Selling what you make online is more complex and frustrating than it should be.

Platforms like iTunes and Kindle take a huge cut of your profits, well-known payment processors freeze funds with no explanation, and most shopping cart software looks like it was built in the 90′s.

Not to mention that these solutions are hard to use, take your customers off your site, and make it nearly impossible to reach an actual human being for support.

And even some of the best payment processing companies (such as Stripe, who we use for Fizzle.co) can still be complicated to implement without a developer.

Enter Gumroad. They have created one of the simplest and best designed ways for individuals to get paid for what they make online.

The last time I was up in San Francisco I had the pleasure of sitting down and talking with Ryan Delk, the business development lead at Gumroad, about what Gumroad can do, how it works, and how simple it is to use.

(If you can’t see the video above, click here to watch it.)

Give it a try

For you to see just how easy it is for someone to buy something from you, we’ve set up a quick example using the business planning template that is available as a part of our Traffic Toolbox.

In this example I’m using the “pay what you want feature” by adding a “+” after the zero, so your customer could download it for free OR pay you if they felt like it. Pretty cool, huh?

Give it a try, just click on this button:

Ultimate Business Plan Template for Bloggers

Now try using Gumroad to offer something of your own for sale »

If you have any other questions about Gumroad, feel free to ask them below. They’re great people and we love what they are doing for infopreneurs and solo brands online. We’re not affiliated with Gumroad, we just love the software, and the team behind it.

This post is by Richard Boehmcke, the winner of our mentorship contest earlier this year.

There’s a great line from an episode of Seinfeld when George and Jerry are pitching their “show about nothing” to NBC’s top executive Russell. After a bit of back and forth Russell tries desperately to understand what the show is about.

The exchange goes like this:

Russell: Well, why am I watching it?

George: Because it’s on TV!

Russell: (threateningly) Not yet.

As a profession, I produce videos for brands. That means I find myself watching tons of videos. All different kinds.

I’ll search for keywords and find myself in a vortex of videos, some interesting, some extremely obscure.

And no matter how many videos I watch or what kind they are, I find myself asking the same question over and over again:

Why am I watching this?

Every single person on the internet is their own media network now. We get to publish whatever we want without a worry about being cancelled or canned by a network executive.

Unfortunately, many people take that as permission to pump out loads of dull, low quality content.

That’s fine. That’s their right. Nobody said everything on the internet needs to be beautiful, magical and full of meaning.

And that gives you an opportunity. Compared to the rest of the monotony online you can stand out with relative ease using one simple trick.

If you make some sort of a living online, if you seek to build an audience, if you want to share your story with others, all you have to do is ask yourself:

Why am I watching this?

Watch your own video, read your own script, read your own blog post, and ask: Why am I doing this?

If you can’t give a good reason, chances are nobody will be able to either.

It’s not about the production quality or the lighting or the camera or the crew… it’s about how well you know what matters and what doesn’t about your communication.

Think about this: what’s the worst that can happen? What’s the worst thing that can happen when you launch your video or blog post or product or whatever?

It’s not that they’ll make fun of you. It’s not that they’ll despise you or lose respect in you. In order for those to happen they need to notice you.

The worst thing that can happen is that it’s ignored. Nobody notices.

The best way you can avoid that is to ask yourself some form of this question:

• Why am I doing this?
• What will people get out of this?
• What do I want people to take away from this?
• What am I really trying to say?

One trick here is to distance yourself from your work. You need to be able to form intelligent opinions about it.

Friends, family and mastermind groups can give honest feedback and help you (continually) create awesome content.

They’re like Roman Litter bearers walking behind you whispering in your ear “Thou art mortal, thou art mortal.”

Not to say you should double think every single thing you create, but have a healthy awareness of what is working and what is not. The answer to “why?” should always be a good one.

If you paused for three seconds before creating, posting, or otherwise uploading something, your communication would connect harder and hit the target more often. Which is what you were looking for in the first place.

Video is subject to probably more and possibly harsher critique than any other form of content on the internet because it’s so easy to consume and requires minimal thought to tear down. There is so much we can find fault with from the person on camera, to the lighting, sound, subject matter, etc.

As far as critical fodder goes, video is the ripest, lowest hanging fruit.

And while this post isn’t about lighting or iPhone videography or editing tricks, none of that is as important as this one single tip:

Know where you want to go before you start walking.

If you don’t know what you’re going to say, you are not going to find it when you hit the record button.

Think of your viewer asking: why am I watching this?

People rarely enjoy watching others figure out what it is they want to say. It’s like teaching kindergarten. You ask your class what one plus one is and some kid in the back starts telling you about his collection of blue socks.

If you want to connect with your readers and watchers, if you want your communication to connect and resonate, begin with the end in mind.

Here’s a little secret: you know all those television shows you love so much? They didn’t start out so great. Pilots for shows are typically boring or weird or disconnected and generally not good.

So how do they end up getting made? Because a good pilot doesn’t show perfection… it shows promise.

You may not be able to make content at the level you want right now, but you can show your audience promise. People are hungry to connect and sensitive to authenticity. Start by asking: why would I watch this?

Here’s a question for you: what current project are you working on and how can you be more sensitive to your audience’s why? Tell us in the comments and I’ll respond.

Richard Boehmcke is a writer, director, and film maker. His company, Vibrant Motion, produces videos for businesses and brands. You can follow him on Twitter at @Boehmcke.

What’s your most burning question about building an online business?

What would you ask me and the Think Traffic team if you had our undivided attention for a few minutes?

It can be about tech, marketing, networking, finance, something behind-the-scenes, something “taboo,” or whatever you’re dying to know the answer to.

Take a minute to think about it. Really.

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Do you have a question in mind now?

Great, because we could use your help.

We’re starting something new, and your question could play a big part.

Can you do us a favor today? While your question is fresh, share it with us now.

Ask your question in one of two ways:

• Leave us a brief voicemail (the preferred method) »
• Or, write your question in here »

What’s your biggest question about building an online business right now?

We’ll use your question for our new project. More details about this not-so-secret new project will be coming soon. (hint: click on one of the links above to learn a little more)

Thanks so much for your help!

-Corbett

You know the rush. A guest post you’ve written goes live on a huge site, you finally launch the product you’ve been working on for months, or an older article of yours gets Gizmodo’d.

You watch your traffic spike and you can’t peel yourself away from the analytics for the whole day.

“Look at all those visitors!” you yell to your significant other as they feign interest.

But what really matters during these big days?

What metrics and stats should you actually be tracking and which don’t mean jack squat? (Hint: Traffic doesn’t matter as much as you may think.)

In this post we’ll make sure you know the difference between vanity and actionable metrics, which ones you should track, which stats really matter to the bottom line of your business, and share a few of our most important metrics.

Vanity vs. Actionable: What’s the difference?

Let me start by quickly defining the difference between vanity and actionable metrics in my own words.

Vanity metrics: Numbers or stats that look good on paper, but don’t really mean anything important.

Vanity metrics are dangerous.”

~ Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup

If you get caught up tracking things that don’t really matter you’ll look back after a few years and see how much energy you wasted maximizing stats that don’t matter.

Actionable metrics: Stats that tie to specific and repeatable tasks you can improve and to the goals of your business.

If a metric isn’t actionable and you can’t do anything to make it better then why are you tracking it?

Now, this next sentence may go against a lot of advice you’ve heard around the blogosphere, but hear me out.

The number of your visitors, subscribers, and followers are often meaningless.

They aren’t completely meaningless, but they aren’t what you should be spending the majority of your time or energy on.

Worried that you don’t have as many Twitter followers as the next person? Don’t be. Heck, you can become Internet famous for $68 without ever existing.

This is one of the reasons why we quit posting our monthly traffic reports here.

By focusing our time and energy on vanity metrics and then sharing them with you we were doing the exact opposite of what we are trying to do here. Instead of helping you focus on the strategies and actions you can take to build a successful and honest online business we were distracting you with numbers, charts, and graphs that were educational, but weren’t even the actionable metrics that we were tracking day to day.

Don’t get caught up playing the endless and fruitless game of tracking vanity metrics.

Don’t get caught up playing the endless and fruitless game of tracking vanity metrics.”

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Goals Before Metrics

Before you figure out which metrics you should be tracking, you need to determine what the goals of your site and business are.

Tracking metrics that aren’t aligned with your goals is a fastlane to Failureville.

As we’ve mentioned before, our goals at Think Traffic are:

1. Earn enough income to support everyone who works for the business comfortably (we have specific numbers behind this, and you should too).
2. Have fun and do meaningful work.
3. Satisfy our customers and help them accomplish results using our solutions.

Once we knew what our main goals as a company were, then (and only then) we could determine which metrics we should track.

(Read this post to see why these are our three goals and which metrics we track for the each of them.)

Which Metrics Matter for a Business or Blog

As you mature as an entrepreneur you start to see metrics you used to focus on don’t matter nearly as much as you used to care about them.

Focusing on the wrong metrics for too long is dangerous. It is one of the biggest reasons people fall into the blogging trap.

Here are some examples of the different types of metrics that typically matter to you as you progress through each stage of entrepreneurial maturity.

• Infant: traffic, followers, subscribers, reviews, social media shares
• Adolescent: # of sales, revenue, conversion rate, time on site, customer satifaction
• Mature: profit, retention length, churn rate, revenue per customer, costs of good sold, impact

What metrics you should be tracking in your business really depend on your goals, but here is an example of some actionable metrics that we track for Fizzle:

• Current Active Members
• Monthly Active Revenue
• New Members (Past 30 days)
• Members Lost (Past 30 days)
• Monthly Churn
• Retention Rate
• What Link Members Signed Up From

There are other things we track in Fizzle too, but those are the main metrics we keep an eye on day to day using Geckoboard.

What metrics are you tracking right now that you need to stop? Which metrics aren’t you tracking that you should start to? Let us know in the comments below this post.

Further Reading: Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics by Eric Ries on the 4HWW Blog

We’ve been busy over at Fizzle in the past couple of months and I wanted to share some exciting news with you.

If you haven’t heard about Fizzle yet, we call it “Honest Online Business Training.” We think it’s the best training library and community for online business builders anywhere.

And now, it’s available at a new simplified price.

Announcing New Fizzle Pricing

We used to have two pricing tiers for Fizzle. After lots of planning, talking with Fizzlers and coding behind the scenes, we’ve decided to unify all Fizzlers into one (discounted) pricing family.

The days of wondering if you should choose “Standard” or “Deluxe” are over. There is now just one, unified membership level within Fizzle.

This single membership level includes access to all Fizzle resources: the full Fizzle Training Library, Founder’s Stories, Office Hours (both live and recordings), Fizzle Perks & Discounts The Fizzle Community and support from Team Fizzle.

Fizzle membership is now available at a single rate of $35 per month (or $315 per year). This is down from a top rate of $49 per month under our previous structure.

We’re making this change for one simple reason: we believe it’s the “Fizzle” thing to do.

Dividing Fizzlers according to membership levels hasn’t felt right for this community since we launched. Feedback from Fizzlers has confirmed this. We want all Fizzlers to be treated the same, regardless of how much they’re paying.

We launched Fizzle with two pricing tiers because it’s the industry standard setup, and because we vaguely believed it might help us earn more revenue overall.

Now we’re changing things, not because of any testing we’ve done (we have no idea what this change will do to revenue), but because it fits the Fizzle brand best.

Treating our members right is more important than maximizing profit.

This is Honest Online Biz Training™, after all.

A Fizzle member is a Fizzle member. No more distinctions.

Now let me show you the other exciting things we’ve been up to at Fizzle.

A “Must Watch” New Video: Al-U-Mini-Um

(if you don’t see the video above, view it on YouTube)

Can we ask you a favor? If you have a few minutes, we’d love your feedback on our latest Fizzle video above.

Give the video a quick watch, then give us some feedback in the comments on this post. Tell us if you liked the video, and what you think of Fizzle after watching it.

Oh, and there is some al-u-mini-um involved.

New Courses from Familiar Names

Fizzle now contains 176 lessons in 24 courses from some very special instructors including Pat Flynn, Scott Dinsmore, Leo Babauta and the Fizzle Team (Corbett Barr, Chase Reeves and Caleb Wojcik).

Here’s a handful of new courses we’ve released in the past few months:

• Affiliate Marketing the Smart Way (with Pat Flynn) – Pat’s Smart Passive Income blog earns up to $50,000 per month from affiliate marketing, and this exclusive Fizzle course will show you how to earn affiliate revenue with your own site using Pat’s proven strategies.
• Connect with Anyone Fizzle Edition (with Scott Dinsmore) – Somehow we convinced Scott Dinsmore of Live Your Legend to develop a special version of his sold out “How to Connect With Anyone” course exclusively for Fizzle. Scott’s course sells separately for $397 (or more), but as a Fizzler you get access to our special version included with your membership.
• Build Your Email List: The First 10k Subscribers and Beyond (with Corbett Barr) – In this step-by-step course, you’ll learn exactly how to set up your email list, how to grow your list quickly, what to email your list, and lots of advanced techniques. This course contains 22 lessons, 8 pages of workbook, and nearly 3 hours of video on everything you need to grow an email list to 10k subscribers or beyond.
• Productivity Essentials (with Chase Reeves) – This all-new course covers productivity essentials to help you get more done every day. Did you know entrepreneurs have two operating modes, and that we need to tap into each to be effective?

Plus, we have new Founders Stories interviews with Jason Glaspey of Paleo Plan, Chuck Longanecker of Digital Telepathy, and Chris Johnson of Simplifilm.

These are intimate in-person interviews where we dig in and find out exactly how some of the most interesting and successful people online built their businesses.

Perks and more!

We have negotiated exclusive discounts for Fizzlers on some of the most useful tools for building online businesses.

As a Fizzle member, you can get savings of up to 50% on services including Optimizely, Geckoboard, SquareSpace, Page.ly, BlueHost, WooThemes, TextExpander, BackupBuddy and more.

These are just some of the new things we’ve been building inside Fizzle. We also have monthly challenges, live office hours, a vital community (with nearly 20,000 forum posts) and way more than we can list here.

Plus, don’t forget about the inside jokes. Building a business should be fun, and we try to make Fizzle that kind of place.

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We’ve been busy inside Fizzle, and we hope you’ll check it out.

Don’t forget, as a Think Traffic reader, you’ll get 50% off your first month when you sign up through the links on this page.

If you watched the video above, we’d love your feedback. Tell us what you think below.

And if you’re a Fizzler already, thanks for making the community so helpful and fun. Give us a shout-out below if you’ve gotten something useful from Fizzle lately.