Publishing Is Not Dead, It’s Just Getting Started, With The Mikkelsen Twins

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You're listening to Business Lunch with Roland Fraser. This is your seat at the table. Welcome to business lunch, episode 264. And this one's a snackable edition you're going to enjoy. I'm the producer of the show, Darren Clark and today our host Roland Fraser talks with the Mickelson twins about their fast growing company, Publishing life. Please remember to hit, follow or subscribe wherever you're listening and head over to businesslunchpodcast.com for full show notes and to sign up for our email newsletter. Plus, before we get started, if you're a fan of the show and you're learning a lot from Roland, you'll definitely want to check out his five day epic challenge. So go to businesslunchpodcast.com epic to find out what that's all about. Okay, I think we're ready. Here's Roland.

Thank you guys. Number one for coming on and hanging out. Yeah, I wanted to chat with you about a couple of things. One is lots of folks in the industry say good things about you and it's always good to get connected to other people that are doing things.

Cool. First off, super awesome to hear. It's a massive pleasure. Really happy that you took the time to do this as well. Happy to hear that other people have said nice things about us. Where should I begin? Should I give a little an overview on what we're doing? Yeah, I would love to do that. So, yeah, our company is publishinglife.com we have just one offer right now. We've only ever had one offer when.

We started Audio Institute, I think, or Audio Income.

Audiobook Income Academy. So when we started the company back in 2018, we launched it, it was Audiobook Income Academy is still Audiobook Income Academy. Only thing that's changed, you know, is obviously some of the content, the offering, the specifics of it. But last two and a half years has been selling same program with complete focus on nothing else. Yeah, Audiobook Income Academy is, it's a lot more than just an online course. It's a coaching program. So people of course get an online course with it, but also one on one coaching, three to five group coaching calls every day, every week. Every day, every week.

It's a big commitment.

Yes, that would be a very big commitment. And we've seen crazy, crazy, crazy growth since January. So this year has been absolutely insane for us. Maybe I can start from the beginning. I don't want to give you unnecessary information or anything like that.

No, it helps. So I'm happy to hear it.

Well, so I'll be as brief about it as I can. But what our program does is it teaches people how to build a self publishing business with Amazon. So it's an Amazon offer. But what makes our offer different than other Amazon offers is everyone is teaching people how to build. It's primarily an Amazon fba, Amazon physical product business. So our big angle right now is, you know, the best way to make money with Amazon right now in 2021 is not by selling physical products on Amazon. That breaks people's minds a lot of time because they didn't know there was another way to monetize Amazon because they think it's just an E commerce platform. So we do it through the avenue of self publishing and more specifically audiobooks. So inside of the self publishing space, the audiobook market is exploding. I feel like I don't even really need to tell people. They just know that audio is a huge growing sector within that market and it's completely underutilized by the self publishing space. So it's a huge opportunity right now. But that's really what we help people do, build a self publishing business with specifically taking advantage of the new audiobook opportunity that exists right now. So to provide more context on how we got started, that's how we got started first into the online world back in 2016. Before that, I didn't even know what entrepreneurship was that this online world existed and that stuff. So started self publishing books, started making some money with it and then eventually discovered myself just the opportunity that is audiobooks. And I don't want to go into too much detail on that. But we didn't learn like how to publish audiobooks from anyone else, any online course. It was really self discovered. So we're trying to make that like a mainstream opportunity because it is such a fantastic opportunity right now to leverage audiobooks and Amazon at the same time. But then in 2018 we started making YouTube videos, just sharing like what we could bring to the table, which is, you know, how to make money with Amazon and books and audiobooks. And it was people stuff people hadn't heard before. So we're just doing consistent videos. And then after a while it's picking up Steam. People are just begging us to make a course on this audiobook stuff. For a long time. We put it off, we're like, no, no, no, we don't want to be those online course gurus, right? We don't do that.

Guys are all sketchy.

Those are sketchy. That's not us. But then after like months and hundreds of People asking for it. We felt it would be rude to not create this for you and take your money. It would be. It was. It'd be rude of us. So that's when we created Audiobook Income Academy. Launched it in September 2018. When we launched it, you know, we had never seen more than like 10, $15,000 in a bank account or anything like that. Launched it, got 100 people to join on the first day at $500 each. So we did like 52 grand in one day. That's awesome. Insane back then, Completely mind shattering. So then that was when we switched from, you know, self publishing books as our main thing to, okay, now we got a hundred students we got to take care of and help them build their own self publishing businesses. Then from there kind of been doing our thing. The next two years consisted of us improving the course, remaking it. Yeah. Making more YouTube videos to try and get customers. Didn't really know how to do any sort of marketing. Right. Five Facebook ads then. Have any success, you know, really Experimenting, failing, experimenting, and then finally getting the hang of it. Yeah, last year. Really? Yeah. So then last year was when we started learning, you know, YouTube ads, webinar funnels, things like that. I tried it for years, but I could never make it work. Last year I had my first webinar funnel that actually people liked and was profitable. So last year we did $2 million in revenue. That's been kind of consistent with our business. It's kind of been the story of. Yeah. So far. Yeah. So we rely heavily on YouTube ads. You might have seen some of our YouTube ads right now. Now we're like the top 20 spenders now on all of YouTube and. Yeah. Business this year. So I just. We just launched this, a new webinar earlier on Christmas Eve, actually. And since then we've done about $8 million in the last two months.

That's awesome, guys.

Mind shattering stuff. Mind shattering for us. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. I love it.

And what's next?

What's next is to keep doing our thing. That's the first thing. What's next? Keep doing our thing. We got a really fantastic team. We've been hiring a lot to keep up with the demand. So a lot of our team is consisted of a bunch of coaches doing that again. Keep doing what we're doing and then build out a back end. Because everything we've done is purely front end. We're a 100% front end company. Never had a back end offer. So our numbers are very good considering that especially, you know. Yeah. So later this year going to be building out a higher ticket offer for our students who have been waiting years to give us money. We have a lot of people who've been wanting to do it and we've just never just been focused on this one thing. And yeah, that's more or less the 5 minute version.

What are you looking at the higher ticket offer being?

So currently what our offer is is teaching people how to make money on the front end of their books. Book royalties through ebooks, print books, audiobooks, making strictly only money off of selling them. Yes. So what are I like to call the graduate program because it's going to be for current students, it'll eventually go out to, you know, business owners and others. But for current students, I call it a graduate program. And it's going to be teaching our students how to leverage books not just for royalties and front end, but on the back end. Because one of the best funnels in the world is just having a book and then plugging a little call to action like, hey, you want to learn more or do you want to work with me on a deeper level? Book a call. So you know, the free plus shipping book funnel, super popular, nothing new, been around for a long time. Yeah. And so it won't be a free plus shipping book funnel. It'll be, you know, just how to build a back end off of your books with Amazon as the traffic. And instead of making, you know, $5 from a sale, you could potentially make, you know, $3,005 from a sale by getting your readers on a call and working with them on a deeper level. So that'll be our back end book is almost complete. Yes. The front end offer is only $14.97. Very low ticket program. A big reason why I think the offer is doing so well is because it's so much for so little. However, I do realize that there's definitely holes in that. That might be great right now, but it could be a problem down the line when you offer more things. It's like, well, you're already offering us everything, so I don't need to buy more stuff from you guys.

But yeah, because I think a lot of people, I have a similar philosophy to you is a lot of people hold back or give a very incomplete solution. And so then it's like, okay, well, you didn't give me what I was, what I was really trying to get. So when you do give so much like you are doing, I think that just gives you the credibility with your audience to say, you know, hey, imagine that's what we got for 14 bucks. You know, imagine what they're doing in the rest of this thing. And you and your pitch can be, you know, hey, you got everything you need to do this part of it, but there's more. If you want to come deeper down the funnel, we're here to help you. Right?

That's exactly it. That's exactly it. So, yeah, this back end offer will probably be around a 10k offer. So for people who really want to go deeper with us and take. It's just teaching people how to build on their current publishing business. It's not something new. It's an extension about how to make more money from your customers, from your readers, and go deeper on that level. So one of the best things we also have is we have a really fantastic relationship with our customers and our students because of trying over delivering. And, you know, no one's like to think no one's had a bad experience in terms of, you know, paying a ton of money and not getting anything back. You have the idiot here and there, but. Right, right, but like our offer is only $14.97, so you can't lose $10,000 if you only the thing you love.

Is the once in a blue moon person. That's like you ripped me off with your scam for $14.

Dispute my $1 payment. Yeah, right, Right, Yeah. I was going to say insanely awesome. It's so sick. The book market is totally an underutilized market for basically any business owner. So our target market has never been business owners, but that is what we're moving towards later this year with the back end program. Because using a book to sell your services on the back end, that applies not just for small people like our students who apply for literally anyone who has an offer.

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