Lesson 4

The financial rewards & other important benefits of your recordings

I know that this is a subject many people want to know about, so let’s discuss – in a realistic way – what kind of rewards, financial and otherwise, your recordings might bring your way.

Enlightened Audio Company Values

Passive Income

While audio productions might take a little bit of time and money to create from scratch, once they are finished, they become an asset that will continue to reward you for years, perhaps even decades into the future. 

Take a moment to really think about the implications of this and let the word “asset” crystallise in your mind.

Your recordings might not seem as tangible an asset as something like a car or a piece of land or an investment property, but assets they most certainly are. Your recordings are your intellectual property, and they have a very real value that can be measured just like any other asset. 

In some ways, recordings are the best kind of asset of all. Unlike cars, they never depreciate, and they require no maintenance, and unlike a piece of land you can keep selling the same item over and over. Whether you sell your recordings as a digital download or stream them online, you don’t need to maintain any stock of CDs. Forget about posting anything to your customers in the mail. Put your feet up and let the internet handle everything for you. Your online store can be open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, accepting payments from your customers and delivering downloads to them automatically. You can be fast asleep while all this is happening (or busy creating more recordings). 

Before we go any further, I must point out something very important:

This course in NOT another cheesy “get rich quick” strategy. 

Let me be clear, the money you stand to receive for your recordings is not going to just fall in your lap and there are many variables that may affect your success. However, I cannot deny that the earning potential you will open up for yourself by creating audio productions is compelling.

How compelling? How much can you make from your recordings? As you might imagine, this will depend on a wide variety of factors, such as:

  • The quality and quantity of your recordings. 
  • How and where you present your recordings. 
  • How much effort you put into creating public awareness of your recordings.
  • Good ol’ luck!

Further guidance on how to maximise your effectiveness in all of these factors is coming later in this course, but for now why don’t we look at a real-world example of what one person has accomplished since she started creating her own recordings in 2008. 

A Case Study in Earnings

Cary (not her real name) is a hypnotherapist who created her first recording in 2008 – a hypnosis session for anxiety relief. At first she released the recording on her website as a digital download and sent an email to all her clients to let them know about it. 

In the wake of that email she sold 22 copies in the first month. In the second, 5 copies. In the third, none at all. 

Not the most compelling story so far is it? Stay with me, it does get better. 

Cary then released her recording on iTunes and Amazon (the cost to do this was close to nothing). She also put quite a bit of time into writing articles about anxiety and stress relief for her website, and she also posted inspirational content on her Facebook page on a regular basis. 

Now let’s jump six months ahead. Slowly but surely there was a little momentum building. The articles Cary wrote began to attract extra visitors to her website, leading to a few extra online sales and even a few new clients. Her presence on iTunes also boosted sales. By the end of the year she was selling an average of 15 downloads per month at an average price of $10. 

That might not seem like a lot of income at first glance, but Cary had already increased her annual income by around $1,800. Once she reached this point she found that it took almost no effort to maintain that level of sales. 

Over the next 2 years, Cary released another 5 recordings. She also made two of her most popular recordings available as CDs so that her patients could buy them while visiting her clinic. At that stage Cary was selling a total of 60 downloads and 15 CDs per month which amounted to about $700 of additional income per month or $8,400 per annum. 

Two quick statistics that will open your eyes

The majority of Cary’s sales took place automatically via her website. This means it only took Cary about one hour per month to administrate this process, which usually involved nothing more than answering a few email inquiries from customers. For the time she invested in this aspect of her business, she was earning $700 per hour. This eclipsed her usual hourly rate as a clinical hypnotherapist by a factor of around 6 to 1. 

Let’s assume that Cary’s sales remained consistent and never grew beyond this level of $700 per month. She invests all her earnings in a savings account at a modest 3% interest rate. Now let me get my calculator out. Hmmm… that’s interesting. Over the course of 10 years, with almost no effort at all, Cary will amass over $98,000 in additional gross income. 

You might only earn a quarter of what Cary did. You might earn ten times what she did. Suffice to say that results like this are entirely achievable. Like all things in life, you get out what you put in, so the more recordings you create and the more effort you make to attract customers to your recordings, the more money you will make.

Cary’s example is a good one because it demonstrates two things:

  1. Excellent results can be achieved with a fairly modest amount of time and effort.
  2. The return on investment (money earned versus money and time spent) for selling recordings can significantly outperform what most people earn from their day job.  

I hope you can appreciate that I did not try to dazzle you with some far-fetched story of incredible success – you know, the one where poor little Danny goes from living in a cardboard box to buying a Lamborghini and his own personal island in just six months? I wanted to share a realistic, if not commonplace example of what can be achieved in this day and age. It might not happen overnight, but it is possible to earn a substantial amount of money from your recordings. I know a number of hypnotherapists and other counsellors/coaches whose income is now derived entirely from their recordings via online sales, YouTube and/or apps. 

The sky is the limit. You can create as few or as many recordings as you like. How far you take this is up to you. 

I should mention that Cary did not have access to this course when she started out. She made a good number of mistakes along the way and still did very well for herself. You have the distinct advantage of “knowledge in advance”. So read on dear reader, read on… 

This course will definitely help you create extra income. Your own personal island is not guaranteed.

New doors may open for you

Your recordings can lead to all sorts of exciting opportunities and publicity. Here are three great examples:

  1. Linda is a life coach. She offered one of her guided meditations for free on her website. This particular meditation made its way into the hands of a radio station host, who then invited Linda to a live interview to discuss the benefits of meditation. This exposed her services and her recording to a very large audience of people.
  2. Derek is a hypnotherapist who created a range of more than 20 hypnosis recordings over a two year period. A media production company discovered Derek’s website and hired him to write hypnosis scripts for them.
  3. Jocelyne is a stress management consultant who often uses guided imagery in her meditations. She was contacted by a domestic airline that wanted to offer her recordings to airline passengers as part of their in-flight entertainment menu. She licensed her recordings to the airline in exchange for an ongoing fee, and now millions of people enjoy listening to Jocelyne’s recordings while flying. Jocelyne has no other obligation to the airline whatsoever; she simply receives a royalty payment four times a year. 

It’s worth mentioning that, more often than not, it is the internet that paves the way for these kinds of unexpected opportunities. The internet will take you to every corner of the globe, to billions of people and it will do so in an interactive way that allows people to see and hear your work from the comfort of their own home or office. Good reasons to have a website of your own don’t you think? This is something to contemplate if you don’t already have one.

Greater credibility & status as a professional in your field

It should come as no surprise to you that professionals who are published, whether in print, audio or video format, instantly gain additional credibility and status as an expert in their field. Our media hungry world is increasingly appreciative of, nay, expecting of media productions. They are the mark of a professional and they garner both loyalty and respect.

Happier clients and a more effective you

Much of what we have talked about in this lesson has been focussed on “what’s in it for YOU”. What are you going to gain from creating recordings? How much money will you make? How will your professional status be improved and what new opportunities will arise?

But we should pause for a moment (a big moment) to consider the positive effect that your recordings are going to have on others and how you might use your recordings to improve the services you offer to your clients. Let me give you one example of how this can happen. 

Some therapists provide each of their clients with a recording as part of their overall patient care package. Some include this recording in the price of their patient’s first consultation, whereas others make it an optional extra that the patient can choose to buy. Your recording might be one to help alleviate depression or anxiety. It might be a general relaxation exercise, or perhaps a hypnosis recording to help people with sleep disorders. Whatever the case, audio recordings can be an extremely beneficial adjunct to your clients’ treatment.

The beauty of recordings such as these is that they extend the contact between you and your client long after they leave your presence. This can really help to keep your clients motivated and will help them to establish new behaviours and thought patterns even in your absence. And because your recording includes your voice, the patient benefits from a much more personal and memorable experience each time they listen to your recording, more so than if they had purchased a recording that was created by someone whom they’ve never met.

Your first steps – let’s get started

OK, we’ve talked quite a bit about why you should create an audio recording and what you and your customers stand to gain by doing so. Now it’s time to take our first step into the how. All recordings begin life as a written script, so that’s exactly where we’ll begin…