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Nathan Williams is a professional poker player who specializes in “microstakes”. This means he is very good at winning when the amount required to bet is small (we called him the featherweight champion of poker during this interview, an apt description).
Nathan, using the username “BlackRain79” became internet famous in online poker forums, thanks largely to his status at the top of a microstakes ranking site that is no longer live today. Nathan decided to take what began in the forums and move the conversation over to a blog, thus BlackRain79.com was born.
One of the main reasons I invited Nathan on to a podcast is because he manages to sell over 200 copies of an ebook he wrote every month from his blog (he recently launched a second ebook and now is selling as many as 300 ebooks a month).
What is interesting about Nathan’s success is he has a very small audience. He only recently started hitting 300 visitors per day to his blog and for a long time his traffic was around the 200 visitors per day mark.
You might recall I recently wrote a series of articles on blog traffic, with one of them specifically talking about how to make $100,000 a year from just 200 daily visitors.
Nathan is proof of this concept, although he’s not exactly doing what I suggest because he only has front-end low priced ebooks for sale (for the time being). Generally you need some higher priced back-end products to make a full time income off small traffic, but because Nathan is able to tap into some highly qualified sources of referral traffic in the form of other poker sites, he is able to sell a lot of ebooks.
Feed A Hungry Audience
Listen in to this interview and you will hear that Nathan is not a fan of pushy internet marketing techniques.
He poured a lot of content into his blog and even more into his ebooks (his second one is almost 500 pages long!). People buy from him because he provides value in a market of poker players hungry to improve their game.
The formula is simple. Find a hungry crowd and give them what they want. If you have knowledge to share a blog is a great way to execute this formula.
Enjoy this interview with Nathan, and if you too want to earn full-time income with your blog, consider taking the next step and take part in the internet’s leading professional blogging course, Blog Mastermind.
Talk to you soon,
Yaro Starak
EJ Podcast
Relevant Links
[ Download MP3 | Transcript | iTunes | Soundcloud | Raw RSS ]
Thanks again for having me on your podcast Yaro! I would be happy to answer any questions that anyone has.
Thanks for coming on the show Nathan. If you ever want help planning out the back-end aspect of your business let me know. I think you have huge potential to double or triple your income if you offer your audience an ongoing community coaching experience. A course is a great too, especially if you do not want the responsibility of looking after a community.
Yaro
Thanks Yaro, will do. I really appreciate your thoughts and I will be focusing on back-end products in the near future.
How would one go about starting a course? I’m currently writing my first eBook and I hope to eventually turn it into a longer, more in depth guide by doing a course. Are there any good resources I should look into to learn how to go about it?
And Nathan, hearing your story only inspires me to keep going. I too only have a few visitors a day but I know it is a hungry market. I hope to someday be where you are at!
Eddie
Hi Eddie,
Do you mean how do you go about creating your own course from a technical stand point?
Have a read of my Membership Site Masterplan, that will help you connect the dots about how to create, launch and maintain a course.
Yaro
Firstly – thank you Nathan and Yaro! Awesome post and thank you for sharing!
I am just curious about the small number of email subscribers. Even forgetting visitors to your site, you should have a list of at least 6,100 (calculation below) just from customers – let alone free sign ups, which is far greater than the 1300 subscribers you have. I just wonder why you haven’t collected the emails of your customers?
*6,100 derived from:
$50k approx made in the first 2 years @ $20 per book = 2,500 customers
In the third year it seems you have made 300 sales a month, therefore another 3,600 customers.
Hey Steve,
The reason why the numbers differ is because I don’t automatically add customer emails to my list. As I mentioned in the interview I prefer a soft sell value intensive approach and I think automatically adding customers to my list is borderline scummy. I started the list about a year ago and sent a one time email to the 2K or so past customers about it. About 1/4 of them chose to sign up. The rest of the signups are just from the past year offering at the point of sale and regular traffic.
Nathan
Hey Nathan,
Like Yaro, I’m really pleased to see you doing so well by providing quality content to a select group of true fans. Also like Yaro, I see a huge latency in your product portfolio.
Good on you for continuing to take action, try new things and keep moving forward.
Finally, before anybody says “Yeah, but he already had a fan base”, let me point to something else you took action on: getting in the forums and establishing yourself as a quality player who knows his stuff and is willing to share.
This interview has given me the shot in the arm I need for my new blog. I’m going to get back to taking consistent action creating content that’s shareable and high quality, take a deep breath, keep at it and celebrate the small victories!
I just love not hearing one more time that there’s practically no point in having a blog without at least 1,000 visitors/day!
Great show! Thanks to both of you!
Jeff
Thanks Jeff,
I hope my story can be inspirational on some level to you and others. I love listening to success stories myself. They can give you that shot of enthusiasm that we all need sometimes. I know that I can do so much more and so doing this podcast and hearing Yaro’s thoughts was very beneficial to me as well. All the best in your endeavors.
Thanks, Nathan!
The same to you!
Jeff
Nathan and Yaro,
On the techy side of things:
I notice Nathan’s blog at BlackRain79.com is hosted on Google’s Blogger platform using the ‘Awesone’ template.
Interesting because most (if not ALL) the blogging experts I read recommend WordPress for commercial blogging. I love the Blogger platform!
Also – Nathan, I see you have LOTS of white space and big graphics which makes your copy easier on the eyes.
Enjoyed reading the interview transcript — thanks to both of you.
I did not realize that Mike – good research!
Nathan certainly doesn’t do everything by the book, that was evident during the interview. He gets results though!
Yaro
Hey Mike,
Yes I have been meaning to transfer over to WordPress for quite some time to be honest. Blogger is good for beginners and obviously the price (free) is unbeatable. However, I know that it lacks a lot in functionality. I have seen a few high profile blogs out there that get much more traffic than me who are still on this platform though. So it is by no means impossible to make it work using Blogger. Thanks for the compliments about my blog and I am glad that you enjoyed this interview 🙂
Thanks, Nathan and Yaro, for a great podcast. I’m curious…your ebook is nearly 500 pages long and Yaro believes this would be suited better as a training course. What is a good page or word count for an ebook, especially if it’s a report that you want to offer to the readership in exchange for capturing their email addresses? I have begun writing a report, but as I work on the outline, I keep thinking that it would be better suited as a book and now, perhaps after hearing Yaro’s comments, perhaps it would make an even better e-course!
Thanks again!
Rebecca
There are no solid rules Rebecca, but a report should be smaller than a book, and a book should be smaller than a course in my opinion.
As a ballpark you can convey a lot of good information in a report that is 30 to 50 pages long, with an upper limit of 100 pages. Most people won’t make it all the way through so if you can deliver your key points in fewer pages, go for it.
This sort of decision should be made based on the overall product funnel you plan to create. Have a read of my Blog Profits Blueprint report where I explain more –
http://www.blogprofitsblueprint.com
Good luck with your project!
Yaro