Blackbelt In Making Money Online Pt.2

Last week I explained the problem most rookie Internet marketers have that keeps them from making any money online. Then I gave you a plan for getting out of that viscous cycle. I also promised you that I’d show you what the next levels look like.

For example if we compared Internet marketing or making money online to the martial arts, then white and yellow belts are about research and creation. Then green belt through red belt would be about driving traffic and analytics.

Before I get into the specifics of what I think are the green and red belt levels I’ve got some personal things I want to talk to you about. I’ll keep them quick and get right back to the lesson at hand.

Quick Personal Message

1.) Russell Brunson is coming out with a new product called “Do You Suck At Making Money.” Most of you know that I’m kinda like a protege from Russell. I interned with him for 30 days and that’s pretty much what launched me into what I am today (his teachings WORK VERY WELL!).

I will have, hands down, the best bonus possible for Russell’s new product. There’s really no one that could compete with my bonus since I live down the street from the man himself. If you’ve liked this series of articles or you’re a newbie marketer – You’re going to love Russell’s new product.

2.) Later this week I will be releasing a FREE DVD called the “30MinuteTrafficMethod.” I highly advise you get one of the 500 copies that will be available.

No matter what you are trying to do, whether it be affiliate marketing, network marketing, selling your own product, CPA offers, or even if you are an offline business… YOU NEED TRAFFIC. The Internet is not a “build it and they will come” type resource.

The method I am teaching on this DVD has lead to me having over 10,000 subscribers on multiple lists, has lead to over $250,000 in sales, and lets me make more money on demand. Whenever I create a new website this traffic method is my first resort – I could live entirely on this one method of traffic and never need anything else. DON’T MISS OUT ON THIS DVD.

Now Back To The Blog Post…

In the last blog post I told you how to find a profitable market and how to create a hot offer for that market. Today, I’m talking about how to drive traffic to your offer and then how to maximize the value of that traffic (aka turn that traffic into green stuff you can fill your bank account with)

Driving Traffic:

I have 5 favorite ways that I like to drive traffic. I don’t think anyone should rely on just one method because if that channel ever goes down then you’re all of a sudden back at square one.

Also, these are not the only ways to drive traffic. There are literally thousands of ways to get people to come to your website. I can’t cover all thousand neither can I physically apply all thousand. So I stick with what works well for me and what I can manage.

As an aside: You should NEVER drive traffic to something where you can’t capture that traffic. Meaning getting that traffic to subscribe to your email list, RSS feed, or fill out a lead gen. form. IF you’re not doing this then you are wasting 50% of the value of your traffic right from the start. When you capture the traffic you now OWN THE TRAFFIC and can send it wherever you want later.

My biggest source of traffic is affiliates. When you have affiliates (people that earn a commission for helping you make more sales) they’ll do your marketing for you. They’ll build blogs, pay for Adwords, write articles, do SEO, and some even have huge email lists and can tell all their email subscribers about you.

Like most things in life the most rewarding things come with a higher price to acquire. Affiliate traffic means you have to build relationships and actively recruit new people to become your affiliate.

How can you do this? It’s not rocket science… You just have to use the things you were taught in Kindgarten about making friends. Find people that share a like mind with you or that are targetting the same people as you. Be friendly with them first, offer them value, and then in return they’ll do the same for you.

Where most everyone goes wrong with this is they’re asking instead of giving. Here’s how most people go about trying to get an affiliate or industry leader to promote them.

“Hi John Doe,

I’ve just created this killer product and if
you promote it for me you’ll make a bunch
of money.

The product is already created and there are
thousands that will buy this. All you have to
do is promote it and you’ll make soooo much
money.”

I get at least 3-5 of these emails per week and usually they are deleted without a response. I know guys like Russell Brunson, Frank Kern, and Mike Filsaime get 10x more of those then I do. Still they just get deleted.

The reason that approach doesn’t work is because you’re jumping into the friendship asking for something first instead of giving. Who would you want to be friends with more? Someone asking you for something valuable or someone giving you something valuable.

The first JV I ever got was with a letter like this…

“Hey Joe Schmoe,

I know your subscribers like such and such
and I’m doing something cool on that topic
that’s working very well for me.

I wrote up short report about what I’m doing
and I think your subscribers will love it. You
can give it to them for free.

At the bottom there is room for me to put an
affiliate link to my bigger report that sells for
such and such. So I could brand it with a link
for you and you can make money giving it away.

Or you could just give it away as is… Your call,
I just wanted to help you and your subscribers.”

That email made me a couple thousand dollars because I was giving first instead of asking. The person I sent it to saw the value, liked my approach, and decided to use an affiliate link instead of just giving it away.

Affiliates, especially BIG affiliates, care about two main things. 1.) How can you help them save time and 2.) How can you help them improve their image to their audience. The bigger the affiliate the less they care about something making them a lot of money – They already know how to make a lot of money.

So before you go to recruit an affiliate first think about what they would want out of the deal. Give that to them first and then hope that they’ll return the favor for you. The law of reciprocity is very powerful and ALMOST ALWAYS WORKS.

Ok so that’s my biggest and best source of traffic. It really only works if you are the person with the product, service, or offer though. It won’t really work if you are just promoting someone else’s offer unless you get really creative.

Up next on the list of traffic sources are my two MOST RELIABLE sources of traffic. These are two sources of traffic that I know I can always get and can always count on to work. And they are…

…Pay Per Click & SEO!

And I put PPC first because PPC is the fastest. Even with my most ninja methods of doing SEO it still takes at least a couple hours if not a couple days. SEO for really high traffic keywords can even take weeks to months. Doesn’t mean it’s not worth it… Just means that it’s not as fast.

PPC I can setup a campaign in less then an hour, go out to lunch, and by the time I come back I can have traffic coming to my site.

For the super rookie: PPC is where you set bid prices on how much you are willing to pay per click on certain keywords. Then when someone searches that keyword on that PPC network your advertisement will display and if the browser clicks your ad it will cost you the price you set in the beginning.

For example: Let’s say you were selling a tomato growing book. So you decided to join up with Google’s PPC network which is called “AdWords.” Then you set up your campaign to show your ad everytime someone types in Tomato Growing and you were willing to spend $0.20 per click.

Then whenever anyone searches for Tomato Growing your ad will display and if they click it to go to your website – You’ll get $0.20 deducted from your account.

I can hear what most of you are saying, “But PPC costs money.” Yes, but as long as it costs you less then you are making then it’s profitable. For example lets say you start a PPC campaign using the most popular program, Google Adwords.

You set your budget to $10 per day and that brings you one sale per day. Now let’s pretend that sale is worth $27 to you. That means you spent $10 to make $27 which is $17 profit. If that kind of deal doesn’t interet you then you are in the WRONG place.

Even if it takes you 2 days at $10/day budget… That’s still $7 profit.

What happens if it’s taking you 3 days or 5 days at $10/per day to make a sale? Then you either need to raise your price or increase how many sales you are making from that amount of traffic (which we’ll be addressing later in this blog post).

Everything you could ever need to know about using Google Adwords is available for free in the Google Adwords Learning Center. Don’t tell the Adwords guru’s that I told you that though!!! haha

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization works much the same way except instead of paying to be visible for a certain keyword. You work your way up the ladder meaning “optimizing” your website so that it ranks higher until you are the #1 website for that keyword phrase.

I have a full report on SEO available for just $1.00 here. You’ll learn everything you need to know for driving traffic with SEO in that report. Don’t confuse it’s low price for low quality. It has a low price because it’s the entry point to my sales funnel. I know that if you buy something from me for $1.00 and you love it then chances are you’ll buy more stuff from me at higher prices.

Last but certainly not least comes my three lesser traffic sources. Which are forum marketing, ezine advertising, and banner advertising.

Just because I call them my “lesser” traffic sources doesn’t mean they are less effective. Just that I do them less.

Forum marketing involves you becoming a member of online forums in your niche then being involved in that online community. Most forums allow you to have a “signature box” which is a little box you can put a link back to your website in that is automatically posted at the end of every message you post.

Here’s a video that show syou how to find these online forums for just about any niche. Even the cockaroach niche! LoL (one of my subscribers mentioned it to me)

eZine Advertising involves you sending out advertisements in other peoples ezines. An ezine is like a magazine just only online. Some of them can be as big as having millions of subscribers and some as small as a couple hundred.

The prices range anywhere from $50 – $500 and ad sizes range from a small 6 line ad to a full email. Here’s a quick video I made a couple years ago about eZine advertising.

Click Here To Join The Directory Of Ezines

Finally, banner advertising involves you placing a graphic on someone elses site that entices the visitors of that site to click the graphic which sends them back to your site.

You’ll see that I’m using banner advertising at the top right of this page. I can either charge people to put a banner their or I can put my own banner there to an affiliate product (which is what I’m doing)

Huge sites like Yahoo and Myspace.com can cost you hundreds to thousands of dollars per month for a banner on their sites. TechCunch.com charges $10,000 per month with a contract of 5 months (last time I checked).

Lots of people think banner advertising doesn’t work anymore because it sort of got put on the backburner after PPC came out. However, it’s never stopped working and is still very effective. There are tons of sites run by normal people that get a slew of visitors and they’d freak out if you offered them money to put a banner on their site. They have no clue that their website could be earning them money.

Easiest way to find banner spots is to Google your main keyword and look at the top 10 sites that show up. Do they have Adsense ads? If they do then then are trying to make money from that website and would almost always let you have a banner for such and such dollars per month. Sometimes as little as $30 per month.

Think about that… Their site is at the top of Google… You can put your ad on their site… Doesn’t that kind of put you at the top of Google also???

If you put all of these traffic generation strategies into action, driving the traffic back to the offer you made fromyour yellowbelt stage. You are now in what I believe to be the greenbelt stage of making money online.

The red belt stage is where we setup tracking and testing programs to make sure our traffic strategies are profitable. If you are not tracking your traffic then you are blind. You can’t possibly know whats working and whats making you money if you don’t track it.

Web Analytics:

To be honest this blog post is getting really long and my fingers are aching. So if you don’t mind I’m just going to pull a video out from my $1,000 coaching program that will teach you what you need to know about setting up tracking and testing programs.

The first video is just to teach you what is what. Like why you need to track and what you should use. As well as why you need to test and what you should use.

The second video is from my coaching course and teaches you step-by-step on how to install tracking and testing programs onto your sites. I hope you enjoy and forgive me for not typin out the rest of this blog post. Plus, I’m sure you’ll like the step by step videos more then my writing anyhow.

Just like last week please don’t just read this post… DO THIS POST! I’ve done my best to include everything a beginner needs to know in the last two blog posts. As always I’m here for you with any questions or comment you have. Comments and compliments go down below. For complaints hold down the ALT button and press f + x.

Tagged as: banner advertising, ezine advertising, forum marketing, google analytics, joint ventures, recruiting affiliates, seo, split testing, testing, tracking