Denise:                 Hey, gorgeous and welcome to another episode of Chill and Prosper. Today, we are talking about a question of monetization. Does everything in your business need to be monetized? Do you need to make money out of every single thing that you do in your business? Juicy, juicy topic. So you might be surprised by my answer because yes, I talk about money mindset and charging what you are worth, but I'm also a Chillpreneur. Not everything needs to be monetized necessarily because this is what I believe. You can do whatever business you want. You can set up your business, however you like. You can do whatever business model that works for you, but everything has customer service implications. Everything has logistical implications. And so, because I'm lazy and smart, smazy, I really look at everything in my business and some things are deliberately not monetized because in the long run that creates more ease and flow for me.

                                And sometimes it actually creates more abundance, down the track. So you might have that question too. And especially nowadays when there's so many different things you could do, right? It's like, well, should I write books? Should I write free books? Should I create a podcast? Should I do speaking? Should I have an app? All of those things. And so you might think, well, which bits should be monetized and which bits shouldn't and what's okay. So let me just share with you one thing, I talk about this in my book where I have an app, so it's a money tracking app. And honestly, the only reason I did it is because at the time lots of people were creating apps and it just felt so sexy. I have an app, it just felt really cool. And I wanted to be cutting edge.

                                So I created this money tracking app because I talk about money tracking. And so it cost about $10,000 to do it, which at the time was quite a bit of a chunk. And it's really pretty, it's lovely, but right towards the end, the podcast developer, sorry, the app developer was like, how much do you want to charge for it? And I was like, oh crap, I hadn't even thought about that. What do people charge? And he's like, well you could do a one off thing. So it could be like 299, 399, 499, or you could do like a monthly thing, like 99 cents a month. And I was just like, oh man. And I could just see ahead to people, sending me messages saying, oh, your app doesn't work and getting really angry. And I've noticed this for myself.

                                It actually doesn't matter how much you're charging. You're still going to get the same amount of angry customers. And I call this the 3% rule, 3% of your customers are going to be angry, disappointed, some cases abusive, some cases just disappointed, which hurts so much. And just sometimes pain in the butts, right? And so I was like, oh man, I actually don't want to deal with any of that customer service. So we decided to make the app free because then if it doesn't work and I'm sorry, if you've used it and it doesn't work, I'm not under that much obligation to fix it. I'm just like, oh, I'm sorry, it doesn't work for you. That really sucks. But I didn't want to have to go into an area that I don't know much about constantly have to pay developers to fix things for $2 a month.

                                Now, if you're in my money bootcamp and you've paid me $2,000 to join my course and tech doesn't work, well, I have customer service in place to be able to deal with that, right? And so for me, I decided not to monetize that app. You could do a similar thing with almost anything in your business. So podcast, you might wonder if you're a regular listener of Chill and Prosper, why I don't put ads in this podcast. And the reason is because that is a whole separate arm of a business that has logistical implications. I would have to find sponsors, or I would have to sign up to a sponsorship thing. I would have to make sure that I'm tracking my downloads for my sponsors and probably doing reports. I would be beholden to somebody if I had an ad for something, and then later on that company did something bad.

                                I would have to go and redo all of those ads. So for me, it's not my business to monetize my podcast. And so I don't care about making it free. I still have ad breaks, but they're ad breaks for my products. So the ad break is like, Hey, Denise has got this great book, go buy this book. Oh, Denise has got a great bootcamp, go buy this bootcamp. So I control all of that. Now, does that mean that you don't charge for your app? You don't charge for your podcast? Not at all, if that is your business and you have the bandwidth to do that and to do it properly and to put energy into it, go forth and do it. But it's also okay for some of those things, just to be marketing channels for a bigger purpose. So for me, everything in my business, we have a motto, all roads lead to boot camp. All roads lead to boot camp.

                                And so I personally don't want the logistical implications of having bigger team, bigger customer service to fix things that, to be honest, yes, I could probably make a couple of thousand dollars out of podcast advertising, but it's easier for me to make money out of money bootcamp. That's where I concentrate my customer service. That's where I concentrate my energy. And that's where at the moment I make my money. Now, you might do speaking and training. A lot of people speak for free. And that's cool too. So you just want to know why you're doing something. If you are speaking and coaching for free, what's the benefit that you get out of it. I used to do it a lot because people would go, oh, well, you can record it. And it'll be part of your sizzle reel. And then, you know what, they never freaking send.

                                They never send it to you or I'll do it in exchange for a testimonial and they never send the freaking testimonial or they say, "oh, and then you can sell your thing." And like, I'm not good at selling from the stage. So it just, would've been a waste of time for me. So for me, I actually do charge for speaking because it's not necessarily my favorite thing to do. So if you love speaking and it works out for you in lots of different ways and you make money out of it, eventually down the track, go for it and do it. For me, doesn't feel good. And this is the kind of question, right? Does it feel good to you? Does it feel good? So for me, feels good having a free podcast, I don't feel like anyone's taking advantage of me.

                                I'm super grateful that you guys even listen. I'm super grateful for all the feedback and I love doing it, right? It costs me money to do. It absolutely costs me money to create, but it's easy for me. I don't have to think about another arm of my business, about advertising for my app. It's easy for it to be free. It's generous. It's easy. I've already created it, but I have no interest in monetizing that at the moment. Okay, but for speaking, it actually doesn't feel good for me to do it for free. It actually makes me feel, to be honest, it makes me feel icky doing it for free. It makes me feel like my life force is being sucked out of me and I get off stage and I just go, oh, I don't feel good. So it has to be win-win.

                                So really look at everything that you are doing in your business. It's okay to not do it. At some point I might not do a podcast all the time. At some point I might discontinue my app. I might even do more speaking and training in the future, or I might do some more of that for free. I don't really know, but you can write down everything that you want to do in your business. What's the customer service implications? What are the logistical implications of that? And would your time and energy be worth doing something else? Everything's a trade off, right? So at the moment, I don't do any interviews. I used to do, I don't know, 200 podcast interviews a year and I'm taking a break from that because I need to work on books. Books are a really big strategy for me at the moment, I'm creating a whole bunch of money mindset guides.

                                And that for me is where I want to spend my money. Sorry, spend my time and energy. Now, as I'm creating those books, so I'm doing money mindset for writers, money mindset for health coaches, money mindset for dance teachers. There's no limit to the amount of books that I can write. And each one will lead to money bootcamp. So a question for me was, well, do I make those books free or do I charge for them? And I'm going to tell you about that after the break. What decision I made about that and how it might help you in pricing some of your stuff too. And then I'm also going to share exactly how I make my money, what things I do monetize and what things I don't. Speak to you soon.

Laura:                    Hi, I'm Laura of Laura Cruise Coaching. And I live in Bedfordshire in the UK. I work with women in part two of their lives, i.e the bit where they get to put the focus back on them so that they can identify and ultimately achieve their wildest dreams. Why do I do that? Well, because I think it's too easy to stop dreaming once you become an adult. Why can't you still follow your dreams in your forties? I came across Denise a couple of years ago when her book Get Rich, Lucky Bitch was recommended to me and I put it on my Christmas list. My kids laughed when they saw the title, but I told them to watch out because I too was going to get rich and be a lucky bitch. I love the way Denise writes and talks. It's like listening to a friend.

                                The biggest light bulb moment for me is when she talks about getting really specific with your goals. Saying you want to be successful in your business is nowhere near enough. You need to know what that looks like, feels like, maybe even smells like. I often find myself dipping back into the book to help me get past a particular block. And of course now with the podcast I listen to, I have a little bit of Denise in my life each week. I've recommended this book to so many people and actually got in trouble on Facebook because they thought my comment was offensive and I was calling the other person a name. Oh, Facebook, get with the program. So thank you, Denise. I love the work that you do. And I can't wait to hear myself on the Chill and Prosper podcast.

Denise:                 Okay, welcome back. We are talking about, does everything in your business need to be monetized? What should you put a price on and what shouldn't you. And I hope that you got this already, but what I make decisions on that could be completely different to you. Okay? So there's no right or wrong at all. You just have to know what are the implications, what are the logistics involved in every part of your business. And you want to do that or not because you don't have to do everything. You don't have to do everything all at the same time. That's totally cool. So just before the break, I mentioned that I'm creating a whole bunch of books. So my inspiration for these books is the four dummies guides. So like internet for dummies, singing for dummies, all these things. And they've written like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these books.

                                And so when people come and join my money bootcamp, or when they read one of my money books, they always say, "Yeah, but Denise, but I'm a dance teacher. So your advice doesn't really work for me. I'm different." And I say, well, yes, actually there are some nuances, but you're still going to have money blocks. So I decided that I would create a whole series of books and I'm writing with my beautiful co-author, Chris Emery, who's helping me do the logistics of it and a whole team. And it's a whole production, right? And so like money mindset for writers, money mindset for health practitioners. I want to do money mindset for real estate professionals, money mindset for dance teachers. And I'm just going to keep on going basically. And the first one took like a year to create. And then I think we're going to get at a really great system to get them out, because we want to make sure that as many professions as possible find their money blocks, right?

                                So the question I said was, do I charge for them or do I not? So I don't charge my podcast. I don't do advertising on that. I don't charge for my app. I have tons of freebies all around that I don't charge for. I do charge for speaking and training. I don't charge for interviews and those kind of trainings. So what am I doing about these books? I really had a thought about this because remember everything has customer service implications. And if I was just selling them myself, I would maybe, I don't know there would be customer service, right? But I'm actually doing them through Amazon. I'm doing a Kindle version and a paperback through Amazon. So if someone has technical problems, they don't need to come to me. They can go to Amazon who have got a freaking 24/7 customer service team, right?

                                So I was like, okay, I don't have to worry about customer service. I'm going to try and make things really easy. So every book is going to have bonuses, so they can come over and get bonuses. So they'll be on my list. So I was like, okay, cool. Well then, you know, do I need to even charge for these? I actually have decided to charge a normal book price for them because this is going to be a little test, right? Money bootcamp is $2,000. And I don't have anything for sale beyond that, right? It's not like I've got a $7 then a 27, then a 37, then a hundred dollars, a 250. I don't have an ascension model. There's nothing wrong with that, lots of people do. I've had it in the past and it was great. But I wanted to make an experiment in my business to say, I'm either free or it's money bootcamp.

                                And I was saying free or expensive, but people don't like that word expensive, because it's so meaningless. What's expensive for one person is not expensive for another person. So I was like free or money bootcamp. So you come to my website, you can consume all my free stuff, but if you want to work with me, it's going to cost you a couple of thousand dollars, right? To join my money bootcamp. And there's nothing else. But I decided to charge for these books because I thought if someone's willing to spend $10 and that's the books will be like 10, 15 dollars. It could also be a really good, just a test, right? To see, well, look, if someone can't afford 10, 15 dollars, they're not ready to work with me in money bootcamp. And I have tons of free resources on my website that someone who doesn't have any money, they can listen to this.

                                They can read articles in my blog. So I just thought, okay, I am going to charge for those books. And so that being said, look at everything you're offering. Some of the things that you're giving away for free, they could be chargeable. You could create that into a little eCourse. You could make it into some people call these, the self-liquidating offer. The slow, which is basically, it just pays for your ad spend, it could just pay for itself kind of thing. Or it could be something that's an upsell to something else, you know? So there is absolutely no right or wrong.

                                But if you are getting customer service questions for things all the time about something you don't really care that much about, or it's annoying you, maybe make it free or discontinue it completely. It's totally, totally up to you. Okay, so you might be curious about how I make money in my business and what I actually do charge for. So my books with Hay House, so I've got three books published with Hay House. I've got Get Rich, Lucky Bitch and Chillpreneur, which is renamed Chill and Prosper in the second edition.

                                They're owned by Hay house now. So I get royalties. I get about a dollar a book in that. So, twice a year I'll get a royalty that might be 20,000, 30,000 dollars twice a year, which is nice. That's really cool. For my books though, I do see them as business cards for everything else I do. But hey, I may as well get paid for those. And as I said, those new books will be charged as well. So then what else? What else do I have for sale? So at the moment it's pretty much you come and join money bootcamp. But that being said, I also make money from being an affiliate. So I'm an affiliate for some courses that I've taken that I love. And we put a lot of time and energy into that affiliate campaign.

                                We treat it like it's our business. And we can often make up to a million dollars a year in promoting other people's courses. Now some people really resist doing things like this because they think that if they receive affiliate income from something, then it kind of dirties that recommendation. And especially if you are like a connector kind of person, you're always recommending things you might think, oh no, people won't think it's authentic if I get a royalty from it, but that's not true. You are someone of high integrity and you curate things. So it's totally okay to do a resources page on your website with affiliate links, to things that you've used and loved. You may as well. It's totally okay to recommend things and receive money in return. Now I don't do that with everything. There's sometimes someone goes, oh, can you share my thing? And I go, oh yeah, cool. If it's a friend and they're like, do you want an affiliate link? I go, oh no, that's fine. I can't be bothered. I can't be bothered doing the logistics.

                                So I tend to just do the really big ones. But like when I send people a link to my book, I'm sending them like an Amazon affiliate link. I may as well get paid my dollar for my book. And I may as well get a little bit of money from Amazon as well, right? But that's at no extra cost to customers. The money doesn't come directly to me in a way. As I said, speaking fees, I charge for speaking pretty much because I don't like leaving my house. And if you ask me to speak at your event, you have to lure me out of my house with money.

                                Because I can't be lured out anymore for just like exposure. I can't be lured out for a free night away in a hotel. I need to be lured out with money. So I would say like 80% of my money probably comes from money bootcamp. It depends on the year. Sometimes it's 50-50. If I ever do a big affiliate year, that could be a third of my income sometimes comes from affiliates. If we do that big million dollar a year. Speaking fees, I would do a handful like one or two max, four or five I've done in a year. I just, most of the time, it's just not my thing. And then as I said, I probably make about between 40 and 60,000 dollars a year from books. But I'm not monetizing everything else, could I, as I said, make a couple of thousand dollars out of podcasts.

                                Absolutely. Could I monetize my app? Make it another couple of thousand dollars a year? Absolutely. Could I do more speaking and training? Yeah, but I don't really want to. So the lesson here is not everything needs to be monetized. It's totally okay to pick and choose what works for you. It's totally okay to do things in a different way. It's totally okay for you to do my model, which is free or money bootcamp. Or it's totally okay to do an Ascension model and have a lot of different things. Just everything comes with energy, trade offs. Everything comes with customer service implications. That's it. And I tend to do things that are easier for me than not. Okay, but easy looks different for everybody. All right, so hopefully I've given you some food for thought there. Maybe you're going to change some things. Maybe you're going to add some price tags on some things and take things off other things, that's cool too. I would love to hear your ahas about this episode, but stick around and I have got one more final thought for you too.

Jennie:                 Hi, my name's Jennie Cashman Wilson. I'm the founder of Abram Wilson, which is a nonprofit that supports up and coming musicians and young disadvantaged people unlock their creative potential by opening doors, to the music industry.

                                I have a gorgeous little Cockapoo Misty, who's nearly two. And I split my time between the north of England and London. I joined money bootcamp at the beginning of 2017. I'd read, Get Rich, Lucky Bitch, which had been recommended by Lannie Dawson. And I was at a point where I'd been working for my foundation full time paid for just over a year. And I had realized that I had been stressing about money and cash every single day, that whole period.

                                And I knew that something needed to change. It did with money bootcamp. One of my biggest aha moments was making the connection between my dad's negative relationship with money and my fear of talking to donors and asking them to support my nonprofit, Abram Wilson. Since then I've done money boot camp twice. I've attended a couple of events that Denise has done in London. I do the monthly coaching calls. Often I'll watch the playbacks because I can't fit them into work, but I always watch them and I love the community. I love how chill she is. I love her chill and prosper kind of mindset and mantra. And if you want to grow your business, I couldn't recommend Denise highly enough.

Denise:                 Okay, welcome back. My final thought is about changing your mind. Changing your mind because some people really are reluctant to change their mind because maybe you've been called a flake. Maybe you've heard so much as a kid, oh, you've made your bed now. Now you have to lie on it. Or maybe you just, you really struggle to shift and change things. And so you're happy to keep on throwing money at something, even though it's no longer a fit for you. So I had to do this recently. I had to change my mind about something and it really inconvenienced people. And I had to deal with the fallout of that. And it actually, the fallout wasn't bad. It was all in my head. I was like, oh, they're going to think I'm such a bitch, they're going to think I'm such a flake.

                                I'm such a diva asking for what I want. And this has been such a big lesson for me that over the years, I've made some very unpopular kind of decisions in my family. And it's always been for my highest good, always. So if you struggle with that because you don't want to let other people down, you don't want to inconvenience other people. You don't want to have to deal with. Maybe it's going to cost more money, something's just not sitting right with you. An affirmation for you could be, it's safe for me to change my mind. It's safe for me to redefine what I want. It's safe for me to say no, even after I've said yes and my daughter came home from school in her first year of kindie, and she said, "You get what you get and you don't get upset." And I went, oh God, it starts so early.

                                And I said, no, everything can be re-negotiated. And we even say that to them. Cool, if you change your mind, like convince us, persuade us. So we're trying to teach our kids too, that within reason, it's okay to negotiate things because it really starts from that young age. So where is it not being safe for you to change your mind and redefine things and renegotiate your boundaries and ask for what you want. Something to ponder on. All right, I will see you next week for another edition of Chill and Prosper. Have an amazing week. Bye