Insider Secrets To Internet Business Success

In a recent article I mentioned why promoting affiliate products using pay-per-click (PPC) search engines was a bad idea. Though some affiliates have done quite well (about a measly 2% of them), the fact that you have no or very little control over so many variables can quickly cause you to lose money. However, there are strategies for promoting affiliate products without using PPC.

One way to make money using affiliate products is to show an offer to a current customer on the back end. Let’s just say you have a product in the weight loss industry, maybe a fitness DVD. A customer purchases your DVD but you realize your customers could also benefit from a daily vitamin or some other supplement. Since it may take quite a bit more time to start selling your own supplement, it would make sense to promote an existing product that already has a brand name and has a working system in place. You can very easily find affiliate products to promote that your market could benefit from.

Sell YOUR product in the front end, sell an affiliate product or products in the back end.

Doing business that way you decrease a lot of risk. The fact is that if you did sell an affiliate product in the front end, it’s possible the owner of the product could stop selling the product, their sales page could change (the price, a poor headline, etc.) which could negatively affect their conversion rate, There’s also the risk of not getting a paycheck or getting one for an entire month later. The risks of selling an affiliate product in the front end are almost endless. So why do it?

There is a secret to running a successful internet business. One secret that if everyone did, they would probably have a much higher success rate. What is this secret? The secret is to stay on a single track and not get distracted. What? That’s it? Before you pout and stomp your feet like a 3 year old because you’ve read similar before, hear me out.

The fastest way to get from where you are right now, to where you want to be is a straight line. That line resembles time. At the left end, imagine a big dot. At the right end, imagine another big dot. There will also be be several smaller dots in between. These are steps, tasks, accomplishments, milestones, or whatever else you want to call them. Each will take different amounts of time which determines the amount of spacing between them. If you’re an insistent one and want to get where you want to go, your best bet is to stay on this line.

Though it may seem simple, it isn’t. Everyone has distractions and obstacles whether it be an illness, injury, computer malfunction, natural disaster, or something else. What does that look like when we apply one of those to the line? Imagine looking at the middle of the line I described earlier. Now imagine a peak there. That’s time moving while it’s not being used efficiently. Of course, as I said it can’t always be controlled. If your desired goal only takes five minutes, then the line is more likely to stay flat.

The last sentence brings up another fact. If you split up your goal up into many smaller chunks, the line is more likely to stay flat. It is often the case that the longer someone spends on a task, the more likely someone is to get distracted, bored, or interrupted. Now apply this to yourself. You’ve probably been reading this thinking about tasks in your own life or business. Do a self diagnostic and figure out what tasks aren’t progressing forward and why. Consider writing down a procedure for something you want to complete. Then, take it a step further and turn it into several sub-steps. Write the amount of time each step might take. Then once you do the step, keep track of how much time the step actually took. This will give you a better understanding of your time and will help you get to that to that final dot…your ultimate destination.

Have you ever tried using a pay per click search engine to promote an affiliate program? I’ve tried it before. Long story short, it has never worked out in the end. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I simply don’t recommend it for several reasons. Let’s look at an example.

Let’s say you find an affiliate product on ClickBank to promote. The amount you get after a 75% commission is $30. You’ve now set up your pay per click campaign, so you drive 1000 visitors to your website for a reasonable .50 cents per click. You’ve now spent $500. You made 10 sales. Congrats! That gives your page+the owners product page a 1% conversion ratio. But it doesn’t seem all that great once you calculate your profit. You’ve just lost $200.03. Not only that, the other $299.97 will arrive as a check hopefully after a month, if you’re lucky.

On the other hand, if you were promoting your own product, you have the ability to adjust some of those numbers. Let’s say you were promoting the same product, but you owned it. You now have the ability to modify the sales page. That means you have control over its conversion rate. You can install multivariate testing software on your website and test a number of variable versions. You can also adjust the price of your product.

Lets look at those numbers again. Since your testing experiment is new, lets just pretend that you actually added more profitable variable versions and now your page converts at a 1.5% conversion ratio. At this point, if your product was only $30, you would still be losing $50.05 using the same numbers. But since this is now your product, you’re making $65 dollars per sale. Suddenly, you’ve now made 15 sales, and your profit is now over $165.

Now, since you are testing your sales page and know it converts well enough to make money, you can increase the amount of traffic to your sales page. If all the other numbers stayed the same and you sent 10,000 visitors to your sales page, your profit would be over $1,600. And if you increased your conversion to 2%, you’re almost at the $4,000 mark. And of course, if you optimized your campaign, you could eliminate unprofitable keywords and ads and increase those numbers even more. There are a number of ways to make your own product. There are also a number of other products that other owners don’t want to promote, or don’t know how to promote. Know you numbers, and keep testing.

The other day I posted about how you can find targeted traffic on YouTube in 8 steps. Martin Russell decided to check out this strategy.

Sure enough, he has been getting results. One person agreed to mention his product to 1500 readers at no cost to him. You can read the original blog entry and see Martin’s feedback in the comments:

Targeted YouTube Traffic In 8 Simple Steps

*Note to self, targeted does NOT have 3 T’s. And why doesn’t spell check see misspellings in single line text boxes?

I’ve been following Stephen Dean’s blog for quite a while now. He recently posted about recent trends in 3 areas:

Gmail becoming more mainstream

Asking for email addresses only

The death of double opt-in

The second two are always interesting to me. I have heard the same as Stephen that some experts have claimed better conversions by only asking for only an email address, while others (and I happen to know a few who test this) claim that conversions will be higher by asking for both name and email address. Of course, with the large numbers of marketers playing “operator”, the actual test results that were released (assuming they even were) may have been useful for a specific market. Or, it could be that the test was looking for the highest number of conversions, but not profitability. Unless you do some of the testing yourself, you’ll end up scratching your head over hearing about tests like this.

You can read the Stephens blog entry here:

http://www.copywritingdean.com/living-in-email-sin-and-loving-it

What?

Ray Edwards says “What your own brain”. What does he mean by that?

Are you convinced by everything you read or hear that has been released by certain media outlets?

Ray used the example of Toyota and their recalls. Toyota did what they had to in order to go about fixing the problem. But the media added a very negative spin on the problem. Do you now believe that Toyota is less reliable and less safe than several American competitors? Hopefully you don’t, but you have the right to your own opinion. Unfortunately, other peoples opinions of have changed.

You can see Ray’s complete blog entry here:

The Toyota Effect: Wash Your Own Brain

What if you could get targeted traffic for just .05 cents per visitor? These days, it’s hard to get traffic that cheap, especially using pay per click (PPC) search engines. Some websites claim they can send you targeted traffic for only a few cents per visitor, but if you’ve tried many of these offers you’ll know it’s usually unprofitable.

But what if for .05 cents per visitor, you could also choose a topic your market is interested in as well as specific demographic information? You can choose Age, Gender, Country, State, and even City for just .05 cents per visitor. Would you be able to benefit from this very targeted traffic?

Find out more here:

http://www.aaronbrandon.com/blog/targetedtraffic005pervisitor

What Caused The Increase In Website Traffic?
Aaron Brandon
The other day I reported that this site had a 32% increase increase in traffic since I changed blogging software. I got that number by averaging the amount of daily visitors from the first day of the month to the date I installed the new software which was about the 17th of the month. Then I averaged the visitor numbers for the five or so days I’ve had the new software installed.

If you don’t think those results are good, imagine if your website had 800 daily visitors coming to your website on average. Every day it may be a little more or a little bit less, but the average remains around 800. Then imagine the average amount of traffic increased from 800 to 1055 visitors on average. Would you enjoy that extra traffic? I certainly would.

I’m not sure what caused the increase in traffic. It could be a number of new links coming from within the network of websites, it could be search engines re-caching my website, I’m not sure yet. But I will continue to watch the traffic and I will do my best to report what has caused an increase in my traffic statistics.

Since moving to this platform (instead of WordPress) I have experienced a 32% increase in my daily website traffic. I would say that is a pretty good increase considering all I have been doing up to this point is post 2 or 3 articles per day.

Maybe you can do that too by doing the same? Or, maybe you even do better because it’s certainly possible. I’m going to be trying some experiments soon to increase that percentage. Maybe I’ll be nice and share those results with everyone. You’ll just have to check back soon to see.