The Complete Money Making Strategy That Allowed Me to Fire My Boss!
July 25, 2010 – 12:45 amThis article is guest posted by Paul.
The last year has been pretty far from comfortable. In fact it’s been a year of hard work, determination, failures, successes, hair pulling frustration and confusion. And I think many beginner marketers who are trying to make money online can relate to this.
However, when you come through the other side of the initial baptism of fire, this making money online “thing” all becomes very clear! You develop a system that you know works, and you can replicate that system to scale your income up to heights previously unimaginable.
In this article I’m going to share with you the exact system that I am using today to create a full time income online in the hope that it’ll help you avoid a lot of the pains that I went through to figure it all out!
My Six Step Process to Making Money Online
I’m going to give you a high level overview of how I make money online and then I’m going to break each step down, one by one, to give you a greater insight. Here’s the system:
- Find a hungry market
- Create a web site
- Build a qualified list of names and email addresses
- Build a relationship with the subscribers
- Promote genuinely useful products to the email list list
- Scale the system up by driving traffic to the web site
And that’s all there is to it. Of course when you break it down to a lower level things get a bit more complicated:
Step 1 – Finding a Hungry Market
I have to say that this is arguably the most important part of the whole process. If you can find a hungry market then you don’t really need to be great at selling and people will still purchase from you.
I liken this to coming across a crowd of thirsty people in the middle of the Sahara desert…You could charge $40 for a glass of water and they’d still buy from you.
Ideally you want to find a crowd of people who have a problem with an emotional attachment, have money to spend, think about the problem more than once per day and like to talk about their problem (in online forums for example).
The three main markets in which there are a plethora of profitable niches are “health”, “wealth” and “relationships”. Human nature dictates that consumers will always look for ways to improve their situation in any of those three markets.
Step 2 – Create a Web Site
Many people think that creating the web site is the most important part of the process. Personally, I think it’s the least important. Sure, you can’t live without a web site, but the match between the hungry market and the offer are much more important than a web site with fancy graphics.
That said, you do need to have a web presence. The only web sites I ever build are “squeeze pages” – they are called this because the aim is to “squeeze” the visitor into entering their name and email address into an opt-in form. Which brings me nicely onto the third step…
Step 3 – Build Your List
If you think about it from a logical point of view then we, as marketers, should always be striving to improve the revenue per visitor to our web site. Why? Because free traffic is hard to get and the higher your value per visitor the more chance you have for running profitable paid advertising campaigns.
Building your list is one of the biggest revenue per visitor multipliers. By building a list you are creating an ever increasing pool of targeted prospects who you can reach at any time.
The marketing rule of 7 dictates:
”that a prospect needs to see or hear your marketing message at least seven times before they take action and buy from you. Now the number seven isn’t cast in stone. The truth of the Rule of Seven is you can’t just engage in a marketing activity and then be done. Marketing must be an on-going process in order for it to be successful.”
In making money online terms, this means that the majority of visitors to your web site will not buy straight away. They will likely need to build up some sense of familiarity with the product you are trying to promote first. Building a list allows you to generate that sense of familiarity in a very effective way – in fact, my conversion rate went up over 300% when I first created an email campaign at the back of my web site.
Step 4 – Build The Relationship With Your Subscribers
If a friend of yours recommended a product to you and then a random guy off the street recommended a different product – which one would you purchase? Of course you’d take the advice of your friend…Why? Because you feel you can trust him/her.
It’s a similar concept online. A recent study showed that the biggest conversion killer is actually distrust. Often, consumers believe that they are going to get scammed by being sold a rubbish product and it stops them from making the purchase.
This is why I focus on providing real value to my subscribers for free. Every time I send an email with free material to my subscribers I make sure there’s so much value packed in the content that they’ll be truly thankful and grateful for having received the email.
The “power of free” is massive – the more you give up front, the more you’ll get back in return when you promote a paid product.
Step 5 – Promote Genuinely Useful Products
I’m now at the stage where I can promote genuinely useful products to my list. These products can be ones that I’ve created or other people’s products as an affiliate for a commission.
I always make sure that I do my due diligence on the product before I promote it. The last thing I want to do is alienate the buyers by promoting rubbish.
Taking this a step further – I like to build up what’s called a profit funnel. This is a series of products ranging from low value to high value that I promote at relevant stages in my email campaign to my subscribers. A complete profit funnel can really increase your value per visitor tremendously.
Step 6 – Drive Traffic!
Now the system is in place all I need to do is drive traffic to my web site.
In the first instance I’ll drive traffic for free to see how well my offer converts. I’ll often make tweaks to my email campaign to try and improve conversion. Once I’m happy with the conversion rate I will work out my value per subscriber and per visitor.
With these figures I can then go and find paid advertising sources (such as banner ads and pay per click) and test them over a period of a couple of weeks. Once I’ve found a good source of traffic and an ad, it’s simply a case of scaling up across different sites and networks for increased traffic.
Once you’re at this stage, it’s simply a case of increasing the traffic to grow your income.
This is POSSIBLE!!
When you read this article it seems like a lot of work but actually it isn’t as much as it sounds. You can do the entire process in the space of 4 weeks before moving onto your next hungry market. Remember, this game is all about baby steps – take one step at a time and that way you don’t feel intimidated by anything.
Just a year ago I was completely new to all of this. If I can do it then so can you!
If you’d like to learn step by step how to make money from internet marketing then visit here: http://www.fromzerotowebsite.com and I’ll teach you myself personally for free.
