Internet Marketing Strategy

Why Making Money Online with Advertising is not My Focus

By Christian

So many people have questions about how to monetize their website! I talk with a lot of business owners, real estate professionals and others who really want to ramp up their social networking and blogging efforts and really start to get results. This is very smart, and I applaud your interest in this hugely powerful technology. Internet marketing is the place to be if you run a small business, because it allows you to be very targeted, to connect with your buyers in a very personal way, and it’s more cost effective than any other form of marketing out there! That said, most people seem to have a very limited view of how to make money using these tools.

How Much Does Advertising Pay?

This is the main reason I want to focus on selling things as opposed to advertising…advertising just doesn’t pay very well! So many people want to make money online with advertising, and the thing I think these people don’t understand is that the average ad will pay out something in the neighborhood of $3 cpm. That’s $3 per thousand visitors. So to put that in a real world example, if you have a pretty successful site that’s getting 30k visitors a month, you will get $300 from an ad. It’s very possible to make a lot less than this, but it’s not very likely you’ll make much more.

$300 is nothing to scoff at. If you run 10 ads on your site, you’re looking at something like $3k a month.

This is why I’m not against advertising, it’s just the reason I don’t focus on it. If you have a site that is getting tens of thousands of visitors a month or more, and you want to get some ads up and running, use these:

Google Adsense
Text Link Ads
Kontera

With these three well-known and proven solutions, you’ll be able to get ad revenue coming in from your site. Google Adsense can be put up anytime, but the other two will require that you have adequate traffic to your site before you can get approved to use their ad network.

If you want to make money online with ads, I recommend visiting John Chow and downloading his ebook. It’s free, and it has some good tutorials on how to set these things up in detail.

Again, setting up ads is fairly simple. It’s a no-brainer. If you have some good traffic, you can put up some ads and get a few thousand a month. Not bad. And since I get questions about it often enough, I wanted to have this post up to direct you to the right resources.

Why I Focus on Other Ways to Make Money Online

I honestly think there are way better ways to make money online than with advertising. Like I said, I’m not against it, and I’m not saying I’ll never put ads up on Next Level Blogger, but if I do they will be minimal and non-intrusive. It’s not the point, and it’s not the focus of Next Level Blogger.

You can sell a product or a service and do so much better. It takes more work, but it’s a vastly better return on your time, and it has the added benefit of creating a better, more targeted experience for your readers.

To use a very basic example, let’s say you put out an ebook in your area of expertise. Let’s say it’s a 100 pages long, and you decide to sell it for $47. You can put up a landing page and sell the ebook through that page. I’ve written before about how some of my sites get far above average conversion rates, but even if you get an average 2% coversion, that means you’ll sell 20 out of a 1000 visitors. Are you following me? That’s $940 of revenue, vesus $3 that you would have made with Adsense. See why I focus on selling as opposed to advertising? The difference is massive. Yes, it takes more work. Yes, you need to take extra measures to make sure you’re traffic is targeted. Yes, you’ll need to set up a way to take orders and process credit card payments. Yes, you’ll have to field questions and the occasional person demanding a return, etc. Money ain’t free! But I’ll take $940 over $3 any day. How about you?

Is Internet Marketing too Techy for You?

By Christian

I network primarily with home based business and other small business owners who want to use blogging, internet marketing and social networking tools to promote and grow their business. One of the biggest concerns I hear is that this “internet stuff” is just too technical. With terms like “seo”, “image alt tags”, “robots.txt”, and so on and so forth, internet marketing is surely filled with jargon and a lot of things to learn. But so what? My argument is that the learning curve is NOT something that should scare you away. You’re looking at tools that can literally transform your business. And they cost almost nothing to use them! If you’re in the camp that has delayed getting online in a big way because you’re intimidated by technology, I get it, but I hope this article gets you off the fence. That’s my goal anyway.

What’s Your Competition Doing?

Consider this: your competition IS going after the internet space in your niche, so if you don’t you’re putting yourself at a huge disadvantage. Besides, with even a cursory glance, you can see that people are looking for what you sell online, and if you’re not in that space in a big way, then you’re basically begging your customers to go somewhere else. That’s not you!

It’s Time to Be Smart, not Safe

This is not a time to not be smart in business. I see business owners canceling their print advertising left and right. And many have reported to me that they see little to no negative effect. What does that tell you about the power of traditional advertising on today’s consumer?

You need to market yourself in some manner. Would you not agree? I think there’s something essential to consider here. I’m not going to pretend there is not a learning curve to internet marketing. I’ve spent years doing this, making a lot of money for clients, and I’m just now starting to turn the tables to make real money for myself. It takes time to learn the ropes of ANY system. This is no different. Let me tell you that if you take on internet marketing for your small business, you will not only learn a lot about technology, but you will be tapping into a global market…it will likely transform your business in a very real, positive way. It will change the way you think about your business, and you’ll see a whole new set of ways to grow it in the future. This ought to both thrill you AND scare the crap out of you. If not, you can stop reading now 🙂

Success Takes Work, Period

I can’t make the learning curve disappear for you. Anyone who claims to do that is full of BS. One of the top things I concentrate on at Next Level Blogger is how to make money online using blogging, social networking and internet marketing. This field is filled with content on “how to get results fast”, “how to make money fast”, etc. I’m trying to keep my foot off the gas in that department. It takes work, and I don’t want to give any false impressions. Even Frank Kern, the king of laziness in the internet marketing world, openly admits that he has to work hard to make his millions. Deep down, we all know success takes hard work, and as a business owner I have no doubt you understand that. So why should internet marketing be any different? The question is not whether you should do the work necessary…the question is whether or not you can get huge results with it. I’m telling you the answer is “yes, you can get HUGE results with it! It’s worth the work!” My goal is not to make the work disappear, but I do want to put it into perspective.

To Put it into Perspective…

One field I know well is real estate. I’ve had a lot of success generating leads online and helping my real estate team sell a lot of houses. When making the transition from traditional advertising to internet marketing, I often confront (and still confront) the concern of internet marketing being too techy. I explain a new marketing idea I have, and some people just don’t “get it”. And because it’s an uncomfortable concept, they just want to keep doing it old school. Well, if old school still worked, I’d be out of business. The whole point of this is that old school doesn’t work anymore, not when it comes to marketing. To remain competitive, we NEED to try new things.This means we simply have to dive in, get our hands dirty and learn new stuff. Period.

This is what I try to explain to my clients, and this is what I’ll try to explain to you today: to become an expert in your field, to become good in your business, you needed to learn a lot of things. In real estate for example, Realtors NEVER used to use cell phones or laptops. They never used to use contact management databases. They didn’t know how to typeset their own print ads or design brochures…none of this. Now, a real estate agent without these tools and skills is out of business, period. Stuff changes, doesn’t it?

And this is all I’m saying in this article. Soon, a Realtor without a Twitter account and a strong social networking plan is going to be uncompetitive. And this applies to YOUR business 100%. Whether you’re in a home based business, network marketing, whether you sell ebooks or affiliate products, whether your main business is online or offline…no matter what you’re selling, this applies, because what the consumer wants is changing, and the way they’re searching for information is changing. Is internet marketing too techy for you? At this point, yes it probably is. So it’s time to start learning! Embrace change, because it’s here to stay.

How to Identify Your Most Profitable Niche Market

By Christian

There are a couple common challenges to blogging effectively when it comes to picking your niche:

How to pick a profitable blog topic, and…
How to pick a profitable blog topic when you already have an existing business.

I will try to shed a little light on both of these. Most importantly, if you’re blogging for the purpose of selling stuff, you’re smart. Good call. But if you want to sell stuff, you need to first make certain that there is a market for what you’re selling. This is the first order of business. It may seem like common sense, but you’d be amazed how often this step gets skipped entirely! I recommend using SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool. This is a free tool, and it can give you some huge insight into whether or not there is a real market for what you want to sell.

Here is a typical report this tool will generate for you:

I ran this report on the keyword “cake recipes” just as an example, because I wanted to show you what this tool offers you. Look at a couple things here:

It seems “cake recipes” itself only generates an average of 63 searches per day. Not too heavy. But look at all the other related searches. Check out the scroll bar to the right in this screen shot, and you’ll see that it’s quite a list of very related searches, all totaling up to several hundred searches per day. Is this sufficient for your needs? I have no idea, because I don’t know what you plan on selling to these people, but the point is that it’s important to look at the whole report, not just the exact keyword you type in.
Look at all the resources to the right. All those links take you to other reports and resources you can use to cross reference your results and get more ideas. It’s pretty comprehensive.

I’ve used this tool a LOT over the past couple years, and believe me it will enable you to save yourself a lot of heartache by confirming up front whether the niche you’re pursuing is even something people are interested in.

Another thing to consider

Let’s say you’ve found a keyword that gets plenty of traffic. That’s a good thing, right? Can you make money in that niche? Possibly. But just because there are a lot of people looking for information in a particular niche doesn’t mean they’re spending any money. There’s a difference between getting a lot of traffic and making a lot of money. This is a theme that will continue to come up here a lot, so I’ll go ahead and say it again: it’s better to get only moderate traffic in a profitable niche than to get tons of traffic in an unprofitable one. This sounds like a “duh” statement, but go look at how many people are trying to make a living with entertainment blogs and news blogs, and you’ll see very clearly that most bloggers often monetize as an afterthought. That’s fine of course, but if your goal from the start is to make money online, make sure you pick a niche where there is sufficient interest AND where people are actually spending money!

Do a search in Google and see if there’s any advertising in the sidebar in the search results page. Look at this result for “cake recipes”:

Now this is just my personal take on it, but there’s over a million search results and a grand total of 7 ads. And 3 of those ads are from big name companies, probably wasting money. If I was looking for a profitable niche, I’d want to see more than 7 people trying to make money on it. I’ve talked about this before, but competition is a good thing! If there are a bunch of people advertising to try and reach this niche with paid advertising, I’d take that as more of a sign that people were spending money on this niche. As it stands, I see a million pages offering free information and half a dozen people charging for it. This is not what I call a good target.

What if You Already have a Business?

Let’s say you own a business already, and you want to start blogging. Or maybe you’re already blogging and social networking and not getting the results you’re looking for. One common mistake a business owner will make when starting a blog is to simply use their existing business niche and build a blog around it. This is surely a logical approach, but don’t make the assumption that what you’re doing offline is going to work online. The internet is its own marketplace.

Think about it this way: if you were taking your business and starting another store in a new location…you would research that location first, right? You wouldn’t just assume that any old place will do, and you wouldn’t assume that what you do in one place is going to work somewhere else, right? There are a whole variety of factors to consider when opening a new location for your business, and doing it well and profitably requires that you do research up front. Give your business blog and social networking presence the same consideration.

For example, let’s say you’re in the real estate business. I use this example because I have experience in real estate, and I know a lot of people in the real estate business. The common assumption for a real estate agent would be to use their blog to post their new listings. That makes sense of course, but will it help you produce results toward reaching your goals? The name of this post is “How to Identify Your Most Profitable Niche Market”, so we need to find a niche for your blog that is actually profitable, not just one that makes sense.

From what I’ve seen, I’d say 99% of Realtors who have a blog, use their blog primarily as a place to post their new listings, and that’s about it. Look, marketing your listings is a big part of the real estate business, so that makes sense, and I think you should do it. But I strongly encourage you to dig a lot deeper. Are people in your market searching for vacation property? Short term rentals? Foreclosures? Multifamily investment property? If so, then any of these are worthy niches…valuable pockets of your market where you could slip in and dominate your competition…and you’re missing out on it entirely if you’re not doing your research!

Type in all the keywords you can think of that fit your existing business. Anything that you think is relevant to what you offer. How do you want to be found online? Type it in. See what comes up. Get familiar with what people are actually looking for. This keyword tool is a fantastic, free resource…use it! You can start a blog using a topic that “makes sense” if you want, but if you want great results, you need to be sophisticated in your approach. You need to provide content that is highly targeted to a market with demand that you have verified. This goes for those of you who want to start a new blog to make money online or for those of you with an existing business. It’s the same either way. Do the research and verify demand up front, and you will be well-rewarded.

A Specific Example of Finding a Profitable Niche

An example of this…I work for a real estate broker, and in her particular market there is a high demand for bank owned properties. There are a lot of people searching for bank owned properties; we’ve seen it. It’s funny, because compared to many markets across the country, there are very few bank owned properties in this market, but nevertheless…people are searching for it. So we set up a single page with a keyword-targeted domain name pointing to it…to target that traffic. When people search for bank owned properties in this market, her site will show up. No other real estate people in this market are doing anything nearly as targeted as this, and as a result I bet this page is going to do very well for her.

That’s all I’m talking about. It’s not rocket science. It’s just a matter of digging in deep, doing research up front and taking the time to make sure that whatever blog you want to set up is going to actually help you meet your goals.

Make Money Online by Selling More to Fewer People

By Christian

This is a post in a series which begins here. We’ve talked so far about the 3 Simple, Killer Steps to Improve Traffic, and then we moved on to how to Use a Sales Funnel to Blow up Your Blogging and Internet Marketing Sales. Today, I’m going to talk for a minute about how a tip I learned to make better use of the traffic you’re already getting.

High Traffic Ain’t all That…

We’re all understandably concerned with getting more and more traffic. This makes sense. But look, if you’re getting any traffic at all, and you’re not making money…you’re doing something wrong. If you’re not making ANY money with low traffic, you’re not going to be doing much better with MORE traffic. We’ve already talked about this briefly, but this will come up again and again here: you don’t need massive traffic to make money online. You just need to be smart about what you’re doing! In this post I’ll give you a simple tweak that will help you get better results from the traffic you’re already getting. Make more money without increasing traffic at all…that’s gotta sound at least kind of cool, right? 😉

The Sales Funnel, Again

So here’s the deal, everyone of your visitors is at a certain place in your sales funnel. It’s essential to stop looking at your traffic as just “traffic”. First of all, they’re all prospects. They’re all individual people. Everyone who hits your site is there for a reason. Why? What’s their motivation for being there? How did they find you? What problem can you help them solve? It’s your job to be able to answer these questions. One of my goals in writing this particular series of posts is to hopefully help you with some sales training tips that will help you zero in on these concerns and make better use of your traffic.

It’s important to consider this: not everyone is on your site for the same reason. Your friends, your colleagues, people you’ve never met, people who found you on Twitter, through Google…they’re all likely there for different reasons, and you need to tweak your site to make the best use of this information. You cannot use a blanket sales approach and hope for good results. It’s not going to work. You need to sell, as best as you can, to each individual visitor.

Look at where your visitors came from and use that information to make the page they land on as conducive to moving them along the sales cycle as possible. In this post, I’ll give you an example of how to do this with organic traffic (visitors that come in from search engines). In later posts, I will cover more sources of traffic and how to tweak your site out to monetize on those as well.

Tweak Your Page to Monetize on Organic Traffic

Do you have a page that’s getting a lot of traffic from Google or some other search engine? Use your analytics to see what keywords they’re using to land on that page. Search engine traffic is usually pretty targeted, good quality traffic, but if you’re not converting that traffic, what good is it? If they’re landing on your page through a search engine, think about what they means…

They typed in specific keywords for a specific problem they’re looking to solve. They’re looking for an answer, and your site showed up! They’re on your site because Google has told them you likely have a good answer for them. This is a fantastic opportunity to monetize! Yet many sites have a 60% bounce rate or higher. In other words, you have all these targeted leads hitting your site, and 60% of them or more are immediately leaving without even reading a single article, filling out a form or even asking you for more information in any way. Fail! Let’s not let this happen anymore, okay?

Let’s say you have an article on how to grow blueberries on your back porch. Cool. I like this site already! Now let’s say you look in your analytics report and see that people are finding that page by searching “how to grow blueberries”. Here are a few things to think about:

Maybe it’s time to add a free ebook, specifically on this page, called “how to grow blueberries” and offer it as a free download for any new subscribers.
Maybe you can even effectively SELL an ebook on that page.
Perhaps you would do better to increase the size and scope of that particular article and make it more engaging…people are hitting this article for a reason. There is obviously demand for it. Give them tons of information to keep them there longer!
Link the page up really well to OTHER pages on your site or related sales pages you have up elsewhere. They’ve hit your site as a targeted lead. Now, lead them on to a place that will show them even more value, and give you a better opportunity to make a sale. If you don’t ask, you don’t get!
Maybe you can try cutting back on the information you give! Require an email subscription to access the page.

See the point is this…there are a LOT of things you can do to respond to this demand for information. But the WRONG thing to do is to simply appreciate the hits you’re getting and then proceed to wonder why you’re not making any money! Unfortunately this is what most people do! Be deliberate in your approach and keep this fantastically simple rule of blogging for business success always in the front of your mind:

Success comes in tiny increments!

You can always wonder why you’re not getting the huge results that other bloggers and internet marketers get, or you can go about the business of making the small tiny tweaks that make all the difference. It’s up to you! Let’s say you have 100 pages or so indexed on your site. Make a tiny 1% improvement to each page, and you create an overall massive increase in income! These small changes add up; trust me!

A Lesson from the Trenches

When I was out in the field selling face to face, I learned how important it was to dress well. On the surface, and to the untrained sales professional, it doesn’t seem like it should matter so much. I mean, if my product was indeed the best, all I should have to do is show it, and the customer should buy it because it makes sense…because it’s a quality, affordable and necessary product, right? It doesn’t work that way. Presentation is everything. Little tweaks to your presentation make all the difference. A clean, well-tailored suit, a slightly different inflection when you make a certain point or ask a certain question of your prospect, effective body language…it all requires extra work and attention to detail. But when you put all the elements together, it becomes nearly impossible to NOT get the sale! You become a force to be reckoned with. But you must do the work! Internet marketing is no different.

Perhaps you’re blogging or social networking and trying to get better results. Maybe you’re selling real estate, or ebooks, or affiliate products of some sort…you’re in the right place, but always remember there are no short cuts!

Make small incremental changes, and critique the results you get. Go back and tweak more. Lots of work, I know! You can complain if you want, or you can go make a killing…it’s up to you 🙂

Upcoming posts…I will be covering more sales training tips for tweaking and getting better results from more traffic sources. As the series continues, feel free to comment and leave any ideas for future content you’d like to see covered. Thanks and talk to you soon!

Use a Sales Funnel to Blow Up Your Blogging and Internet Marketing Sales

By Christian

This is the second post in a series on how to power-monetize your blog, internet marketing or social networking. If you’d like to start from the beginning, you can visit the first post here.

Whether you operate an offline business and are using blogging, internet marketing and social networking as a way of expanding your reach and effectiveness, or whether your online presence is your primary activity, using a sales funnel is mandatory if you want to truly maximize your results. Yet, most people don’t even know what a sales funnel is! And what’s more…even those who have an idea of what a sales funnel is, don’t know how to use one effectively. So, here’s the rundown:

What is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is a tool that guides you on how to optimize your sales. It’s something you come up with through the process of developing a good business plan for your site. This is something I’m going to be covering in depth in future posts, but for now let’s look at the funnel itself. It looks simple enough, no?

Now this graphic is just a representation of a sales funnel; you can make yours look however you prefer. The point is to have one. A sales funnel is the process you take your buyers through that leads to a sale. Simple concept wouldn’t you say? But how many of us neglect to implement on this concept? Answer a few questions to see where you stand:

Where do most of your buyers come from?
What pages do they land on most often?
Where do they go from there?
What steps are you taking to monetize each page of your site?
How are you providing maximum value to each buyer on every page of your site?
What stage in the buying process do you suppose is each of your visitors in, and what steps are you taking to guide them to a sale?

If you do not have immediate and simple answers to each of these questions, your sales funnel needs work. The good news is that by developing a well-designed sales funnel, you will be able to truly maximize sales on your site.

Obviously, you can tell by looking at my sales funnel (which I took from a real estate site I run), not everyone who visits my site signs up for what I offer. Imagine that! I expect you’re running on less than 100% conversion as well, and the trick is to really dig in and make sure you’re getting every conversion you can get.

The point of this post is not to go in depth on how to use a sales funnel. That is coming in future posts. I’m really going to dig in for this series and show you not only how to use a sales funnel but also how to maximize sales every step along the way. Make sure to bookmark this post and come back for the future posts as well!

For this post, I want to show you what a sales funnel is and illustrate how powerful it is.

The Power of a Sales Funnel

Buyers visit your site. Some of them bounce right off to another site. Some of them stick around for a minute. Some of them hang out for a while and read several things and then leave. Some of them actually sign up for what you’re offering. This is good stuff. It’s how you make money online! But the problem is that most people take a very scatterbrain approach to all this. The idea is that you put up some good content, drive traffic, offer a product or service for sale and hope for the best. I don’t really need to tell you that’s not a very good approach, do I? We need to do way better than that!

Deliberately designing a sales funnel forces you to think about the process a buyer needs to move through in order for you to make a sale. What process does YOUR buyer need to go through in order to buy from you? Have you thought about this?

Let’s use the sales funnel I pictured above as an example. As I mentioned, it’s from a real estate site I run. The goal is for me to get contact information from as many buyers on this site as possible. Perhaps your goal is to take orders for an ebook. Maybe you want to build a list of email subscribers. You have your own goals. My goal for this particular site is to build a list of buyers and their contact information.

Look at the Numbers…

Do the math and you’ll see I’m pulling a little over 17% conversion from this site. This doesn’t happen automatically! Many internet marketers shoot for 2%. They brag their faces off when they get 7-10%. This site is pulling 17%. I hope this serves as a testament to how powerful a sales funnel can be 🙂

But I don’t just have the total number of visitors and how many leads that came in, do I? There’s more. I have an intermediate step in the middle. I track how many people view the sign up form. Out of all the visitors to this particular site, I am successful at getting about 46% of them to the opt-in page, where they give me their contact information. Not all buyers fill out the form of course. In fact I lose most of them, but I do get an overall 17% conversion from this site.

It’s important to understand that 17% conversion is very rare in internet marketing, BUT it’s very achievable for you as well if you implement the same systems. Like I said, I cannot go into huge detail on the implementation of the sales funnel in this post. I will be doing that in future posts here. Please bookmark this page to return for the future articles as they go live. I will link up all the content here, so it’s very easy to find.

How to Make a Sales Funnel

Of course, this is a simple enough thing to do. Creating a sales funnel is merely a process of accessing your goal and then deciding how to best achieve it. Many people just want to “make money online”. Of course, you need more than that. You need a plan. A sales funnel is an essential part of that plan.

What is your main goal?
What things need to happen in order to turn your visitor into a buyer?
What steps can you take to ensure that every page on your site functions to convert a potential buyer from one step to the next?

Of course if your sales funnel is very simple, such as the one I’ve pictured as an example, there are really only a few steps. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It just needs to be something you’re mindful of when tweaking your site for maximum efficiency.

So You’ve Put Together a Sales Funnel. Now What?

Having a sales funnel is the first step. A defined and laid out step-by-step process you lead every buyer through that results in a sale. As you can see by the example I provided, it doesn’t need to be complicated. In fact, it can be very simple! But it’s essential to write it up as part of your plan and most people skip this.

Having a process in place, you now have the real work cut out for you: how to maximize results at each stop along the way to the sale!

In future posts, I will take you through each step of the sales funnel and how to maximize results each step of the way. Suffice to say for now, your sales funnel is the process you lead your buyers through in order to make a sale. It’s essential to understand where each of your buyers is within your sales funnel. If you know where they are, you can take them and guide them to a sale. Or you can use the scattershot approach, put up good content and hope for the best. I hope you’ll keep reading and learn to use your sales funnel for maximum success in your blogging and internet marketing 🙂

BTW…let me know if you have any questions!

Make sure to visit the next post in this series also…