Sonia St James—the Infopreneur

Sonia St. James talks about infopreneuring the real estate market and self-publishing a book.

You run a web site called “MyCareerinRealEstate.com” offering information products to real estate agents and those who want to become real estate agents. How is that going?
We have a website with products that tells prospective real estate agents how much it will cost to enter the business. We recently launched two products for the real estate agents themselves. We bought a 1.3M email database for all the real estate agents in the US. There were only 860K emails that weren’t duplicates. We tried to do the emails ourselves and upgraded to Roadrunner business class. There was not one bit of difference between that and Roadrunner’s residential service. I wouldn’t recommend business class it if you plan to use it from a residential location. The line to the residential location doesn’t allow for a higher speed, I think. We ran into another challenge with the emailing. One of the problems is that only 168K addresses went through. For some reason the servers were rejecting them saying the server won’t accept it.

We recently dropped the price of our products. They were originally at the base price of $75 but we dropped it to $19. The general public stuff is a lot harder to sell than a niche product. The challenge is no one knows we’re there.

Did you ever buy any Google Ads?

We plan to do that.

What other tools do you use?

There’s software for creating a web-site for generating a community site similar to MySpace. It’s called Jinity. It’s great. There’s also a website called WorldfreeArticles that creates content for your website.

You recently self-published a book. How did you do that?

I used a self-publishing company. It is the largest publisher in this area and is Lulu. A 6x9 inch physical book costs $6.53 to produce. They will produce a downloadable version at no cost, and you can set your price to sell. They handle the shipping and much of the marketing depending on how you choose to work with them. There are different binding choices and the price I quoted you is a perfect binding, black and white, and they provide the ISBN number. Lulu is the best one out there. It’s to your benefit to pay the extra dollars (less than $100) for their distribution package and for them to do the marketing. I didn’t do that on my first book. They place it on Amazon and other key lists. The truth of it is that you don’t make money publishing a book. The book helps you leverage yourself and other projects.

Best regards,
Hall T.