The information-marketing world suddenly took notice in 2004 when John Reese publicly credited Jeff’s teachings after he launched a new home-study course and sold over $1 million in the first 24 hours.

Since then Jeff has helped other famous marketers such as Yanik Silver, Brian Sacks and Frank Kern, and multi-million dollar launches have become almost common. However, many not-so-famous students of Jeff’s Product Launch Formula have had great success in all kinds of niches from massage therapy to software training to baseball coaching.

The following is an excerpt from an interview I did with Jeff where we talked about how to build an email list, create products and generate profits with your content.

Cathy Stucker: Jeff, tell us a little about how you got started.

Jeff Walker: I started publishing about the stock market. I had very humble, humble, humble beginnings. I think the first time I published was for 19 email addresses. One of them was my second email address and one was my wife’s email address, one was my in-laws and my parents. If you really got down to it I probably had about four or five subscribers for that first email. And that was back in 1996, the summer of ’96.

But I just started publishing. And I published high quality stuff and I didn’t charge for it. I didn’t have advertisements, I just started publishing it. With no money, no income, no revenue at all. But I just had this inkling that if I started publishing then good things would happen.

And sure enough, word started to spread through word of mouth and in fairly short order I had hundreds of subscribers and then thousands of subscribers and then tens of thousands of subscribers. And then from there it’s almost like the revenue started to just show up. It’s almost magical how that happened.

Once I had built up this audience of people, they had been following my stuff, then I started to create products for them. I took that newsletter that had been free and I added stuff to it and I made it a paid newsletter. Then I published paid newsletters about different aspects of the market.

I think I published, I am going to guess, about four or five different paid publications, paid newsletters. And these were all email based newsletters so my cost was like virtually nothing. And then I also started to create home study courses. I created membership areas. I started to put ads in my free newsletters. And often the newsletters would track people back to the website. And that would drive more advertising on the website and all of a sudden it became a nice little business.

Cathy Stucker: And I think that’s important too that all these different things that you do kind of fit together and generate different revenue streams. It’s not doing one thing and expecting that one thing to provide all of the income.

Jeff Walker: Well, you know, I am a big believer in growing a group of fans. I think, we are talking about content, and there’s lots and lots of ways you can use content. It’s unbelievable, I am a huge fan of what I call information marketing. And that’s using information to market. It’s not necessarily just selling information. There’s so many ways you can use it, but one of the things that I’ve always focused on is growing a list. If you do it right, it becomes a list of fans, hopefully a list of raving fans.

I’ve now achieved unbelievable success. When I first got that product in 1994, one of the things that you need to do is sit down and write down all your goals, like really big wild dreams. I actually have that still sitting around. I look at that list. Those goals that seemed unattainable to me then, are humble to me now. I had this number, $100,000. To me, the thought of making $100,000 a year was — people couldn’t possibly make more money than that. That was as big as I could think. Last October, I made $100,000 in one hour. I don’t mean to brag here.

Cathy Stucker: No. I think it’s important that people understand what the possibilities are. There is a tendency, sometimes, to think very small. I know my dreams keep getting bigger the more I achieve. I want to do more because I want to reach more people. I want to have more personal success. I want to do more. Your dreams do get bigger.

Jeff Walker: Basically, if you start publishing and you publish good content, this is how I’ve always driven traffic to my website. I’ve put good content on my website. Then, all of a sudden, I get people passing it around. I get word of mouth. I would put together a really good study about the stock market. I would put up my website. Then I would send an email to my list telling people about that.

Those people, they would be like my army. They would go out and they would tell all their friends. They would post about it on bulletin boards. Then all of a sudden I’d have a ton of new traffic coming in. I’d add 1,000 new subscribers to my newsletter in just a couple days.

Then, the next time I did that, I just had that much bigger list. I put out another study, and boom! All of a sudden, I’d get more traffic to the website, more subscribers. I’m just building this list. That list got up to 80,000 people at one point in pretty much every country in the world.

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The complete, one-hour interview with Jeff Walker is one of twelve expert interviews that are part of the Cash Content Formula course. Learn more, and get a free one-hour audio about making money with your content, at http://www.CashContentFormula.com/.

My interview of Jeff is also available at ExpertTeleseminars.com, on CD or as a downloadable PDF transcript.

I have been giving this a lot of thought lately. My conclusion: Investing time in tasks that create long-term value is the way to go.

That might seem obvious to you, but is that how you operate? Or do you spend your time on “right now” tasks–going from doing repetitive jobs, such as filling orders and paying bills, to putting out “fires”? When you do productive work, is a large portion of it work for which you will only be paid once? If so, you need to make some changes.

Someone once told me she could not spend 15 minutes setting up a page on her web site with affiliate links because she was so busy with her work. Well, that single page probably wouldn’t make her rich, but it might bring her $20, $50, $100 or more (possibly much more) every month.

Let’s say she bills $100 an hour. Doing her regular work and billing for15 minutes earns her $25. If putting up the affiliate page brings in $500 or $1000 (or more) a year, every year, what is the better use of that 15 minutes? I’m not a math whiz, but I can figure that one out.

Commit to spending at least a portion of each work day creating long-term value. That means doing something that can help you prosper for years to come. Here are just a few ideas.

Create content for your web site, and monetize it with ads (such as Google AdSense) or affiliate links.

Develop material you can present again and again. There are workshops I have been giving for 14 years. I long ago amortized the time I spent in development. My preparation time is now near zero, and my only time involvement is the actual presenting time.

Better yet, turn that workshop into a product, such as an audio or video recording and eliminate the presenting time, too.

Create other products, such as books, ebooks, audio programs and more. Sell them yourself and recruit affiliates to sell for you. Set up automated downloads for digital products, and get an assistant to ship physical products for you, or hire a service such as http://www.SpeakerFulfillmentServices.com/.

The best part? Each of these will make money for you for a long time to come.

Want more great ideas on how you can generate streams of passive income?