3 Principles of Helping Others and Building an Online Business

Two days ago I launched my new book “A Mindful Guide to Online Living” and I am still completely blown away by the amount of support I received from both the regular readers of this blog and even completely new people. It is selling like hot cakes, which is of course a nice thing.

But – on a higher or deeper level – the success of this book shows me that the time is actually ripe for the ideas I am presenting and that it resonates with people from all over the world, regardless of culture or creed! This is what surprises me even more than the sales!

So, first of all, let me say thank you to all of the people who bought the book, sent me emails, wrote comments, messages and shared their excitement. (If you haven’t yet gotten your hands on a copy yet, the “early bird” discount is still running, so you can get it for amost half the regular price!)

Having said that… let me give something back to you today by talking about how to actually be more helpful to others and by doing this create circles of connection and trust that will eventually lift you out of your day job.

One of the principles I presented in “A Mindful Guide to Online Living” is that:

1. If you aren’t successful in making an “online living”, chances are that you aren’t helping anyone. Others decide what is helpful, not you!

So, how can we actually know whether what we do is helpful to others or not? There is just one way: We have to stop talking and actually start doing something!

Take my good friend and colleague Jeremiah Bourque as an example: He is leading a crowd of more than 17.000 people over at Facebook, teaching them about Idioms and answering all of their questions! He is doing this every day and free of charge!

The responses to what he does are of course highly positive and 99,9 % support and gratefulness! As a native English speaker he takes Idioms and idiomatic phrases (of which there are a lot in English) and drills them down to the essentials so that even non-native speakers (like me, for example) can gain a a deeper understanding through his very clear-cut explanations of the subject matter.

From the success and huge response to this Idioms project we can see another principle:

2. You have to be willing to do things for free!

This is not to say that being compensated for your efforts and time is bad, and that everything on the planet should be free. If you want to make a living online you’ll eventually have to think about premium services or products. But if you don’t offer anything for free, chances are that you are never even going to find out if what you do is really helpful or or you just think it is.

If, on the other hand, you do a great job and people tell you so, you have already taken a big step towards the most important and difficult principle:

3. Building an Audience

This is the key to your online success. With it, everything stands and falls. Those are the people who will tell you, if what you do is helpful or not! They will cheer you on when it’s going great and will be reason to continue when you feel stuck in a rut. In short: They will bring out the best in you and inspire you to give even more!

If there’s no audience, you aren’t doing anything except living in your head!

So, how to get started?

There are many ways to do this but the most effective way to create an audience is to offer free products and services (see principle two)

Let me give you a practical example for this: Jeremiah, our English and Japanese tutor here at Learn Out Live about whose Idioms project I talked about above, had a great idea:

After teaching people about English idioms over weeks and weeks, he had accumulated quite a number of very concise explanations which he was able to refine even more through feedback, so he decided to make an audiobook.

We put our heads together, came up with a nice cover, intro and outro music and released three volumes of English Idioms for free onto the Learn Out Live Shop. Yes, you heard right: Three audiobooks, completely free!

It was of course a huge success, hundreds of people downloaded the first audiobook within the first few minutes after the release!

We started building on that and asked ourselves how to be even more helpful while keeping our products 100 % free. So with the release of audiobook number two we started asking people to subscribe to free updates from our blog in order to get the download.

At first it seemed a bit awkward and I thought: “Why to ‘force’ people to subscribe to our blog?” But I was proven wrong in my scepticism. People continued to be crazed about the audiobooks and download counts kept skyrocketing because when they signed up, they now got an email which contained already two free audiobooks directly to their inbox.

One week later, we added English Idioms Volume Three, so they got three free audiobooks. What followed about a month from then was Jeremiah’s “A Taste of TOEFL” ebook, so we added that to the list of downloads, but the trend continues with our Hebrew teacher Eti Shani today also releasing her Hebrew Coloring Book into the pool of free downloads,

In other words, what you get if you sign up for our blog right now is the following

Every few days new articles about
- how to learn languages better
- observations about how our world is changing
- entertaining stories and practical suggestions to build your own online business
- and much much more…
Complete access to an ever-growing pool of high quality free downloads like
- Audiobooks
- Ebooks
- etc.

At Learn Out Live we work together as a team, putting all of our skills together in order to help you best!

We are of course also teaching a wide range of students in German, Japanese and other language lessons and will continue to do so as a premium service in order to support our daily lives as teachers and to be able to give you even more.

So, what matters for us, first of all – is to educate and to help others with clear explanations, straightforward communication and practical suggestions.

Whether this is through free products or premium services, one thing is clear: Free stuff rocks. Everybody loves it. And it’s one of the best ways to establish your authority on any given field or subject matter!

Thank you very much for reading.

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