$100K Passive Income Strategy for 2026 (Full Guide)

Do you want to add passive income to your business? My guest today is Allie Schwonke, a HubSpot and inbound marketing expert with over 15 years of B2B marketing experience.

We need to retrain how we think about marketing. Marketing is simply communicating the value to your customer, the right customer, so that they take action. Most people are missing a lot of that strategy piece. The way that people are searching now is like, that's my bread and butter when it comes to a content strategy for how to do things.

Let's jump up on the board and map out how to add $100,000 in passive income. If we go 10 years out, what's the goal for you and your brand?

I am that central hub in all of these, and there's teams of people that are all solving similar problems.

When we know what we're optimizing for long-term, then these other decisions become so much more clear. I wanna play with decoy pricing. I don't want someone deciding, should I buy this or not?

Gotcha.

That is a terrible decision.

Just which one should I buy?

Which one should I buy? I would keep the price point the same and the offer the same, And I would just—

Oh, that's a great idea.

There's a pretty clear path to getting to $100K in revenue there.

The clarity now that I, that I have, this will move it forward.

Allie, you have this line that I hear you say fairly often, and that's that marketing is simple when your strategy is sound. What does that mean to you?

Well, as a lifelong marketer, one of the things that I see people struggle with is that they just want to do all the things or they get stuck and it's this analysis paralysis. And what you should do is really driven by where your business is going and what you want to achieve and setting goals and putting those in, let's say, like 90-day timeframes. When I do that for clients, they end up just like their mind is blown because it's just less noise and more focus.

Okay, so I think I see a lot of people dive in and they are like, okay, I need a marketing plan and they start to immediately go to tasks.

Mm-hmm.

Right? So I'm gonna write these blog posts, I'm gonna produce these YouTube videos, or here, you know, I'm gonna level up from here.

Mm-hmm.

It sort of makes this like marketing chaos and mayhem.

Yeah.

Where it's just entirely activity driven and it's not strategy driven in any way.

Mm-hmm.

Is that something that you see where you're trying to say like, okay, let's take a step back and focus on strategy?

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And we're trying so hard to define what we think marketing is. So marketing now is like, you have to do YouTube videos and you have to do this and whatever, but it's all driven by what your audience, uh, where they are. Who they get information from, who they trust, and then what action they need to take to solve their problems. And so even when I say it in that way, they go, oh, okay. So, you know, do you think blogging is effective? And I said, the answer is not, is it effective? Is it, is it the right thing for your business to drive the results that you need? So it becomes less about like making really cool creative things and more about like a business kind of step-by-step, uh, approach. And I think that's where like it becomes clear because you can just say, in this 90-day time frame, this is important, or this 12-month timeframe, this is important. And maybe down the road we need to start a YouTube channel. But that can't be today. And that's how you tend to think about it.

So how would you take someone who is in that chaotic marketing tasks focus and then bring them back and start to create a strategy?

Yeah, so one of the first things that, so I'll give you an example of a call that I had this morning. And so this particular business owner was looking to get more people in her sales funnel. Okay, so the first question I asked is, where did you get your current clients? And that question usually tells me a lot. That tells me that they either found them by referral or somebody else had trusted them and they, you know, stumbled upon them. So in that case, my question to her is, if I could just find more clients like that for you, would that be, you know, would that work? And she says, yeah, how would you do that? And so again, that question then like opens up, well, have you gone out to your current you know, base and actively ask them for referrals? Um, no. So it's that simple, simple question is, well, in the next 2 weeks, here's what I want you to do. I want you to get everybody that you've talked to and I want you to send them these 3 emails and then we're gonna check back in 2 weeks. And it just goes, that's clear. I would be shocked if she doesn't get one meeting from that. Um, but that then is like, not, don't do LinkedIn outreach, don't do all this other stuff. Yeah. And focus on the things that, you know, have already worked and then kind of work your way back from that.

And it's working backwards from what's already working. Whereas so many people set marketing and business strategy based on, not to dig on podcasts since we're recording one right now, but they listen to a podcast and go, oh, LinkedIn is in it, okay. Or YouTube, okay, I'm gonna, you know, I'm going to copy and paste this thing that I heard into my business with no context or understanding about it. And I'm gonna run that for 3 weeks and then I'm gonna discourage when it doesn't work, and then I'm gonna jump on and copy and paste the next thing in. And so I love your approach because you're just saying, no, no, no, like what is already working and what can we learn from that?

Well, and how many times do you, I don't know if you've been in your career like this where someone will say, I wanna do, let's say cold outreach, and that tends to be the hot thing, or like cold outreach is dead, or this is dead, or whatever.

But I love fill in the blank is dead.

Everything is dead.

Like just these generic statements that people make based on such a limited amount of life experience and worldview.

Well, and if that's the case, I mean, one of your first, we were looking at the yearbooks sort of things that you guys create, and one of them says, you know, blogging. People would say blogging is dead. I would say it's not. I would say terrible blogs are dead that don't have any unique point of view. That's what's dead. But in the same respect, I think what we find when people go to LinkedIn, for example, when's the last time you got a LinkedIn message that was not personalized, that had some sort of, you know, call to action that you were like, wow, I'm really glad I got this.

I think never. Never.

And yet the very things that we despise and do not work on us, for some reason, when we get in this like marketing mindset, all of a sudden we forget that we hated that.

Right.

And so we go try to hire someone to do it and then get surprised when it doesn't work. So my job and a lot of the content that I produce is like breaking down the reality of those myths and beliefs that people have. If you're going to use, let's say, LinkedIn and your CRM together to drive leads, For the love, please figure out who your target customer is, what motivates them, and then what messages you can start with and make it personal. Quality over quantity. Do not measure how many outreaches you're doing a week. That's not gonna gear, that's not gonna, that's not a bar that's worth tracking.

How would you go about finding those common threads that you want to say, okay, I need to target more people like this and I need to use messaging like that?

Yeah, well, I'm gonna take it back one step and people always think think that they need more. I need more clients, I need more leads, I need whatever. And the first thing I would have you do is look at your customer journey from start to finish, even if you don't have a CRM or something to track all of this. How many people are in that right now? So if they became a customer, when's the last time you talked to them after their last sale? Okay, your current customers— best opportunity to get new sales because the cost of acquisition is lower. Um, if you need more leads, what is your current conversion rate? If you get 100 leads a month and you convert one, I would argue that you're probably either getting the wrong people or you're a pretty terrible salesperson. You know? So I think really when you're looking at making your strategy sound and you're looking at simplifying that, it's where in my overall funnel do I need to focus right now? What are the two places? And then you laser focus those and you kind of, I create what it's called the on fire pile. The stuff that's on fire and you can kind of let it burn, but it's not going to burn your business down right now. If you do not address this in the future, it needs to be here. Okay. But, so the two places, and if you want to get more, then I would say, tell me what business goal this ties to. So in order for us to get different results, we need to change our behaviors, but we need to retrain how we think about marketing. Marketing is simply communicating the value to your customer, the right customer, so that they take action.

Yeah.

And the action could be newsletter, it could be webinar, it could be purchase, it could be referral. You got to know what you're asking those people to do and what motivates them to act. And most people are missing a lot of that strategy piece. 'Cause then the execution becomes simple.

Yeah, I love it. Okay, so you obviously have thought about this topic.

Lots.

For thousands of hours. Give listeners a sense of your business today. Like what is it that, I mean, you've built up an amazing business both from the content side and then the services side and the way it ties together. But yeah, give the summary of it.

Yeah, so we, a little bit of background on me, I've been a marketer my whole career, as I mentioned, but in about 2016, 2017, started a business called Simple Strat. So that's a services business right now with some residual. We'll get into that here in a second. But we help folks get more out of their HubSpot CRM. So if you happen to use HubSpot, automate things, CRM, training, I mean, go to our website, all the things. But we actually launched that as a byproduct of what the market told us. So in 2019, we launched a YouTube channel. We were based locally in the Midwest, and I'm from Lincoln, Nebraska, and the ability to find really great sales and marketing talent that knew HubSpot, knew the sophisticated digital marketing realm was, was not awesome. So when we went remote, we launched this YouTube channel and actually all of a sudden, maybe it wasn't all of a sudden, we can go into that, but a year later we were getting people that were converting and asking us for services and they would say, do you offer HubSpot consulting? And at the time we were just offering marketing and we're like, no, no, but what about this marketing thing? And I started saying, yeah, we do. And with that iteration then came, you know, the fits and starts, but now we've grown that into a full line of HubSpot services. We have 6 full-time consultants hiring too, just in case.

Get that plug in.

You know, exactly. And so we've got folks that are coming in with these very specific business problems, but on the backside of that, we also have a new podcast called Marketing Deconstructed designed to help address some of these channels or, or problems that are higher in the funnel than just moving into your CRM. So that's where we're at today.

That makes sense. What's the revenue at for your services business?

Yeah, so we're about $1.5 to $2 million right now. Per year in revenue? Yeah. Mm-hmm, yep.

That's fantastic.

Yeah.

And now one thing I know that you want to learn and like talk through how to add $100,000 in passive income. And we're going to get into that in a few minutes and we'll jump up on the board and diagram a bunch of ways. That we could do that. But before we go there, I wanna ask about starting the YouTube channel. Because you had both some really great timing of getting it established before the pandemic. And you were there ready, you're the surfer in the water, in the right position, ready to catch the wave. But it also didn't, it didn't take off like crazy. Immediately, right? You didn't, you know, put out your first tutorials and have something go viral and have instant success.

Mm-hmm.

So talk about the strategy there of, you know, why launch the channel and then what it took to get that initial momentum.

Yeah, I love those instances where you kind of luck out with the things at the time. I mean, a lot of it was really strategic, but a lot of it was timing. So when we first started, it's called HubSpot Hacks. If you search for HubSpot on YouTube, there's a good chance you'll find us or HubSpot.

Yeah.

Um, and at the time, HubSpot didn't have a channel that was They had a channel, but they weren't really doing like teaching type of content. So, um, we were just getting frustrated at like, we would tell clients how to do something and then we'd record a Loom. Loom was very new at the time, and I was convinced that when you show somebody a video, they get it instantly. And so I thought, there was one other channel at the time on YouTube teaching people how to use HubSpot, and they were very verbose. It was like life story, intro, I went on a walk this week, whatever.

And I'm really like, how do I automate this thing with this lead? And I came with a purpose.

Yeah, yeah. So, So I had stumbled upon TubeBuddy. It's still our preferred optimization tool, but I had inserted that channel and a bunch of other channels and just like studied what they were talking about and said, okay, what if we shoot some initial videos? We did, and they were just with Loom and they got several thousand views on the first day on just a random channel. We're like, we're going to start this HubSpot Hacks channel. So built a strategy, also developed a whole brand. We just were convinced at the time that this is the future of how people are gonna learn software and buy software too and get help. And quick and to the point, do not tell me a life story. I'm a very like quick and to the point person. So like this fit my personality, my business partners. So we launched it and our goal, we had an email campaign, social, all the things. Our goal was 100 subscribers on the first day.

First day?

Well, first month, first month.

First month, okay.

First month. And we got 72.

I mean. You're partway there.

I know, I know. But even like now when people talks about getting millions of people following them on YouTube, it's like, guys, we started with 72. Right.

And setting a goal of 100 in a month, you have to build that momentum in 6 months.

We published weekly. Right. And we had to map out what the content strategy was. And so we did. But I was telling you before we started recording that 6 months in, I stepped in and looked at our strategy because I was kind of creating the videos and then handing them off. And I stepped in and I was mortified at the strategy behind the scenes. For anybody who does YouTube, our tags were like Midwest and Adobe, and our description had like the, you know, license of the soft or the Adobe and then like the music. And so we just didn't have the right content people on that backside. So I went through, did a big analysis and revamped all of that. We found some gaps. And then about that same time, we started to see the hockey stick take off. We had one video, a beginner tutorial to HubSpot that just started, like the numbers started taking in. And that started to be served. We started getting the top 10 spots in YouTube. HubSpot was not on our, on our case at that point. And then the pandemic happened and half the marketing teams got let go and the rest that were left behind were like, what is HubSpot and how do I use it? And we had a video called What is HubSpot and How Do I Use It? So it was just an actual search term that people put in. It is. We have a blog about that too. And even now with AI, like the way that people are searching now is like A lot of that is like understanding marketing and sales. So I started this as a way to extract more value out of those conversations, but also educate this audience so we can drive more leads for the business overall. So as we're looking at passive income, I know that there's things I could like pull out of this already today if I had some focus on what I could sell here.

Right. I like that. Okay. Why don't you write HubSpot-focused here? Okay. And then that will help us map that out. Okay, so as we're looking at $2 million is the target for, for this year, why does $100K in passive income matter to you?

So right now, one of the things that, like, one of my biggest strengths is the ability to identify new opportunities and create revenue. And some of the things we're like in our business right now, the, um, while we can do this, a lot of it is actually execution focused. So it's finding new team members, scaling that up. So the ability to generate new passive income creates not only more leads for that business But for me, long term down the road, should I decide to sell the agency or something along those lines, I'm now setting myself up to have additional portfolio opportunities that are not going to go away if in fact anything changes or, you know, we decided to shift the business and I become a silent owner.

That's an important point. And I'm just going to map this out with kind of a dashed line here. You've deliberately set these up as distinct from each other, which gives you the ability to sell this off. And not to say that you have to or that's the ultimate goal, but I think it's the book Built to Sell.

Yeah, I've read that front to back numerous times.

Because what happens is you end up just, if you follow that mindset, I'm building this business to sell, then you build so much of a better business. And it comes down to little decisions like you don't combine the Google Analytics accounts for these two businesses. Correct.

You do it separately, right?

There's all of these little things You know, these businesses invoice each other for certain, like the lines are clean.

Yeah.

And it just requires like crisp operations, which will serve you even if you decide, I want to keep running this business for the next decade.

Yeah. I mean, from a perspective of audiences too, these folks are, I mean, 0 to 500 employees typically. They're going to be business owners, they're going to be sales ops, rev ops, marketing. But here we've got a lot of people that I believe are more solopreneurs or kind of at their starting stages. And like we discussed when we first started, they're just, they're honestly trying to figure out the muck of what to do. And so we can't serve them here if they don't really know where they're going. And here this is designed to kind of help them in their earlier journey, whereas down here you have to have a much more of an operational mindset because you can't take advantage of technology if you don't really know where you're going.

Right, that makes sense. Okay, so when you're considering that $100K in passive income, what are the things, what are the options that you're choosing between?

Yeah, right now, I mean, a couple things that have, uh, you know, taken off so far have been we've offered a couple of podcast sponsorships, um, and haven't pressed that hard, but I've gotten a couple of sponsors, uh, over the last, I guess, 6 months. Um, we've got things that exist like ancillary to our HubSpot, which we don't want to execute on in our primary business, which might be how to, you know, do XYZ outside of the platform. So LinkedIn, for example, LinkedIn lead gen. Have no desire to be a company that you hire and run your LinkedIn stuff.

Okay.

But—

You don't want to do services around that, but you do trainings on it.

No, but like I've done webinars, and every time we do a webinar, the attendance rate is huge. So, I mean, Nathan Barry did a webinar for 300 people about how to use LinkedIn and HubSpot together. And only if they buy our services, right, do we profit from that. So if there's a way, because if they're like, that's cool, but I don't really want to use you for HubSpot, I'm not extracting that value. So can there be a course or some training opportunities around that that create once and kind of then refer them over, you know, so on and so forth? And we'd pay a referral fee from one business to the other if in fact that does happen, because we're using these resources to host the webinar.

Right, that makes sense. Okay, so sponsors, courses, what other things would you like? What are the other buckets?

Yeah, another bucket is live training. So hosting people in a location and charging, you know, let's say $500 a seat and it's a day-long training and taking that on the road. I think one, the opportunity right now to do that and then set yourself up on the back side to have, um, we'll call them subscription products so that they can get more value out of that. And then we've talked about coaching and memberships. So, um, like, one thing we tossed around early in the days of our YouTube channel is creating a HubSpot Hacks membership. But again, based on what people are looking for, for value, the return wasn't there. But I think that would apply here because the expectations are much different and the companies are different.

That makes sense to me. All right, so got 4 different options there. Sponsors, courses, live training, coaching. Maybe we'll—

We're coaching.

Coaching, we're coaching. We'll put a little apostrophe there.

Yeah, there you go.

Coaching and membership. And then I think the last thing, like how would you describe it? Resources? Or are there things in your business, it could be anything from SOPs that you use to like actual apps that you've made for the HubSpot ecosystem. Or cheat sheets, guides.

Yeah, I mean, one of my most popular things that I give away for free right now, which is how that newsletter list got built initially, kind of on accident. The content went viral and all of a sudden I had like a signup sheet on my homepage and people are signing up, but I'm like, I don't have anything else to give you here, people. But I have a LinkedIn posting calendar that's a 30-day quick start. And again, that resources, I've got automation playbooks, I've got email templates, like the things I just told you I would do in those 3 steps of referrals. So resource and sort of playbooks would be another one of those options.

Nice. Okay. So out of these, if you had to pick one, which one has, in your gut feeling, which one has the best shot at getting you to $100K in passive income?

I mean, when I look at ideas and opportunities, I tend to think about return and effort.

Yeah.

So if I was ranking these, like the one that probably has the least amount of effort for quick return, I'm not sure, like I have to figure out the pricing structure, is probably this last one is, I mean, I've got, a whole library full of resources now already. They would just need to be landing page, you know, Gumroad kit, whatever.

Yeah.

Purchase. And since we've got the newsletter, it's a relaunch and it could be a quick test of what's, you know, what people want to buy. The next one that I think has, you know, since we've already got content going, if we can add $25,000 this year in sponsor revenue just by simply continuing to create the content we're already creating, that seems like an easy lift. This one, it might just be I'm thinking too small on how much you could get from that.

Right.

I think long-term live training has a lot of opportunity, but it's a big lift. That's a lot of—

Yeah, I'm not sure that live training fits our passive income requirements.

You know what? Yep, all right, well, let's cross that one off. Training that we recorded and offered online, I guess.

Yeah, that could work. I mean, there's ways that you could teach that workshop.

Yeah.

And then create videos in it and go from there.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, of all the ones we have up here is sponsors and resources and playbooks are the two that come to the top as we can realistically look at $100K in revenue from those two.

So I like those two examples. Resources and playbooks stood out to me as well. Sponsors. What I want to know is, do you have existing deal flow from sponsors that feels like there's a lot more momentum and energy there?

We do. So we do get sponsors on our HubSpot Hacks YouTube channel now, and we only take on a short, a small amount of those. So we have sponsored videos there. What we haven't done is really gone out to go find more. And we know in the B2B ecosystem, this is a huge thing right now. Like it is sort of back to that timing, like the timing right now is significant. So I don't want that to be off the radar. But to your point, like since we don't have a deal flow already of that, it may be harder to get that going to get to that $100,000.

Yeah. Well, let's dive in on resources and playbooks. Because again, as you talk about from, you know, effort and impact, ease and impact, however you want to frame it, then that's the— you've got so much there already. So what would go into, like if we, maybe we map this out here, on the resources and playbooks, if we were to sell a single thing that might feel a lot closer to like what you're giving away for free. But if you put together a bundle, that might be something where people feel like, oh, I'm getting all of these.

Sure. Okay.

Are there— is there something that stands out of like an angle or a job to be done, a pain point for this bundle in particular, if you were to package and position it a certain way?

Yeah, the first one that comes to mind is back to that, like using LinkedIn and HubSpot together. And if it happens to be a It's the schedule, it's the way in which you're supposed to execute them. It's, it's more the methodology. And then the course would be the videos and all that stuff walking through.

Right. Okay. So the two options are $2,500. Okay. Now, if we take a break from this for a second, the main revenue is coming from the, the agency. And tell me, talk to me about the price points and offerings that the agency has.

Yeah, so our minimum investment here to help somebody is going to be about $2,500. Okay. Well, $2,000, I guess, is what we're kind of at now. All of our goals as far as where someone comes in the business, one of the biggest pieces that we usually have to quote unquote fix is their HubSpot setup. And again, these are usually organizations that have a lot of hands in the cookie jar. So because they have a lot of hands in the cookie jar, they've kind of made a hot mess of themselves. And so our Fix My HubSpot program is usually where they start, and that's about $3,500. And so if they want to buy ours, it's $2,000 is ours. But if you're wanting to like dip your toe and even like get approval for someone to do something, this a salesperson would shell out. So this meaning $499 is a something that a salesperson would shell out because they know they need to get more revenue going.

Right.

And so the way that people buy is going to be different. I think this appeals more to the individual contributor price point. This you're going to have to hire an agency, which doesn't happen.

Yeah, that makes sense because it falls into a different budget.

Correct.

Right. The $499 can go on a credit card or it's in your learning development budget or something like that, whereas the $2,000 a month one-time or recurring, uh, is, is a different thing. My gut reaction, the reason I was asking about the agency side of it, is my gut reaction is that you want to price a lower price point. So we're staying within the impulse buy.

Oh sure, and there is confusion between agency services in here. Okay, that makes a lot of sense.

Right, because one thing you were saying separately before we were recording is that we don't— one of our rules for the passive income efforts is it can't cannibalize, right, the, the core offering.

Yeah.

And so like what I would hate to have happen is someone to buy a $2,500 collection of digital products, not achieve their outcome.

Yep.

And then assume that that's what they would have gotten.

That's actually a really good point. Yeah.

And so I want to stay in these like probably under $1,000.

Yeah. I mean, now that you say that, I mean, the value you could extract from this, it may look more $299, $999. Yeah. Because under $1,000 is 100%. I know a lot of professional sales folks that have purchased things like that because that fits in their budget and they know they can recoup $1,000.

Right.

And then if it— then the idea there being if they are a target client for Simple Strat, for example, then they bring their whole team in and then they hire all of us to do that. But here we're assuming like this is the goal is we have a lot of people who they believe in what they can do here, right? Their organization does not. And so because we don't offer these right now, we're not going to be able to get that value. But this is relying on my knowledge and my personal brand here. Because I'm the only one on our team that like goes— like, I live this and breathe this myself.

If you figure out your urgency that you're using, you can say, hey, if you do this, if you commit to a year of our agency services, I'll give you this for free.

Oh, that's a great idea.

Or there's some other things that you can offer.

Yeah, actually, that's a really good idea because right now we're moving toward a rate increase, and one of the things is how do we continue to get people to— like, if you have a month where you don't use us a whole lot, and then you have the next month— right now, if stop and come back, you're going to come to the new rates. But I don't— sort of a negative message. I like the message of as long as you stay contained or retained with us, you get access to all the marketing deconstructed resources for free.

Yeah, I like that. Okay, so I like this $299.99 price point a lot better, but I want to play with the pricing a little bit because I think that pricing really, really matters.

Oh yeah.

And there's— I want to play with decoy pricing.

Okay.

And so that's the idea that you're not trying to get someone to, you're trying to make one offer seem so, so valuable. In this case, if I'm $299 for the resources and $999 for the entire thing, is there a really obvious value? And there might not be. So what I'm wondering is if we could split these in half, split the offering in half, and so it's like, do you want to buy A or B? And they're entirely separate. There's no overlap between what's offered. Or do you want to buy C, that is both of those things? So let's say, made-up example, but let's say that I have all the resources and the bundles and these are so valuable and they're going to save you so much time and that's $500. And then I have all of the courses and this is so detailed and so good and all of that and that's $500. And so when you add them together, those should be $1,000?

No, it's going to be— But at $750 or something.

Or $600. Okay.

Okay. So it's just so stupid. Like, if you buy one of those separate, it's like buying something at Kohl's without using a coupon.

Yes, exactly. Where you're like, what are you doing? No. Get that Kohl's cash in here. Come on. Yes, exactly. And so there's a guy named Dan Ariely who's written a lot about pricing strategy.

Oh, yes. He has a very famous TED Talk.

Yes, he does.

Yes. Wall Street Journal electronic plus print edition. Yes.

Yes.

I'm familiar with that.

That example. Okay. Right? And so I don't remember the exact numbers, but it's one of those things in the Wall Street Journal, right? There, do you want, do you want to buy the print version or the digital version? And they're like very, very close, you know, two or two totally separate prices. Or do you want to buy both for, I think it was just slightly more, right?

Yeah.

And like as they played with the different versions, you know, they got it to where 90% of people, I think, selected the third one. And so they're paying for more. There's a risk that can happen where people say like, oh, I want A, C, and D in your bundle, but I don't want— and they start to assign like, oh, if you have 6 resources at $600, then each resource is worth $100. Can I pick and choose?

They're trying to justify it too much at that point. You just need easy math.

And so I would really try to— I want that bundle to be the obvious decision because the other thing, the reason that I love tiered pricing and like pricing packages is that I don't want someone deciding, should I buy this or not? Gosh, that is a terrible decision.

Just which one should I buy?

Which one should I buy?

Sure. Right?

Because then you're like, from your cases, it's like, do I win or do I win slightly more?

You know? Okay.

And so in that case, I would love that pricing that is, let's say, The other thing that I like about this angle, right, if we go back to the LinkedIn plus HubSpot, right, how to use them together, is that you have already proven that 300 people will sign up for a webinar about that. We're not speculating, hey, is this a package or a combination that resonates with the audience? I don't know, maybe let's test it. You've already tested that the demand is there.

Certainly, yeah. Right now I think I'm in this middle ground where I'm trying to figure out, I've got alischwonke.com and I've got marketingdeconstructed.com and Do you— where do you host this sort of information? Because right now Marketing Deconstructed is just the podcast website, right? Um, so do we— is this something launched there? Does it live on alischwanke.com? I mean, I don't know the answer today, but I think that's a question I have to think through.

Well, that gets into where are we going long term. Okay, so let's move over to our other piece of paper and say, what is the short-term goal that we're trying to figure out? Why don't you write in $100K in passive income. All right, so the short-term goal is $100K in passive income. Let's talk about the medium-term goal. So we say 3 years from now, what does all this look like? You can wave your magic wand. What, what are we doing in agency revenue and what are we doing in passive income?

Yeah, agency revenue in the next 3 years is $5 million, and for me personally I have a target of 1 million in, we'll call it Path EverCreator. And what I think this looks like for me is, it's right now the little building blocks itself are a little cloudy, but at the end, it's, if I could put the headlines on a Wall Street Journal article, it would be, you know, Allie Schwonke headlines XYZ conference and, you know, thousands of people are benefiting from this course and, you know, like, where I'm asked more and more to come in and help and create things. So I'm seeing marketing deconstructed as one vein, and perhaps there's a whole sales-specific, you know, brand over here. And so I'm seeing it kind of like a portfolio of offerings.

Right.

And so that's where right now I'm inclined to say, back to my original way we started the podcast, when the strategy is clear, the execution becomes simple.

Right.

So if you go to marketing deconstructed, you don't have to figure out what it's about. We're helping you market and drive sales and marketing results.

Yeah, so that already starts to answer some questions for me, right? Because I'm going to use an orange marker. Uh, what that does is I'm imagining this business diagram where you've got, you know, you and your brand, and then underneath it, um, I'm just gonna say strat for the agency Right, of these, you know, simple strat, marketing deconstructed.

Whatever those other ones are.

The sales thing, whatever comes next. These all live underneath what you're doing. And so now we're starting to figure out how we could anchor different things here. Now let's go to, let's think about the long term. If we go 10 years out, 10, 15 years out, what are we looking at? What's the goal? For you and your brand?

Yeah, the types of— the way I like to think about this is, so some of the women that I follow that I really emulate, Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart are two that come to mind. Jillian Michaels is another where they have a really strong presence about what they do, but they have several different ways that that's applied across their portfolio. But their name resonates with one thing and one thing only. So with Oprah Winfrey, it's telling stories and making, you know, driving change. With Martha Stewart, it's, you know, beautiful and simple simplistic home decor, whatever. Jillian Michaels, it's, it's health and wellness.

Right.

So I envision that for myself. The revenue there, I think it's far beyond. I think in 10 years it could be $25 million.

Right.

And not just this like, oh, we're just going to double this. But to me, the vision is there's— I am that central hub in all of these and there's, there's teams of people carrying out different brands in the space that are all solving similar problems.

Right. Okay. That makes sense. Yes. So is the long-term vision to be the Oprah Winfrey of marketing?

If that was— if I could Google that and say that was a thing, yes, I think so.

Okay, why don't you write that down?

Okay. Oprah.

Oprah of marketing.

If you're watching.

So I love what you have mapped out here because it's clear, right? This could look so many different ways, right? You could say, hey, short term I want to grow $100K in passive income, and actually You said creator income at one point. We've used those interchangeably. I actually like creator income much better because we all know none of this is passive, right? Like it's going to be a huge amount of work to build out the template library, to sell it, the automations for this and all of that. But that bucket of creator income, you know, really speaks to the types of things you're doing with your personal brand, and all of that. But it'd be very easy to say, hey, we want to go from $100K in creator income to $500K in creator income. And then actually maybe long-term, I want to hold it at $500K because, and then I want to decrease. Now, like long-term, maybe it's $500K of creator income in 10 hours a week, right?

Sure, gotcha.

But here, like it is very clear. If someone was like, hmm, does Allie have big ambitions? I, you know, like.

I'm not sure.

We can see it very, very clearly here.

Yeah.

Where you're saying, look, I want to scale revenue in two different buckets. I want to scale reach in the business, you know, and so level up in leadership and all these things that are going to be necessary. And then, you know, I want to scale impact, right? To me, the OKR of marketing says impact.

Yeah. I mean, I was sharing that my sister has a business and one of the biggest obstacles for her is the, like, she wants, she's just trying to do all the things. And it's that very same value proposition we started talking about at the start of the show where she's going to try and find someone to tell her what to do next. And I believe that the types of things that I offer give people clarity and they don't spin their wheels. And imagine her, she could double, triple her business by simply putting a better marketing strategy and plan in place.

Yeah, I love that. Okay, so you'd ask a question around You know, as we're going back to the short term, how do we structure the site? How do we make it clear, you know, so what site does— what domain does this new offering live on? If you were to answer that question yourself, understanding your short, medium, and long-term view, what would you say?

I mean, right now my gut tells me that this still is the podcast and this right here is building into alicewonke.com with multiple offerings, because then, I mean What I've noticed about the types of, I'm looking at the analytics of people that are coming is when someone does get something like, 'cause we've got a couple resources there, they instantly go, what's next? What else does she have? What else can she offer? And so if that was the case, I could also be putting some of our resources from Simple Strat on there and tracking and getting commissions from the agency if in fact that wasn't an option. But right now it is Allie Schwonke's brain. It is. So that, I mean, just talking through that, That's how it comes out to me.

Yeah, that sounds good. I think that's the right path because then it's really clear someone's coming, they're starting to follow you for more things and then you have these offerings.

Yeah.

Which is a different structure than, oh, here's this site, this agency, only peel back a layer and see who's behind it.

Right.

Right, and so it's flipped. And 'cause again, when we know what we're optimizing for long-term, then these other decisions become so much more clear.

Sure.

Because so many other people, right, would say, hey, long term, I want to optimize for the business brand growth and I want to be a behind-the-scenes operator.

Yeah.

Nothing about the Oprah of marketing says you want to be a behind-the-scenes operator.

I mean, the number, the number of times right now, just like anecdotal evidence of doing a podcast interview and getting the feedback of like, this is one of the best interviews I've ever had when they're on my podcast. Okay, that, that's actually because I put in a lot of work to customize the conversation and ask questions they don't get. If they download my template, it's because they follow me on LinkedIn and love my content, not because they love Simple Strat. We have good content, but they're like, I bought into her. So if I release a book, I'm very big fans of like Rand Fishkin and, you know, people that have built businesses off of their brand, but so much of their following is due to them.

Yeah, I think that makes so much sense and it lets you transcend a particular platform that you're focused on or even a particular your category, right? Because you go, you know, Ali Schwonke talking about sales, talking about all these other things.

Yeah, I mean, a couple of things in here from a strategy perspective, like I am working on a couple of vanity URLs that like when I'm on a podcast I can say them so that because my name isn't easy to spell or remember. But if you do Google me, I'm the only Ali Schwonke, at least right now before the bots take me over. But if you do, if on a podcast like right now we're using a URL for Simplestrux, that's hard too. Fixmycrm.com. So I think we could probably do like URLs that would be like thelinkedinmaximizationprogram.com. That's too long. Yeah, but something of that nature.

Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so it sounds like we've got a package and an offering that can drive a significant amount of revenue. We actually haven't gotten into numbers yet. So, but I know, you know, this $599 price point, we're not going to do the live math, but, you know, there's a pretty clear path to getting to $100K in revenue there. But let's, let's actually break it down. Let's make it super actionable. What are the next steps? And maybe we can use even this part of the board and just make the to-do list. So why don't you write out to-do there and we'll start to break down like what should you do next to bring this to life.

So one of the questions I have is this idea of launching before creating.

Okay.

So that's been, you know, the market. So if, because I think that's where I get stuck is I'm going to go and I'm going to make all the things. But then you get bogged down and then you miss the opportunity. And so might there be a way for, for me to say this is coming and making the landing page and being one of the first to get it?

Yeah, I think that makes sense. So you're going to need— yeah, the landing page. The thing that I want to test is the positioning and packaging around the whole thing.

Okay.

So brainstorming a few ideas of how we could do that. Right? You could run— if there's a niche to run ads to, um, or because we're just looking for titles and, and subtitles, right? Because we're trying to, um, sure, we're trying to get that, that right. Okay, what— so we can run ads, we could split test to your existing audience, right? You've got 5,000, you know, if you combine newsletters Uh, maybe you've got 8,000 total people, right? So we can split test that. Um, what else? How, how could we refine down to the, the perfect packaging and positioning for this before we put a big focus behind it?

I mean, I think this split test of the people on the newsletter list is important, but I think even more important is reaching out. And it, it would have to be a one-to-one email, not like a mass email, but a one-to-one of Hey, you've come to 2 webinars that we've done on LinkedIn and actually like I'm handpicking you as being one of the first people. I'd love to get your feedback on this. Or maybe just like, I don't even know if I don't want feedback because I don't want unsolicited ideas. I don't really want any of that stuff. But if you're interested, like sign up here.

Yeah. And so you could take 20 of your best leads, 20 engaged people and send them the offer with the buy link, but split, you know, go 10 and 10. We don't have statistical significance. Right. But that's okay. You do need to actually, if we think about the amount of work, so I think this is great for testing.

Yeah, uh-huh.

We've got that covered well. So now we have to actually create this package and bundle. And so the biggest thing that's missing in this as I understand it right now is the course.

Uh-huh, sure.

So with the course, do we want to create it? Like, is— are you confident enough in this offering that you want to spend the dedicated week or multiple weeks to create the course and then sell it? Or should we pre-sell all of this and then launch the course? What do you think?

My gut tells me right now that the course— I can record that now. Um, I— what I— so one thing that we usually ask on any webinar, um, registrant or registrations is we have open field that says what they want to learn. And everybody that registered for that, well, I've got like hundreds of what they want to learn.

I love that question. Yeah, you're just constantly learning.

So telling. And it's not a dropdown, it's like put your stuff in there, right? And tell people this, hey, I want to learn literally what the objective said. So again, I think like I've got a really strong understanding that maybe a lot of creators don't have because they haven't done the sort of pre-work up front of doing these, these webinars. But I think the course is it's 3 parts. It's why and what do you want to get out of this and setting the level-setting expectations. It's going through all the details of what's here, and then it's the— it's like a video a day for— or a video a week for like 8 weeks that you watch and implement. So I think like for me, the biggest unknown is, is this a course where they— like if they, if they buy it on its own, will they get value out of it now the way I have it mapped out? And I That probably is where I need some work.

So what would give you confidence in one direction or another?

Maybe, so in software we call these like design partners. So if I found a couple of early adopters and mentality is that they were piloting the course with me and that was actually the reason, like they actually can get this for let's say $100 as opposed to $500, they still have some skin in the game and that release that first to them and then also use that as testimonial.

Yeah, those are good, right? Because we go to the landing page, that's really going to matter. I'm going to push back on the $100 price point because I think we need to find a way to position it so that this, this pilot program is more valuable than the initial one. Because also, if we run the pilot program to a small group of 10 people at $100 price point, we didn't validate— we actually learned nothing about our price point.

Gotcha.

Maybe we invalidated our price point. Sure. And so I would say try to have the exact same price point, okay, that you'll have, especially because we're talking a difference of $100 or $500 or something like that. Um, and also 5 or 10— say we had 10 people at $100, that has us 1% of the way towards our goal for the whole year, right? We're $1,000. That doesn't do anything. But 10 people at $600, we're now 6% of the way there, right? We've made meaningful, um meaningful progress. And so what I would do is I would keep the price point the same and the offer the same, and I would just find a way to say, hey, this includes more of my time, right? Or something else, because it's going to, right? You're hands-on learning and you're studying that. And so then increase the value with the amount of your time rather than decreasing the price.

Sure. Okay, that makes sense because I'll also get more feedback by doing that. Yeah. Without saying give me feedback.

And I think the pilot program works really well because then you can release the videos as you go. And so you're saying, hey, I'm selling this, you immediately get all these resources, and then every week I'm releasing a module and you have that accountability. Yeah, you're getting feedback on it.

I'm just gonna write my note here.

Perfect.

Yeah, the ongoing value beyond this, um, so something we haven't touched on is, as, as you and I are both active on LinkedIn, know like this platform every day is like, this is new and here's changing. And so to stay in and get like training on the latest updates and how to take advantage of them, I think on the backside can be a subscription fee that they can have. But, you know, they're not going to have that till we prove our value here first. Yeah.

And so you could say like this comes with a year of updates on what's changing in the platform, in the algorithm. Yeah.

Right. Okay.

And then that tees it up for ongoing value. And later you're like, hey, I'm launching the $100 a month community of of, you know, for sales leaders or marketing leaders. Sure. As we stay up in touch of what's working and all of that.

Okay.

But positions as well.

Yeah, fantastic.

Okay, that sounds good. Well, let's sit down and kind of recap what we went over. We've got some great action steps. I'd love to hear just a little recap from you of what you're thinking, like what the offer is going to be and then what is next on your to-do list.

Yeah, so this clarity is really helpful because I think I've mulled around a lot of these in my mind. And even when we talked about the ideas, just talking about the idea of what is passive income, Right. And I mean, even just saying live training isn't really passive. So it just helps qualify some of that. Um, when it comes to the course or the bundling itself, uh, I would have never thought about actually taking, I was thinking more of the one-on, like, here's my calendar and here's this, but I love how we've taken that and said, here's all the things together.

And then one thing on that is I notice a lot of creators saying, I'm going to sell this and that and this other thing, and then they're asking the their audience to try to decide, should I buy any? Like, I don't even know what to buy.

Yes.

An example is I'm really into woodworking. And so I bought a laser engraver from a company called xTool. Okay. And it was the hardest decision because I couldn't figure it out. They had like 6 different modules or models. And then within that, they had all these variations. I'm like, do I need this add-on or that add-on? And I was like, like, just make it simple. Like, I almost didn't buy because I couldn't figure out how to make an informed decision. And I'm like searching YouTube for like, someone just explain to me, like, buy this. And so when you're separately selling this for $50 and that for $100 and all of that, someone's like, I don't know what all to buy.

Yeah.

So here you're clearly saying you have a problem. Buy this to solve the problem.

Yeah.

Yeah. And so it's just a lot of clarity.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I also, as you say it that way, I can now picture if I would've done that, I would've had the posting calendar, the messaging schedule, and all of that, and they would've, they really didn't know what they're supposed to start with. Right. So I love that. From an action set perspective, I love the idea of the module release because now I can get in my brain, I can put together a production schedule or a to-do list that involves dates and it doesn't seem like this overwhelming, I have to have all the videos done by this time. And I've got a lot of those templates already. I think the piece that I'm taking as the most strategic part that I didn't, like, I know it's important, but now it's just slapping me in the face, is the name and the sub and the description of it, you know, and naming that and testing that. And we get that from our YouTube stuff. And so that's like part of what I do all the time, but it hadn't really struck me as, because that usually sells itself once you nail that down.

Yes. A big learning for me in 2024 was around packaging and positioning of books. I spent a lot of time, you know, working on my next book, and I'm very confident in the idea and what I'm teaching and the principles and all that. And I can't— I know that it has to be perfect in the packaging and positioning. And so spending time with authors like James Clear or like Dan Martell with his book, Buy Back Your Time. It has such a clear value proposition right there in the title. And I just saw that book came out 2 years ago and I just saw on Amazon today that it's the number 1 gifted book in that category.

Oh my gosh, wow.

Right? And you're like, oh, because it has, it's a very clear value proposition. And so I think it's completely worth spending a huge amount of time on the exact title and subtitle and that the value proposition for what you're offering. You know, I would— if you came back later and said, hey, I spent 25 hours just on that, I'd be like, perfect.

Yeah.

Whereas I think most people would say I spent 25 minutes on it and that was good enough.

Yeah. Because it's that adage that if you don't get past the title, you don't get to the content itself. Right. So how, how good the content is doesn't matter. It's if they don't get to it.

Yeah, exactly. Well, there's a lot of great things in there. I think for everyone watching, it's something where so many people have a services business where they're saying, hey, I want to get to $100,000 in creative income or, you know, digital products sold or something like that. So I think we've provided a clear roadmap. And as you execute on this and as you, you know, realize this long-term dream of becoming the Oprah of marketing, Where should people go to follow you?

Well, I'm going to say go to alicewonke.com. You know, that's what we decided, but I'm very, very active on LinkedIn. And then I would say the Marketing Deconstructed podcast would encourage you to go listen to that.

Sounds good. Thanks for coming on.

Thank you.

If you enjoyed this episode, go to YouTube and search The Nathan Barry Show. Then hit subscribe and make sure to like the video and drop a comment. I'd love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were and also just who else you think we should have on the show. Thank you so much for listening.