That “Zen” sounding approach would occasionally inspire a joke or two from my employees, but not seriously or often. Maybe that’s because we never once launched a product that failed during the entire run.