via Tiphani Montgomery’s Facebook page.
For folks chained to a desk from 9 to 5, taking carefully scheduled 15-minute breaks and alternating lunch shifts with their coworkers, the idea of earning a full-time income as an internet entrepreneur – from the comfort of their living room couch – can seem as radical as a fully-clothed Rhianna. But for 31-year-old Tiphani Montgomery, it’s reality.
Blogging at TiphaniMontgomery.com, Montgomery has built a business based on live trainings, products and services that encourage her readers to “get up and go harder,” as her site’s tagline so eloquently commands. And if anyone can inspire regular working stiffs to get their hustle on and create the career of their dreams, it’s Montgomery. With a self-professed zero-tolerance-for-BS policy, she has parlayed her straight-shooter approach to personal motivation and business coaching into a six-figure cash cow – in less than two years.
But to be clear, Montgomery doesn’t come from a rich family who supported her while she tinkered around on the Web. Nor does she have access to some top-secret, get-rich-quick manual that promised millionaire status with little sacrifice or investment. What Montgomery possesses, instead, is an incredible work ethic that propelled her from teen mom and college dropout to owner of her very own online empire.
Here, we’ve gathered a few of Montgomery’s top tips to help anyone become an internet superstar and (finally) leave that desk job for good. You’re welcome.
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Start a blog
“You can’t find readers without them having something to read, and you can’t build a platform if you’re not standing on one already,” says Montgomery. “So even if you have zero readers, and you just have your best friend logging on, you’re going to blog.”
And, adds Montgomery, you shouldn’t worry about the already crowded blogosphere. There’s still ample opportunity for you to make your voice heard – and your bank account grow.
“When you’re asking, ‘What do [I] blog about?’ [or] ‘Do [I] add on something to an already saturated market?,’ the answer is yes, because when you talk like yourself, you are in a league of your own,” explains Montgomery. “I talk and I act on my blog like I would with a girlfriend on the phone. There are plenty of people that are teaching about self-confidence and motivation and how to make money with blogs, but the reason why I’m so successful with it is because I have my own authentic voice.”
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Forget what you heard…
About traditional blog monetization, that is. “People that have ads on their sites are not making six figures,” says Montgomery, citing the rare exceptions of bloggers who literally have millions of unique monthly visitors. “You don’t need that many people in readership at all to be making six figures. You just need the right people who want to hear what you have to say.”
Through her site, Montgomery offers trainings that are geared specifically to the interests of her readers. She notes that, using this model, even a base of 100 readers can generate $2,000 in revenue in a month, assuming a conservative 10 percent response rate for a $200 course.
“The problem is that everybody doesn’t know how to monetize,” says Montgomery. “I figure that 9 out of 10 [bloggers] don’t know how to monetize. Period.”
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Tame your inner saleswoman
The saying goes that people like to buy, but no one likes to be sold, and that certainly includes the millions of Web users who you’d like to convert into customers for your online business. So how can you avoid coming off a like slick salesman, filling up folks’ timelines with desperate “Buy my (fill in the blank)” pleas?
“What actually works best for me is that I don’t try to convince people of anything,” says Montgomery. “I put out quality information, and as my readers, either you have a good feeling about what I’m doing and you believe me, or you don’t. If you don’t believe me, you’re more than welcome to go and follow the advice of somebody else. But what I don’t do is try to convince you that I’m the real deal.”
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Always listen to your customers
As a business owner, you certainly need to stay true to yourself and your unique vision for growing your company, but an organization that fails to meet the needs of its customer base won’t be in existence for long. In determining her own product offerings, Montgomery said she simply based decisions on the emails from her followers.
“I get thousands of emails, quite literally, and instead of teaching people what I wanted them to learn, I had to teach people what they were asking me for,” Montgomery says. “And I would say 90% of the emails are from single moms, like me, who have lost confidence, who lack motivation, who just kind of got beaten down by life and don’t know how to get back up again. So I started to say, ‘OK, I’ve been there, I’ve done that, and I just simply teach what I learned and how I got out of my emotional rock bottoms.’”
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Know Your Worth, and Price Yourself Accordingly
Here’s a shocker that may very well go against everything you thought you knew about consumer pricing: Montgomery may consider the interests of her readers when developing her products, but when it’s time to price them, she never takes into account what her readers can afford.
“That may sound crazy, but I do my price points based on what my financial goals are for the month,” she explains. “So if I have a goal of $10,000 to $12,000 for the month, that’s how everything gets priced.”
And, as could be expected, Montgomery’s not at all concerned if folks bristle at her fees.
“People have the money to take my courses; people have the money to be with me one-on-one,” she says. “They don’t feel like it’s important enough to take, and those aren’t my ideal customers anyway. But if I set my financial goal on what people could afford, or what they lie and say they can afford, I wouldn’t make my goal at all.”
“You can always tell who values themselves, and who doesn’t based on what they charge,” Montgomery continues. “I’ve realized that people, especially us women, have a hard time charging what we’re worth.”
