The Ninj and I are busy creating and adding new products to our websites.
When we first started our online business system in 2004, making a living was our main goal. However, making a living isn’t simply about money, is it? Our plan was to run a small business in a way that would make us proud. Above all, we wanted to provide a valuable service to others. Call it a mid-life imperative, no crisis here. 
Being of service is what it’s all about.
We looked around for role models that spoke to us, and found something even better. It’s not a person, it’s a philosophy. The single most crucial element that’s helping us define our strengths and needs, expand our business, and continually increase our financial security is the Integral philosophy. Integral is a system being used by leaders across the disciplines worldwide — in politics, business, education, healthcare, art and more. I’ll say more about it in future posts. For now, I just want to show you how helpful it can be to have an efficient, elegant online business system in place.
Many web business owners have figured out that blog posts can be collected, repackaged and sold as a new product. This is what we just did on one of our websites. It’s significantly increasing membership and sales on one of our websites.
However, it’s not simply the choice of posts that are making this product a bestseller. The genius lies in the way it is organized. The organizing principle is just as important as the information itself. We learned how to organize our material from studying the Integral framework. But like I said, more about that later. The proof is in the pudding, and that’s what I want you to see.
So. Here’s a snapshot of the work we’ve done recently…
For two weeks I gathered blog posts, hand-picking only the most succulent, ripe ones like berries.
Blog posts store a wealth of useful information. But they’re dated, they’re shriveling in the sun. Any writing done prior to today’s posts looks like yesterday’s news to readers. We know that yesterday’s newspaper isn’t good for much outside wrapping fish or lining the bottom of the bird cage.
Yet the information held inside the posts are like gold nuggets hidden in silt on the river bottom. Someone willing to sit and pan for gold could collect a small treasure.
But who has time to sift through hundreds of posts?
Your readers? Nuh-uh. Some of them will, a teeny percentage. But even if your readers like, or even love your latest post, they’re not likely to spend time looking in your archives. They’ll wait for the new stuff instead.
We could tell from the comments made by our blog’s readers that new readers weren’t digging into the past, so we did it for them. We sifted and gathered all that gold into one organized package — a new product to offer on the site.
How long did it take?
What’s left to do? We’ll send out a press release to announce it. Then…voila! Done.
The Ninja has now integrated this product seamlessly into our sales page. Already it’s selling better than our most conservative projections.
Now, you should know that on the website I’m talking about, we enjoy a continuously expanding membership because we regularly add value and more resources to the site. However, some people are simply not the joining type. They aren’t likely to become members, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want the information they would find there.
Herein lies the beauty of the new product. We offer the new product as an alternative to the non-joiners. A lot of us aren’t joiners, right? We want to duck in, duck out, and leave with something useful tucked under our arm.
There’s another nice benefit to this. Since launching the new product, site membership has also increased. We really prefer to give a new product at least three months until we can start to gauge a pattern or see any changes. So fingers crossed.
The result is so far, profitable, yes, and that is a good thing.
But what feels even better is that — because of our study of the Integral framework, our online business system — we know we’re offering a product that is fundamentally useful and unique.
Oh, and just in case this is starting to sound like some sort of miracle, overnight sensation, here’s the thing. It only took us one week to put the new product together. However, the embedded energy, effort and hard work that went into it took five years.
The new item is priced midway between the other products and services available on that website. It fits snugly into the middle range of a service that we offer at different levels, starting at free and ending at a higher price for premier members who receive access to benefits that aren’t available in the free category.
What sort of online business system do you use? Is your system reaching all of your customers, or only some? Please tell me about it in the comments. I’d love to hear from you.
