In this episode of the podcast, I’m joined by Kirk Nathaniel of OptionAlpha.com to talk the business opportunity of building and running a stock trading membership site.
As with any business, building online assets to generate passive income can be done in a variety of ways. For entrepreneurs interested in running their own membership sites, Kirk has some pretty terrific advice!
About Kirk
Kirk’s background starts as a Mergers & Acquisitions Analyst for Deutsche Bank Securities in their New York headquarters. There he prepared highly confidential client merger models assessing leveraged buyouts and corporate divestitures in the Gaming, Apparel and Natural Resources industries. Later he moved onto the Derivatives Trading desk dealing with Option and Futures. While there he spent a majority of his time developing strategic trading plans based on the foundation of odds and probability trading algorithms.
Later, he left the Investment Banking world and worked as a REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) Research Analyst for BB&T Capital Markets. Now that he was on the other side of the Chinese Wall, he prepared extensive market research regarding current trends, economic factors and investment considerations influencing real estate markets across the nation. Kirk also constructed complex valuation models to evaluate core real estate investments with coverage that included Multi-Family, Industrial, Retail and Lodging REITs.
Currently Kirk lives with his wife in Northern Virginia just outside Washington, DC. A graduate from the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia (recently rated as the Top Business School by Newsweek Magazine) with a Bachelor’s Degree in Finance.
He now trades for his own personal account as well as a compilation of family investment accounts in addition to coaching students from around the world in options trading each week. His goal is to continue to build strong and rewarding relationships with the people he meet on his website.
In this Session We Discuss:
How to start a real online business for just a few thousand dollars
How to build a membership site and what software to use
How he’s using social media to drive traffic to his site
How he’s converting free members to paid members
How blogging fits into his sales funnel
How to manage the diving line between free content and paid content
How he’s leveraging Youtube to contribute to his success
Links
OptionAlpha.com
SECockpit trial
Niche Site Mastery
Transcript
Click Here to Read the Transcript
OIL 018: An Interview with Kirk Nathaniel of OptionAlpha.com
Trent Dyrsmid: Hey everybody! This is Trent here from the Online Income Lab and Niche Site Mastery with yet another one of my favorite activities. In the podcast with me today is a recently new member of Niche Site Mastery but by no means an inexperienced online marketer. His name is Kirk Nathaniel. (Well it seems I can’t talk very well today.) And Kirk is in, he is the owner of a membership site by the name of Option Alpha. We’re gonna get him to tell us all of how he got into that and why he became a Niche Site Mastery member. And for those of you who are in the audience who are interested in possibly having a membership site, I thought Kirk could be a great guest to have on the show because he has a very, very competitive niche, probably just as competitive as it is to be in the make money online niche which I am in obviously with Niche Site Mastery. And another, his views, his experience would be really interesting for you, the audience, to hear. So with that said, Kirk, welcome to the show.
Kirk Nathaniel: Yeah thanks for having me Trent. Really appreciate it.
T: No problem at all. So let’s go back, wind the clock back a little bit. You, how did you get started in all this? I mean what were you doing before and how did you first kinda even figure it out that this whole opportunity even existed?
K: Right so it’s been a couple of years now so I got started actually in 2006 with the website and the membership site. And actually before that I’ve been in finance my whole life. I graduated finance degree and worked at Wall Street and when me and my wife got married I decided to come home and do options trading for myself, for my house. And so that was really the root of it. I never was in on my marketing. I never was in any marketing or any online anything and the first thing I threw up was a blogspot website and the only thing I did this is coz I was sharing my ideas with a couple of the guys that I have been trading at home as well from the bank that we’ve left. So we were just sharing ideas back and forth and that was just a way to communicate. And eventually that grew into, you know, a couple of people coming on it and say “hey I used to do this” and you know share their ideas. And I guess to make the long story short, from there it just really started to grow out and started to become more of just a community of people coming together and just sharing ideas, you know, different tricks, education.
The way that I got into actually with the membership stuff is I just thought to myself you know there’s a lot of information that people don’t know out there. And even though it’s such a highly targeted niche, I mean it really you know as well as I do Trent, finance trading, stocks, brokers, all that stuff has very, very high competition on that target in that niche but what they don’t have is education. And they don’t have a wealth of education. And so that’s what I wanna do with Option Alpha is build a platform that is basically just absolutely layered with tons of education, video tutorials, articles, podcasts, webinars, one on one coaching and just so much education that’s what every people need. Everyone can go find a broker but they can’t go find education so that’s really where the root of my membership site started.
T: Terrific! And that’s not entirely dissimilar to why I started Niche Site Mastery. But I gotta imagine I mean with just like how to make money online if I’m willing to scour you too long enough and I’m willing to go long enough, can I really find all the information out there scattered all over the place?
K: Sure yap. And I think that’s the key. You know when we were talking about just the other day you emailed me back and forth what I wanted to do is just make it easy. I think that there’s tons of information I mean there probably could be better information than what I probably have. Smarter guys than what I am, you know, the more than I am. But I think what I do best is that I put everything in an easy to follow format. So like my webpage in my membership site is very, very simple, very simplistic. You have everything categorized in order and so people pay that premium to sign up for my site because everything is clean, it’s organized, it’s in proper order and it’s honest. I mean I don’t have anything else on my website. I don’t promote any stocks. I don’t do brokers. I don’t have any other advertising. You just get what you pay for and you get a ton of it from my site.
T: And that’s such an important point. And I think that a lot of new marketers don’t really understand the whole value of having the knowledge structured and coming from one place. And so if you’re listening to this podcast and this is a new concept for you and you’re thinking “yeah I can get all that stuff for free” you can but there’s a couple of thoughts that I would have for you. One is how long does it take, you know, if you’re not assigning any value to your time then perhaps you should be. And the other thing is if you’re getting your 14 or 17 or 29 pieces of information that make up the whole pie from all those different sources it’s really gonna be difficult to see how they all fit together. And so obviously that’s one of the things I’ve done within Niche Site Mastery and I guess Kirk that you’ve done exactly the same thing as structured the lessons in such a way as okay you’re brand new and you don’t know anything here’s step 1, here’s step 2, here’s step 3, etc.
K: Yeah and I think I always use analogies when I do coaching with people and I think the best analogy for this is and I guess for anything else is like think about it like a house, right? You could go out and find all the parts you need to build a house. You can find lumber, electrical sockets, everything’s out there and it’s pretty much readily available, you can find it everywhere. But you can’t really find a place that’s gonna put it all together and actually have a house built for you. So what you’re gonna do with the membership site is take all those little bits and pieces and put it together in a structure that looks great, I mean, that’s easy that people can go to it and go “ah finally”. Think about a breath of fresh air and say “finally everything’s scattered but now it’s all in one place, it’s easy to find, it’s easy to read”.
T: Okay so you learned how to do your trade on Wall Street. Why did you leave Wall Street by the way?
K: Wife.
T: Just then you were never home. I’m thinking they’re kinda working long hours there on Wall Street.
K: Yeah so I was at a major investment bank in New York. And I was in M&AA for Deutsche, 80 to 100 hours a week and my wife’s a teacher so I had to make a choice if I wanna do banking or if I wanna have a wife and so I chose the latter.
T: Wow! That’s pretty intense to say the least.
K: Yap.
T: So you came home and you started trading and obviously you’ve required that pretty sharp skills during your time on Wall Street I would assume and started to have some success trading. Started to talk about it and people started to notice.
K: Right exactly, I mean that’s really the basis. And then after that there’s just more people coming and asking questions. I mean I think the big thing is with the membership site what I’ve always done is that you know just listen to your members and continuously ask them questions you know, like what do you wanna see. What did I not cover? I think it does 2 things, one obviously, you know, brings it down to human level, that they’re not dealing with some guy on a high pedestal. Just another guy that’s trading that is interested in the same stuff that wants to provide information so the more I ask questions they just gave me all the content that they wanted to see anyway. And I think that that’s the key there.
T: Okay. So there’s a couple of things that we’re gonna dive into on this podcast. We’re gonna talk about technically how you put this site together. We’re gonna talk a bit about monetization. We’re gonna talk a bit about content generation but before we talk about any of that stuff let’s talk about the most important topic, how did you get any members? Because I know that people are listening. If they haven’t done this before and I remember when I created Niche Site Mastery I thought you know I wanna create this thing and minimum I’ll get my own VAs to use all this training. And I don’t know if anybody’s ever gonna buy it. I don’t know if ever I’m gonna market it coz there’s like 9 zillion other sites out there that teach people how to do this stuff but fortunately it worked up. Now how did that work for you? How did you go for I mean member no. 5 which was probably like someone you knew or what have you in your first degree of separation to member no. 50?
K: Yeah so I think 2 things that have been really, really good for me is and again this is just my niche but social media. I mean my other with the market coz the stock market, options markets and future markets is that these are constantly moving everyday. So when I’m online in Facebook or Twitter I’ll just literally spend maybe 30 minutes every morning and just reply to other people, comment, reply. You know if they have a question or I see someone struggling on comment feed I‘ll jump in and add my 2 cents. And I think that’s a real easy way to get people to trust you before they even see your site. I mean after they see your comment the more they go to your site and they automatically trust what you’re gonna do. So I think that was the no. 1 thing that I did.
The other thing that I did was I just create videos. I just create videos on youtube and you know get my name out. I think at a certain point it becomes more of a production thing per se versus the quality thing. I can spend 20 hours making a high quality video that I’ll send out but really all people want is information at the end of the day. They just want nice packaged education and so as I started creating more videos people started watching more and more. Got a link into my membership site, got it right back. But I never did and still to this day I do maybe a $100 of advertising total every month. I don’t do any advertising ever.
T: Yeah that’s almost exactly how it’s been for me as well. So with your youtube videos where do you draw the line between giving away coz in youtube everything is free obviously. Where do you draw the line between what you’re gonna give away for free and what you’re going to provide on a paid basis?
K: So that’s I guess, it was a hard line to draw coz most people they don’t know, they will like you should give everything for free or they feel like you should have people pay for it. What I’ve always found is that have this people trust you first. So I’m of the opinion that I give a lot of information away for free. I give a lot of tutorials away, a lot of basic stuff that really anybody can learn again, you know you can find it anywhere but it’s just packaged all together. But I then draw the line with is the day to day trading stuff. So I give you all the background information that you wanna need, you know, what is this strategy, what is technical analysis, what are stocks. You get all that stuff free but then when you want to know the actual day to day trades and the actual day to day commentary that becomes the premium portion of the membership. And that is really I guess the bedrock of it because it’s on a continual basis. The markets are always moving so I never have a lapse of information to go off of.
T: Yeah no kidding. Talk about always having something to talk about. So do you, like a buddy of mine in my mastermind group, his and another fellow in his mastermind group, has a stock trading site. And they basically would put up a video in the morning, here’s what we’re gonna do, and the video at the end of the day, here’s what we did and how it worked out. How does that differ from what you do for the paid people?
K: Yeah I mean it’s basically, I mean it’s the same basic idea. What I do with everyone is I usually send out an email with the video attachment. Most times it says “hey here’s the update for this week.” It’s usually 2 to 3 times a week. You know, here’s what I’m looking at. Here’s the trades that I’m gonna putting on. You can follow them or not, it’s your choice obviously. And then I’ll have some video commentary or we’ll all go through an actual chart live on my screen and you know, draw all over my screen and show what I’m trading and why I’m trading it, what the returns are. And again it’s not constant, it’s always moving so every week is a new set of trades. So I never have information I can’t go over. I never have a topic I can’t cover.
T: Yeah no kidding. Talk about in that regard your niche is really spectacular because you never ever run out of fresh current trading material to provide your members.
K: Right exactly.
T: Okay so now you mentioned you commented on the social media. What specifically were you using or did you have some people who were following you on twitter or how are you interacting with people when you didn’t have any followers? And where on Facebook were you doing it?
K: Yeah so I think the thing is that when I even started I had no followers, I don’t buy followers right like that and I think the key here is that really anybody can start because you can use both twitter, facebook, I mean I’m assuming any other social media application to search the current news feeds. So all I would do is I would go in facebook and twitter and I would search the current news feeds that fit my keyword which is options trading. So anytime anybody mentioned options trading the last 2 or 3 hours I’d see that comment string and I jump right on the comment stream. So I had already targeted the people who are interested in it. It wasn’t like I was going out there and just writing posts on my own wall just hoping people would stick around. I was actively going after those people saying “okay I know that you’re trading stocks today.” I’m gonna jump into your conversation and I don’t really intend to force you to my website, I just wanna add value to your conversation and maybe even ask you some questions. Make them feel that they’re really getting involved and I know that they’re gonna come over eventually.
T: The natural by product is they’re gonna say “hey who’s this guy kirking? What’s he all about and what other stuff does he have that I might be able to consume?”
K: Right exactly.
T: Yeah something that I didn’t do a lot of but I know has worked well for quite a number of other people is same idea but on the forums. Just get involved if there’s a particular niche that you’re interested in and you really wanna be able to build credibility, trust and ultimately audience from that niche is just start to actively participate in the forum.
K: Absolutely.
T: And do it now. If you do not know how to find a forum on your niche just go to Google and type forum: in the search box and type in whatever your niche is and Google will return to you a whole bunch of forums that you can start to participate in. And I’m sure there’s some other smart ways to find forums but I know that that’s one that makes it very, very easy.
K: Yeah I didn’t even know about that. That’s a good tool for me. That shows how much I didn’t know about even finding forums.
T: Yeah especially in the areas that we’re talking I can imagine that there are literally hundreds (hundreds of thousands) of forums. And by the way folks if you haven’t already gleaned, if you’re listening and curious it’s optionalpha.com in case you wanna be checking the site unless you’re listening to the podcast. And of course if you’re driving maybe you shouldn’t be checking the site while you’re driving coz we don’t wanna have any accidents on our hands.
Okay so your marketing strategy has basically been to put yourself out there, say this is what I’m doing and giving a lot of it away for free so that people would get to know you from afar so you would build credibility and the by product of that would be trust. Is that pretty much your marketing strategy in a nutshell?
K: Yeah I think one thing that I would add to that is that if you give a lot of information, not a lot but most of your information out for free, keep in the really good stuff to yourself, I think what you do by doing that is you get people kind of baited, you know what I mean? You show them so much that you become their go to person when they wanna find out something. And once they cross over that line that they no longer need the background, they wanna start looking forward and doing trading in my case or doing more online marketing in your case Trent with niche sites, once they cross over that they know that they’ve already gone to you before and they can trust that they can go to you again for this premium aspect of the membership.
T: Yap absolutely. Okay so I think being as the marketing relatively straightforward let’s move on to something that’s a little bit more, well let’s move on to the technology. You’ve got a very nice looking site. What did you build it on?
K: So I built it on wordpress and I have the optimized press theme on there.
T: Okay. And what did that cost you?
K: I think it was at that time $97. Best money I’ve ever spent.
T: Yap. Optimized, I know it very well. It’s a very nice theme making a good looking site with all sorts of sales pages and videos sort of things very, very easy. Then as well if you’re gonna run it as a membership site you need some membership softwares, so what did you use for that?
K: Yeah so I use wishlist member again same thing, best money I’ve ever spent. I originally had on the very first site I had A member, I think it was A member at that time, which I know a lot of people had been converting over. But honestly everything runs seamlessly on the background. All the payments are automatically handled. People are automatically registered, as soon as they drop out it drops their membership level. I remember the days A member where I had to log in every night, see who dropped out, see who added and adjust all the membership levels. It just takes too much time so I think that spending money upfront now saves you hours and hours of headaches later on.
T: Yes absolutely that is the case. And so now you’ve got, how many members do you have roughly?
K: Kind of have 215 members right now.
T: Okay and how long would you say that it takes you to administer this site on a daily or weekly basis?
K: So the only thing I really do is just do my regular blog post which I do probably 2 to 3 times a week. So just writing the post it’s really not much. As far as administration work I really don’t do anything. Everything is handled with (A member) wishlist member so people sign up and they automatically register, it’s all handled in the back end. I just get an email that says new person signed up and I have more money in my paypal account.
T: Okay terrific! A couple of other points which I’m gonna ask. I’m looking at, I’ve clicked on a blog and I’m looking at the right side bar and I noticed a couple of things. Your sign up, your lead magnet form has 4,778 subscribers. How do you pull that little pin? Is that a static number or is that an actual?
K: Yeah that is a static number that I’ve had my web eye, hired a guy out of odesk and pulled that number out from the natural old aweber and aweber form. So instead of having that aweber box he just uses that box code and converts it to a subscriber count. So that’s all it is. So everyday I just run a little chrome job on it and it should update the count up to where I’m at for my subscription for that list.
T: Very cool. I’d like to see how to do that and figure that for myself. And then underneath that you’ve got your social icons. Is that a plugin?
K: No those are not plugins. Those again I just hired a guy from Odesk for I think $5 and he put those all on there and those just have a hard code in. And it’s okay coz people can click on them and they can go right to my facebook fan page and see that I really do have 5500 fans. I’ve got 9700 followers. So those are all pretty easy to do and I just have those updated once a day or once every other day if I need to.
T: Yeah okay. Anything else significant on the technology front that you had to use to make this site be able to function as it does today?
K: No I think I would even stress honestly that I’m probably the most not tech savvy when it comes to work like wordpress code even though I have been doing this since 2006. I still have to go find some people on odesk to do my coding for me. So I think when people start to build the site again they think they can do it by themselves but I would completely stress to get a good wordpress theme going first and you know, spend money upfront. Get those good themes and good plugins that run seamlessly coz I really don’t do any coding. I really don’t know how to code. I couldn’t even code a bold texted sentence if I knew.
T: Oh come on. WordPress makes it pretty easy to do that.
K: Right but I have to go there and click it. I couldn’t code it by myself.
T: Well okay I give you to that. Neither could I. I don’t know what the html tag is coz I think it’s strong or h1 or something.
K: But I don’t know.
T: Yeah I agree with you. WordPress makes it exceptionally easy. So again folks if you’re listening and you’ve never built the website before take it from both Kirk and myself, 2 technology neophytes, it’s not very difficult to make a very good website when you run it on wordpress and you use a nice theme either a free theme or if you really need some more enhanced functionality there’s obviously quite a number of paid themes that you would have to choose from.
So the next thing that I wanted to get into was content generation and you’ve got an answer to this one already it’s just the very nature of your business. So you’re writing a couple of posts per week and those posts are available for free I just keep looking through the site. And then so you’re also recoding or doing something that’s creating content that is going out to the paid members on a weekly or a couple of times per week basis, is that correct?
K: Right yap.
T: Okay now are you doing anything in your, there’s a concept with membership sites called content dripping and basically, are you familiar with content dripping?
K: The way I know of it I think so but go ahead.
T: So basically you use your membership software to say okay if I have 70 pages of content maybe at the time a member signs up I only wanna make 4 of them available and then we would drip the other ones out on a predetermined schedule. Now there’s a couple of reasons that you would do that. The first reason is simply you don’t wanna overwhelm your new member. I know that some people I get feedback from people coming in to Niche Site Mastery saying “oh my god, there’s so much information that it’s almost overwhelming.” So I actually started putting content dripping into effects or maybe a month or 6 weeks ago just to try and cut back initially on that overwhelm. And then the other thing that it can do for the site owner, it doesn’t sound like this as a problem to your business and my new done for you va services is much less of an issue but there’s a thing in membership sites called stick rate which is basically how long your members will be around for. And if you drip your content out and you match it to emails coming in each, let’s say for example you have 20 additional pages of content and they’re all really good content but they don’t need to know that information right away. It’s information that will be more useful to them as they’ve been a member for longer. With membership software and something like aweber running your emails you can release that content on a schedule and then match that corresponding email to go out saying “hey this new material has just been released and you can now check it out” and at the end of the email you can go “by the way next week we’re gonna be releasing information on blah blah blah, whatever that is.” And so is that something Kirk that you’ve taken advantage of it all for your site?
K: Yes so let me tell you that I tried that and so I’m gonna tell you why I don’t do it anymore and what I do instead coz I think the keypoint that you hit on there is that you don’t wanna overwhelm people with a bunch of content. So I did try that initially where I had drip feed content and it was every 3 days they got access to a new section in the website. What I found though is that at least in my particular niche since I get a lot of people, I mean my target audience is or the average number or age of subscribers is between 45 and 60. So I got a very older, much older, crowd than you’d be typically used to in like online marketing for example.
T: You’d be surprised actually my average client is right up around that age as well.
K: Oh really? There you go you’ll never know. But so I got a lot of people who would sign up who literally had 20 years of investing experience so they don’t need the basics and they wanted access to some of the more advanced stuff right away. So what I did to counteract that is that as soon as they sign up the first thing that they see is they see this big red letters that says watch this first. And it’s just a quick video that says hey look instead of doing having drip feed I literally tell them what I’m gonna do. I say everything available and right below the video I have links to all of the different sections with a couple of bullet points about explaining what each one is. So you know options trading basics and then I have a couple of bullet points about what that section will cover. So that’s really great because that allows them to either go right down on the list as they need it or allows them to jump to which section they want. Now the thing with keeping people on the website is that also below that video I say, you know I have a link that says a link to up to date video commentary is always found on this one page. And this one page is the only page that keeps getting updated with all the updated video commentary. So if they don’t have a membership they can never access that page. I don’t give them the link to youtube. They can’t go see it on youtube. They have to go into the website to see the updated contents so if they the trading works and they want the daily commentary they go right to that webpage everyday. So that’s been really good because it now allows my membership, my people, on average staying around anywhere from 5 to 7 months depending on the year so that’s really good for me to keep those people around longer. Just give them a lot of information.
T: Oh yeah absolutely, absolutely. And 5-7 months is that’s a pretty decent stick rate for members. Recently any Niche Site Mastery member in the done for you beta program that I’ve recently launched will know what I’m about to explain. But how I decide to solve that problem was a different way. I still do that content dripping only because I don’t want to overwhelm people but anyone who emails me and says I’d like to get access to everything I can just make one little change to their start date and suddenly they have access to everything so it’s not like I’m trying to withhold it to prolong their membership. What I decided to do was I thought okay, training material, coz my niche is very different from yours coz there’s not economic data that is affecting squeaky word research or traffic driving strategy. I mean these things are much slower to change. So there’s a finite appetite for training material so to speak. I mean the business does continually change but it’s not like it’s changing drastically every week. So I thought well I wanna make this, coz I knew that a lot, it’s funny that you’re in the finance niche coz I come from the finance niche. I was a stockbroker for about 8 years before I started my last company and so I kinda have that mindset of everything. It’s about investment, a lot of return of investment. So I started to kind of put, embed those messages into my material and I started to get my members thinking about, and I think this is why some of my membership has started to become older is because I started them to think about “hey this is a viable alternative to the stock market. Only the returns are probably higher and the risks are undoubtedly lower because there’s so much that’s in your control.”
And so I thought what do these guys have in common. This by the way you, the listeners, want to draw from this is this explanation that I’m about to give and that Kirk is giving is what you really, really need to understand who your customer is. That is the very first thing, it’s called an avatar and you absolutely because my membership site does not attract 20 year olds. That’s a totally different message, it’s a totally different they’re looking for quick money, easy money. I don’t know what they’re looking for but it’s not what I’m offering. So I started to really think who my customer is and a couple of things became apparent to me. My customer is somebody who is probably around my age, I’m 40, 41 going on 42 pretty quick. They have money and they would very much like to create a second source of income that if they were really good at it could, at some point in the future not next week, replace that job’s income. But what they don’t have a ton of is time so because they’ve got spouses, they’ve got kids, they’ve got commitments in life but they’re not broke. They’ve got some money so I started thinking about okay in addition to the training why don’t I include software and services with this. And in doing so if I can create a financially compelling model that it was actually less expensive to be a member of Niche Site Mastery and get all the stuff bundled in and have all this work quote unquote done for you then wouldn’t that make more sense and wouldn’t they hang around longer as members. And lo and behold when I launched the beta product last month the response was overwhelming. We sold out in 90 minutes. I only wanted a certain number of people for the beta program because I know that there was gonna be things that came up that I hadn’t thought my way through that I didn’t want 300 people suddenly all pissed off at me because I hadn’t figured out the work flow properly. And so far the program’s going quite well. The thing the people I think really like is the fact that they can just order up a website and have it done for them. They need to find their, choose a keyword and after that everything can be done. For those folks, for my customers, for the type of customer I’m trying to attract that can work or that appears to be working very, very well. And if you think about it from my customer’s perspective why would they leave? Because then if they leave all the software that they get access to that’s bundled in with their membership they’d have to pay for separately so that wouldn’t make any sense coz it cost more. And the whole team of VAs that are supplied to them will be gone so they have to go find and train and manage their own VAs so that would be more work. So instead of having a small amount of work and a small budget they would have much larger amount of work and a much larger budget. So it’s a real win win scenario. And so if you’re thinking about a membership or niche to build a membership site in my advice to you is really, really make sure that you understand who’s your customer and what is the problem they’re trying to solve. And the more you can hit that bulls eye the more successful that you would be.
K: Yeah absolutely. And I’ll make 2 comments on that. And that one and honestly this is not, if anybody who knows me and goes through my blog they know I’m pretty straight shooter when it comes to everything markets or not. I mean that’s one of the things that actually attracted me to the Online Income Lab and Niche Site Mastery is because I’m in that category although I’m not the older crowd, I’m 28, so I’m not obviously too old enough too, but I do have some money that I have from my trading and from my website that I like to get into something that’s a little bit more passive that doesn’t require me to be in front of the screen like trading does or in front of a membership site. So that’s what attracted me to it. I think that that’s the real key of having something there that I know I can rely on that can do just as well. I can do it myself, I have the time believe me but I don’t have the energy that I want to go out and re-learn everything when it’s all pretty built there for me. So believe me when I tell you Trent that I was signing up at 91 minutes that’s when it was already sold out. So I didn’t get a chance to get into the beta program but I’ll be one of the first to sign up afterwards.
And then your other point about knowing your market I’ll tell you this. If I had to do it all over again I think what I would have done is I would have known what I know now and hopefully this resonates with people. I would have built 30 niche sites and see which one does better first and then turn that site into more of an authority site. I think that that’s the real key. I think what happened with my site is great I just happen to work. And I think I can force it into its own market. It wasn’t really going in this direction when it started but I kinda forced it into a good niche, a good market. I think had I known what I know now I would have built more sites in the beginning, see which ones were better, which ones are just performing better as far as SEO and marketability and marketing, content and customers. And then I would have driven all my attention towards those couple of sites. I think that maybe that would be a better way to go even better than what I did.
T: Yes it’s a very good point that you make and I think that’s why I, you know we’re kinda getting off the membership track here a little bit but I’m sure many of the folks listening to this are particularly keen on niche sites so allow us to divert a little bit. You can’t predict which ones are gonna be successful and which ones are not. No matter how good you get at it you’re gonna end up with some, if I quote my last guest on the previous podcast, some donkeys in your portfolio. And it’s the same thing I mean Kirk you were trying for Wall Street. You worked in one of the biggest banks and I’m willing to lay a bet that the stocks you buy you make money on.
K: Yes and it’s all about spreading your bets across different areas. You can’t put everything onto one but just being smart about what you do with your money and how you market yourself. And I think the same goes with niche, you know with niche sites, as it does with investments, with options and stocks.
T: So let’s talk, let’s go back again because you’ve missed you’ve made me think about a question that I wanted to ask earlier and this apply coz both of us have happened to be fortunate to have a reasonable, I’m no Michael Dough by any stress I imagine, but I’ve got a reasonable amount of success in my business career and it sounds like you have as well. So from that perspective what would you say is the number one thing for our listeners out there who are just new, they’re just “man, I wanna make some money online. I really wanna get my own gig going but I just wanna get something started.” What is the biggest mistake that new people make?
K: They don’t start. I think that’s the key. And I think that’s been the key.
T: Hallelujah brother! Hands down. Sorry to interrupt you but I couldn’t hold my silence. That is absolutely that. Please continue.
K: Yeah I think that’s the key. I’ve always been told that if you wanna do something you gotta do it, right? So it’s not just like a famous great quote or whatever. But I think people don’t get, don’t find success because they don’t even start. And I can tell you again I built this site back in 2006 and it is not what it is now, right. In 2006 it is not even a third of what it is now as far as how good it looks and how optimized it is. But the fact that I just started I was already on the road to making it better. And it steps everyday. So whether you think you know or you don’t know I guarantee you probably are gonna find stuff that you don’t know. You always look to people who have done it before you and use them as a guide but that doesn’t mean that you do the analysis paralysis which I think we can all become victim of. We analyze something so much and so much we basically kill the idea before we even start. So I think that the key is you gotta start somewhere and you just know you’re gotta find different ways to do it. And if you don’t start you’re never gonna go up.
T: I couldn’t agree more. You know when I started my previous business in the technology services based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Vancouver needed another technologies services company like they needed a hole in the head. There were the yellow pages, the yellow pages was over flowing with a whole bunch of little companies all of whom were collectively starving so you know do you really need one more? Does the world really need one more options trading website? Now does the world really need another Niche Site Mastery? No, absolutely not. But the thing of it is once you begin and if you’re focused and if you’re passionate and you have something that people are interested in you’re gonna make a success of yourself.
K: Yeah absolutely. You know the thing is when I type in the word options trading in Google I get almost a 150 million hits so I’m clearly not choosing a very light targeted niche as far as glow competition. It’s high competition but if I never started I would never be where I’m at now. So now I’m one of at the top of the pages, you know, for a ton of keywords that I get thousands and thousands of link visitors every month so it’s just about starting. You gotta start and do it.
T: And I know again for you folks who are really new who are listening I know you’re thinking “oh that sounds too easy. It sounds too simple. There’s no simplification blah blah blah.” Trust me I understand how you feel but the advice that Kirk and I are giving you all is absolutely 100% as simple as it sounds. The key is to just start.
I remember and I’ll tell this one real quick story. My very first kind of business job was hired by the company by the name of Copytron to sell photocopiers to small business, to offices. And so I’d never, that was scary as all heck to me, I’d never really sold anything before. And so for the first month the sales manager kinda carried me in his little velvet gloves around and we drove around in the territory and we put call on existing customers and you know we weren’t really selling anything. And I thought this was all the job was all about and oh this is great. I can do this. And then I came in on month one and plus a day he looked at me and he goes “what are you doing here?” I go “I’m coming to work.” He goes “There’s no customers here.” He said “Get out or quit. It’s your choice.” I said “Huh?” And he said “go to your territory or quit. Take your pick.” So I go “ok.” So I drove out to my territory and you wanna talk about sweaty palms. I mean I’m driving out to this town where I hardly know anything or anybody which is a whole bunch of people who have a busy day who probably don’t wanna talk to me. But what did I do? I thought well can I make one cold call? Can I go knock on one door? Yeah okay I could do that. Then I can go home and say I tried. So I knocked on one door and you know the person wasn’t horribly rude. I don’t even remember what happened but I’m sure they didn’t buy anything. But anything could I knock on one more? Well yeah I could knock on one more.
Same thing applies to niche sites. Don’t look at guys out there who have dozens or hundreds of niche sites and think “oh how am I ever gonna compete with that?” No. 1 is you don’t have to compete with it. You only need to build one. And I got a guy on my show, David Anspaugh, I forget what episode it is but if you go back to the onlineincomelab/podcast page you’ll find him. And he built one site and I know I’ve spoken to him and since that episode he sold that site for he said I could say between $5 and $10,000. One site. He didn’t build the whole bunch. He started with one. Now is everybody gonna have a $5 to $10,000 on his first site? No, of course not, but I can guarantee you will not have a $5 to $10,000 site if you don’t build the first one. And that’s my point.
K: Exactly. Yeah couldn’t agree more on that one.
T: Okay so we’re in 40 minutes now we’ll go a little bit longer. Let’s talk about monetization. So I think I probably know how you monetize this site. There’s probably a monthly fee.
K: Yap.
T: And is there anything else like do you have a sizable list? Are there any other ways that you’ve chosen to monetize?
K: Yes so what I do is I don’t do advertising on the site. That maybe something that later on down the road if I transition my site to sell it later on. Then that will be something that I can convert, you know, with my amount of visitors I can pretty much convert that pretty well. I’ve a bunch of offers for advertising but I just never chose to do it coz I want the members, the website to focus on the membership. So I do a monthly membership, 30 day free trial as everyone knows. It’s pretty much standard for everyone to test it out. The other thing I do with my membership is that I offer coaching and now coaching is extra. So I have the membership. I have 215 or around members right now so it’s obviously a lot of emails, a lot of people to go back and forth. And this is something Trent, I mean we were talking about the other day coz I actually asked Trent. I said “Trent you know I’ve got a lot of questions about your niche sites. I know your time is limited. How about I pay you for some coaching?” And it’s the same thing I have my members do for me is that if they need really one on one, hands on guidance then we do coaching. And we do it on an hourly basis and I charge them hourly. And since I started that I never even thought people would do it to tell you the truth. I started with one guy who offered me “look how about I pay you $50 for the next hour. You just tell me everything you do and we share screens and you show me everything.” I said “great.” I started putting that up there and now I have probably 15 to 20 people a month on a consistent basis that I do coaching with. And it’s just a couple of hours but this is another way to monetize it. And again meet great people, find out what they want. Now I can talk to a bunch of people every week and see what they’re having trouble with and then I build more content, more videos for that.
T: You know that’s a really good point you brought that up and I want to tell the story of how I learned to do the same thing. So way back in the early days when I think I started Niche Site Mastery in May. And I had, I think I had like 300 people on my mailing list at that point in time. And so after I spent six weeks full building the original Niche Site Mastery foundation I mailed my list and I think 7 people bought. And I thought okay now what? And so I was browsing the warrior forum one day and I discovered a guy who’s had a WSO which was a warrior special offer. It’s just an advertising section of the warrior forum where you can promote anything that you like. And he basically was saying that he was an adsense affiliate, amazon affiliate guy and he had an amazon affiliate training and he would include some one on one coaching. So I thought “hmm well okay. Let me try that.” Coz and the reason I’m bringing this up by the way is that so many people who are maybe selling a course on how to make the membership site or talking how it’s all so autopilot, nobody ever needs to talk to you and so forth and I don’t know if I agree completely with that because I think that I sell probably a lot more, I shouldn’t say I sell coz I don’t sell anything. People don’t buy it. I think people come and buy a lot more memberships because they know that they can get on the phone one on one with me. And while I was reluctant to do it initially because you know I was brainwashed with the thinking that you should never have to talk to anybody and people just always put money on your paypal account and life will move forward and you’ll be rich. It’s actually one of the things that I kinda like. It’s a lot of fun getting to talk to people and I know the people were gonna be successful coz they’re on for more than one coaching call and they’re back week after week after week. And I can see the progress that they’re making. And I personally get a lot of fulfillment out of seeing members like Matt Newton who took advantage of coaching calls and has gone on to be wildly successful. I don’t know if any of my members had been more successful than him. And so the whole coaching part of it is a really terrific thing and it’s fantastic that you’re doing it this well. So for any of you who are thinking about your membership site also, think about how you can have that one on one interaction with your customers coz it’s gonna be fun, it’s gonna be fulfilling and it’s gonna help you to have more members buy your product.
K: Yeah and I think the thing is it’s funny that you mentioned that coz when somebody signs up for my membership the first thing I do is I send them an email. I literally send them a personal email it’s about 2 sentences coz I don’t want to email people with paragraph. But I say “hey thanks for signing up. When you have time let’s get on the phone and talk.” And I try to talk to everyone and I can’t make it for some people coz they’re around the world, don’t have skype or whatever. But I try to talk to everyone at least for 15 minutes and get their story. Know what they wanted, you know, know what they’re doing, know what they’re having struggles with. Again to drive more content, make the membership site better. But I think that’s the real key point coz that also brings it down to one on one level. They’re not dealing with a huge blog with all these readers. It’s just they’re dealing with me and them. That’s it one on one, me and them. And I think that, I mean Trent, you had our coaching call last night. We’re recording this tonight at 5:00 my time but last night I had my coaching call with Trent. And we didn’t talk anything but niche site stuff and I just ask questions “hey how do you do this? How do you do that?” And that’s one of the reasons that I signed up is to get that access, to get that knowledge that I couldn’t have found any place else really.
T: I gotta credit Kirk. He was probably one of the most business minded coaching sessions I’ve ever had coz I think in 15 minutes he asked 12 questions.
K: Because I know. Because I had coaching sessions with my guys so I know how things worked on that.
T: Yeah I mean it’s hard because I get this people on and I know they want a social element to the call but I always start my calls by saying “hey just a reminder you can talk about anything you want but you only got 15 minutes and there’s somebody waiting in line behind you. I know you wanna get to know me a bit and I should get to know you a bit but we’re gonna have to go quick.” And so my message there is use coaching for what it is. Use it to get answers to the questions that you really need to get answers to.
K: Absolutely. And well worth it.
T: And so now I’m curious coz I do the same thing by the way. I send and everyone who signs up they get an email that says “hey go ahead and schedule your first coaching session. Here’s how you do it. Hook me up on skype.” It amazes me that more people don’t take advantage of that. Do you, what’s your uptake on, do you get everyone who signs up go?
K: Yeah that’s why I said I talk to almost everyone and I agree it amazes me how people don’t wanna do that. They don’t want to put themselves out. And I think that’s what we’re talking about. They wanna take that first step but they don’t. I mean they’re holding themselves back. And I get a lot of responses from people that say “hey that’s really great. That’s awesome that you’re so open and honest and wanna talk.” You know I just feel like we should email back and forth first. I say “you know that’s great but why don’t we talk? What’s the deal? What’s the hang up? You know, what you’re scared about?” Coz there’s obviously something they’re scared about that they don’t wanna get on the phone and admit or whatever. And it gets back down to just taking that first step and hopefully if I can break some of that barrier and say “hey that’s okay you don’t know anything. Let’s just take it one step at a time here. Then I think that’s another way that I get more people to sign up continuously. They tell their friends. They stay longer. And that’s the real key.
T: Yeah absolutely coz now there’s a personal relationship in play.
K: Right.
T: Okay so we’re just about at time so appropriately I wanna talk about the exit strategy. Every business as an entrepreneur no matter what business you’re starting you should be thinking about before you started how am I gonna get out of it. Am I gonna shut it down? That’s not ideal. But what I mean by exit strategy are you gonna sell it or is it gonna become something that could produce cash flow for years and years and years. And those who have heard any of my videos in the Niche Site Mastery, heard of my build 10 sell 6 and keep 4 were a big part of my getting a return on the investment is to build a lot of these niche sites to sell as soon as I can sell them on flipper coz you get such a fantastic return on your capital. Example right now if I was gonna take my top probably 4 niche sites I would get probably a 3 to 4 x return on the amount of money it took me to build all my niche sites and I would only have to sell 4 of them. And that’s one of the things that doesn’t show up right away in the income reports is the asset value. So Kirk, do you have, did you think about an exit strategy when you started Option Alpha or no?
K: I’ll be honest and say no.
T: You’re a Wall Street guy.
K: And I’m a Wall Street guy so can you imagine that. Coz it didn’t even start as a business to begin with so that’s the thing, that’s my excuse. But no I didn’t. But I do have an exit strategy now. I think that the thing that I wanted to do is with my website and membership is making more stream line so the last year and even this year you know it’s just gonna be on cruise control. Everything is in place. It’s pretty much exactly how I want it. I’m not gonna touch it. So right now it’s gonna be more of a passive recurring income but like I said what I want to do is get more education on there so that I can start putting ads on it in a couple of years and start to monetize it ad wise. Slowly transition out of membership and into advertising and then obviously sell it. I’ve already had offers from some brokers to buy it and absorb the content of it and absorb it into their own education portions in their site. So I’ve already got those relationships lined up. I think that I just have different plans for the website. It’s not like their prices were exactly I’d like it to be, very attractive and something I’d consider but I think that the exit strategy is get some advertising on there. It’s obviously a very high targeted, high competition market so if I threw adsense on there it’d be very high pay per click rate. I get a lot of my traffic from Google and Bing and Yahoo. So it’d be really easy I guess to sell if I really want to transition it over.
T: And that’s one of the things that I was curious about, you know, you got your free blog posts. Have you experimented with putting and now I think I know the answer to this question. The question is have you experimented with putting any adsense blocks in those ads and I think I know what your answer’s gonna be but I’ll let you answer the question.
K: Okay maybe you don’t but I originally did and the reason that I took them out is because it detracted from what I have built the whole membership site to be. So when I’d pitched this membership site the whole idea is that it’s only options trading, it’s only options strategy and it’s nothing else that’s distracting from that. And that’s the kind of image that I wanna project and that I’ve built. It’s that what you get when you get with Option Alpha or when you come to Option Alpha is you get pure content. That’s it. If you wanna get the premium stuff it’s very easy and accessible to sign up to that. And that sticks out more than anything else. So I didn’t wanna distract them as well with all of that other stuff. Now keeping in mind I’ve always made my post like all my recent posts and everything are all targeted keywords, SEO, everything SEO’s lined up so if I do wanna throw it in there I can later on but right now it’s just membership. That’s the main way I’m monetizing.
T: And that’s the same reason you don’t see any adsense on the Online Income Lab.
K: Yap.
T: It’s distracting to the major purpose of the site.
K: Right exactly.
T: Okay my friend, well we’re here at 52 minutes so time to wrap this up. I really wanna thank you very much for being on the show. And I also really wanna thank you for becoming a Niche Site Mastery member. You’re a smart guy. You’re the guy that I’d like to keep having a relationship with going forward in some ways, shape and form coz you just never know. When you put smart people together and they have similar goals, similar ideas all sorts of wonderful things emerge from that. And of course I’m hinting at something that Kirk doesn’t have anything to do with but all I can say is if you’re listening stay tuned coz this Niche Site Mastery done for you VA service that is in beta is gonna have a beta part 2 coming out because I have an unbelievable opportunity come my way. And by the way side track on that, how this opportunity came about? I wanna say if you’re trying to do something, whether it’s build niche sites or trade stocks, whether you want to ever be a teacher or have a membership site or whatever, it doesn’t matter. Blog about it.
K: Yap.
T: Blog about it. And the reason is this. When you succeed in public people will notice. And when they notice opportunity will come your way. And this thing that I’m hinting at that I can’t say more about right now is the perfect example of that. And it could very well push Niche Site Mastery into a 7 figure a year business.
K: That’s wonderful. Yeah that’s awesome. Yeah I appreciate you having me on. I really, this is probably the second time that I’ve ever talked about how I market everything coz usually we don’t talk about it. It’s just about trading and market and stocks. But I would encourage everyone to check out the website. Like I’ve been a member now for almost 2 ½ months. I’ve used the coaching. I think it’s an amazing value that you get for what is literally pennies on a dollar of what you could be doing with the information that you get from Trent’s site. So I would definitely tell everyone, and that’s not a paid sponsorship. He didn’t hink hink, wink wink or kick me under the table for that. I mean that’s what I’m a like minded guy. I wanted to do, you know, put my money where it’s gonna make money, more money obviously so that’s where I came and that’s where I stay.
T: Well I appreciate the very kind words but I gotta tell you you totally screw it up coz you’re supposed to plug your own site in the end not mine.
K: That’s okay. Hey everyone you can check out optionalpha.com by the way.
T: Yes you can. And if I had been a member and I’d seen the inside I could say some glowing things too but I’m not an options trader. I don’t know anything about a tiny bit about options trading enough to lose all my money for sure if I tried but I will say with my interactions with Kirk he seems to be a pretty stand up guy. So if trading options is something that’s of interest to you I think he’s giving away a free trial. See you don’t really have anything to lose other than some of your time but even that I’m willing to bet you’re gonna get a phenomenal return on your time.
So that’s it. For those of you listening in the car you will be able to get to the post that holds this episode at onlineincomelab.com/session018. That’s session 018. And under the, or in that post you’ll see links to any of the things that we’ve talked about and as always if you like this episode I would be really, really grateful if you would go to iTunes and leave a hopefully 5 stars of feedback because that is what pushes the podcast up in iTunes. That’s what allows more people to find out about it. That what allows me to help more people and obviously that’s one of the things that I really love doing. I love the fact that you guys come to the blog. I love the fact that you leave comments and you engage and we get a discussion going and it’s really my privilege to be able to serve you all. So thank you so very, very much for helping me to have all the success that I am so blessed to enjoy. And I in turn committed to you and that I’m gonna absolutely do everything that I can to help you have as much success as you can so long as you promise to do one thing. And Kirk what’s the one thing they gotta do?
K: Sign up.
T: No. They gonna just start. They don’t even have to sign up with Niche Site Mastery. They need to build a site.
K: Just start.
T: They just start. That is the most important thing. Alright folks so that’s it for this episode. We’ll see you again on the next episode and I look forward to hearing your comments. That’s it.
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