You can make money online and still not do internet marketing…….

There is a difference between the two, ya know. Most brick & mortar businesses, even the successful ones, don’t have marketing plan for their business.  It is an afterthought and most of the time, any attempt at “marketing” tends to come across as an after thought as well.

And if you ask most businesses offline what they do, they will tell you something like “I am a restaurateur“, or “I am a small business owner“, “I work in the import/export business“, ect.  What you won’t here from them is something like “I am a marketer….” even if they market their business.

I say this because there seems to be a lot of confusion when it comes to what is internet marketing and what it isn’t.  People like to lump online marketers with making money online because they think the two are synonymous.  They are and they aren’t.

The reason why I even mention this is largely from the scathing  third tribe review that Lissie wrote recently as well as Andy Jenkins Beard recent blog post that kind of dissects the ad copy at the afforementioned website.

So if you can make money online without marketing, what good is internet marketing in your business model?

I will get to that in a second. But first what does “making money online” really mean? For most, it is selling something;  whether that is a service, your product, someone else’s product, or ad space on your website doesn’t matter.  If you can manage to do any of those things, then you will make money online.  If you can do it well, you will make A LOT of money online.

Most make money products and membership sites don’t really focus on the marketing aspects of business….

They don’t because it is unsexy.  Let’s face it, unless you are a copywriter, developing solid ad copy or a landing page that converts is not fun.  I can’t think of a single time when I woke up in the morning thinking, I can’t wait to write this ad copy and take it through the rigors of testing.

What is “sexy” are blueprints for success and you can find them in abundance in the internet marketing world.  Third Tribe Marketing claims that they have the answers for bloggers wanting to become hugely popular and make money online; as they put it, marketing strategies that work (without being obnoxious). Yaro Starek has the answers for those who want to become great bloggers as well, or so he claims.  Court’s Keyword Academy has a step by step blueprint on how to make money online through SEO.

But most of these “models” don’t focus on the “marketing” aspects of making money online. Instead, most are just watered down connect-the-dots blueprints of business models (in the most elementary sense) for what could work IF everything fell into place just right.

And judging from the emails I get on a regular basis, I can understand why they don’t.  The regular Joe who is hoping to earn a living on the internet doesn’t really want to think creatively.  They don’t want to question anything.  They would rather have someone hand them the hope or dream of doing it by following a blueprint that could work.

It ain’t marketing folks….This is hardly a business model.

Adsense is NOT Internet Marketing

There are some that believe that building several hundred adsense sites will make them internet marketers.  It won’t…no matter how successful they are.  The folks over at wisegeek aren’t internet marketers….Neither is Court’s Keyword School.  It is a business model sure (and a very good one at that).  But it has very little to do with marketing.

Now, the people who ARE marketing are the ads that are competing for the space on your adsense site.

Neither is SEO….

I mentioned this on my SEO is not marketing post a few weeks back.  Getting ranked in the search engines is hardly marketing because anyone can do it.  It is just a matter of building enough backlinks (or out linking) your competitors.  If you think that ranking automatically makes you a search engine marketer, you are wrong.

Now, placing the right message in front of the right market using the right conversation….now that is marketing.  And where marketers can use the search engines to their advantage is by making that little snippet of text in the search results match exactly with the most qualified searcher with a strong call to action to boot…..Now THAT is search engine marketing.

Getting there is just mundane mechanical turk work.

So, What is Internet Marketing and Why Should You Care?

Now that you know what I think Internet Marketing isn’t, and since it is likely that what you think online marketing is  falls into one of those categories, you have to ask yourself how adding marketing tactics and strategies would be beneficial to whatever business model you are following.

First, an offline example.  A buddy of mine (whom I have spoke about before) has been a restaurateur for over 15 years now.  5 years ago, his business was floundering.  To put it bluntly, his clientele base was dying off or moving away and as a result, his business was dying a slow, agonizing death (more common in the small business world than you think).

Last year, his business had a record year….he had a 47% growth rate in a time when the other restaurants around him were closing.  This year looks like he will easily top this mark….how did he do it?

Through MARKETING but not in the traditional sense of the word.  He knew he needed two things to get things back on track….

1. Customer acquisition
2. Customer retention

He solved the first one by simply buying a list of potential qualified customers (those who lived within a certain radius of his restaurant and that made above a certain yearly income) and sending them an offer they couldn’t refuse.

Once they arrived at his restaurant, he made them another offer.  Join his birthday club and get free stuff (on your birthday) AND possibly win $50 to boot.

It didn’t stop there though.  He started creating newsletters…and not the kind you would think…his first one was 8 pages, full color with coupons inside.  2 months ago, it had grown to 30 pages full of content, with pictures of people who came in, insider glimpses of the staff that worked there and of course coupons.

Today he sends these out quarterly to over 30,000 people in the Memphis area.

He added an email list where he could send even more valuable coupons to.  The result?  Add another 9,000 customers that open his emails and RESPOND to his offers.

The offers are good too.  25% off entrees.  He can do this because he understands the psychology of marketing.  Increase your prices to offset the costs and give the illusion that the offer is VERY good.

Now THAT is marketing.

I could probably write a small book on my friend’s restaurant and his marketing strategies that he employed.  I think that the best marketers, whether they are of the offline persuasion or online, think creatively.   Ultimately, there are two things that they are concerned about….

• How to acquire the right customers that will respond to their offer….
• How to turn them into loyal customers….

This doesn’t matter whether you are a blogger looking to just brand yourself as the next Darren Rouse.  It doesn’t matter if you are simply trying to pad your list by creating the perfect landing page.

What does matter is either creating (or affiliating with the company that makes) the product that speaks with the majority of those who will be most likely to respond.  How you make yourself “visible” (whether this is through Word-of-mouth marketing, which seems to be the blogger’s modus operandi, through SEM or some other marketing paradigm) is part of your business model…..

What the person does when they get there…that is where the marketing strategies come into play….

In a sense, it is why adsense works.  It kind of takes the guesswork out of what is working and what isn’t for publishers.  If you follow the ads week to week, you will soon discover what is working and what isn’t because the ones that are working are the ones that are consistently advertising on that particular conversation.

People looking to make money on the internet without a clue on how to target niches and markets can easily gravitate to adsense because it spoon feeds you the “winners”, product wise without the work.  Are you leaving money on the table?  Probably.  But hell, at least you don’t have to think outside the box.

Who are You?….What do You do?….Why Should I Care?…What’s in it For Me?

For those of you who are more advanced and understand the basic principles of business and marketing, you know that acquiring and retaining a potential customer is much better than a one and done acquisition. And it is primarily where Marketing online kicks in.

If you look at the marketing models for any of the big successful companies online, you will see that they all follow the same principles.

1. Get them to your offer.
2. Give them a reason to be acquired.
3. Find ways to retain their interest.

How you do that is the creative part of marketing.  It is primarily why I love internet marketing.  In a sense, it is art at its finest.  I get a charge about thinking outside the box but the spark really hits when an idea takes its own shape and develops a life on its own.

To be perfectly blunt, it is the journey that is the most enriching.

I think that that is what most people who are just looking to make money online miss…..the creative part of marketing;  it is the coup de grâce of online marketing.

So where do the two meet?

For someone who is simply looking for a quick way to make money, they typically will take a blueprint and be happy (or unhappy) with the results.

An internet marketer will take the same blueprint and will usually ask the question….okay so what, it works….how do I make it better?  How do I squeeze every last inch of money out of this?  How can I increase my margins by adding this upsell?  How can I improve customer (or visitor) satisfaction more?  How can I modify the blueprint to make it better?  What can I say that will make my customers trust me more?  How do I create raving fans that will advertise my site, product or brand without me asking?  How do I become synonymous with my market?  Can I scale this to reach other niches within the market?

In other words, an internet marketer is always changing to suit the needs and demands of his market better.  He or she is never truly happy with the results because there is always room for improvement.  The business model may work but the online marketer knows it could work better tweaked just a little more.

That is the difference.  Someone wanting to make money online is simply elated when they do.  A marketer on the other hand is incessantly searching for ways to improve their marketing.  After all, Marketing is ART.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a definitive answer. The variables in this are competition (which is easy to figure out) as well as the niche itself (some niches are more apt to sandbox newer sites).

The reality is that most of the back links you can easily get are what I consider low hanging fruit. These are the ones that everyone uses. They are also the least valuable and require a huge amount to rank for anything competitive.

Now obviously, if you are trying to rank your Krupps Coffeemaker website with a certain model as the keyword, you could probably rank for it coming out the gate. If, on the other hand, it is internet marketing, prepare for a long wait, barring the miniscule chance that those that are ranking actually link up to you.

I am pretty lackadaisical in my backlinking strategies. Blame it on the fact that I am already earning a living doing this, I guess. I don’t worry about things if it takes 6 months to rank. Personally, I expect it to take that long in most cases. Anything that ranks early is just icing on the cake.

I think people worry too much about the things that all in all, don’t matter. If you get sandboxed, you will eventually come out of it and although it isn’t fun to suddenly see your rankings disappear, usually it is only temporary (assuming you aren’t linking in bad neighborhoods or have poor content that was reviewed manually).

You want to rank to increase your website’s visibility.

If you aren’t ranking, your options are to find places where your market visits while you wait.

• If you do list building, build a list and market to those interested in your products.
• If you are selling an actual product, hang in forums with people that share your interests while you wait.
• Network with other marketers.
• Work on building a viral article and release it as a press release with an angle (not the typical crap that marketers call “press releases”).

There are more ways to get traffic than obsessing over building backlinks.

That’s just my .02 cents on that matter. While I think that organic search is important in the grand scheme of things, I think that most marketers miss the whole point of why you want to rank in the first place.

Volumes of content….when backlinks don’t necessarily matter

One way to blow off the tedium of building backlinks is to create volumes of content. In my article on how to outsource your online business (or my opinion of when to do it and when not to do it), I casually mentioned WiseGeek.com.

The front page of wisegeek is a PR6. Obviously Google thinks that the folks at WG are doing a pretty good job.

However, if you start to look inside their website, you will notice something….most of their pages have no PR and no links. This, despite the fact, that their site gets roughly 11 million visits a month.

How do they do it? First of all, their internal link structure is very good. Similar articles are linked up to each other, making for a great user experience AND relevant information to the search bots. In geek speak, they are optimized perfectly and do so through the use of virtual silos.

Secondly, they are creating roughly 120 pages of real content a day. That is a lot of content. And I believe that the more active a website is, the more trust they are given by Google and the less links they need.

Now, they rank for a ton of keywords. Almost all of them are long tail. But that is okay. They are making up for it in volume…..

….and did I mention that their site gets 11 million visits a month?….

They monetize with adsense. Figuring a conservative CTR of 3% and you have to think that google is cutting them a check for 100k-300k+ per month.

And given the fact that all in all, they have paid out roughly $600,000 for the 60,000 articles on their site and you have to figure that their business model is pretty damn solid.

Watch how others are Ranking…..Study their models for clues….

The reason why I mention WiseGeek is that they are using practically the same model from a content perspective as Hubpages and Squidoo (although the latter use user generated content); create massive volumes of content consistently and ride on the long tail wave. Coming out of the gate, you won’t rank for anything. But very quickly, given the fact that you are producing 40….100…even thousands of pages of content and Google will take notice and consider you important.

I think that most marketers, for whatever reason are willing to listen to the little guys a little too much for advice (me included). In reality, they should look at successful websites…and I mean those that are million dollar businesses….study their model to see…

• How they are monetizing their site
• Whether the experience is valuable to the reader (in some cases, this is true) and how they are selling it….
• How they are generating traffic
• What kinds of costs are associated with generating the kind of traffic they are generating

If you study enough businesses online, you will quickly figure out that there are only a few models that are consistently replicated and are consistently successful.

In this article, I intend to tackle the pros and cons of choosing a blog vs. choosing niche sites.

Now, I have stated before that it is much easier to make $3,000 a month with several sites than it is with one. Most bloggers don’t get that. It is much easier to earn a living online by building several hundred micro-niche, ultra-specific, keyword focused websites over the course of a year or two than it is to spend 40+ hours a week grooming your authority blog and getting people interested.

The Problem with Blogs and the reason why most bloggers fail to make a significant income from blogging….

There are actually two problems with trying to make money with blogging….

1. The first is that instead of catering to keywords (the search engines don’t care how good or creative or crazy cool you are and therefore it is much easier to game), you are placing yourself out there to be actually judged by your peers. What this means is that if you are saying the same old, same old, chances are your “signal” will get lost with all the other bloggers producing the same old, same old.
2. The second problem is that most bloggers don’t think like marketers and therefore don’t think in terms of how to funnel folks to their sites. They have no plan…..they are just mindlessly spending hours of their day trying to figure out what they are going to write from one day to the next and have this mindset that if they build it, they will come….

Catering to people is much harder than catering to the search engines but can be more rewarding….

One of the biggest reasons why building a blog that makes money is much harder than building a network of niche websites is because you are subject to the opinion of your peers. Unlike niche websites, which will typically target a particular conversation and rank it organically by adding backlinks, a blogger has a much steeper climb.

Unless they are in a market as an early adapter, they will normally face entrenched competitors and will have to somehow figure out a way to make their site different than every other blog out there that is struggling to “make it” like themselves.

Another big uphill climb for a blogger is that a blog tends to be less focused than a niche website. Most niche websites are simply trying to rank for a couple keywords…a handful at the most and because the focus is so laser targeted, the chances of success are much higher.

Try doing that with a make money blog and you will see…..you are just one in a sea of thousands….that, my friend, is a lot of noise to rise above.

What’s your USP?

USP stands for Unique Selling Position. For a marketer simply marketing an offer, establishing a USP that will move their customers to buy is perhaps the #1 asset to strong copy. In the case of blogging, you are essentially selling yourself and what you know; in effect, YOU are your USP. Your personality, what you say, and how you respond to your visitors becomes far more critical to your success.

In contrast, a niche site doesn’t need a USP. In most cases, all they need is rankings. What you say isn’t that important and for a niche marketer, the idea isn’t to have someone coming back over and over for repeat business….it is simply to get them to click to whatever it is they are selling.

Most bloggers don’t even factor this into the equation. I imagine that if you randomly took a poll of 100 bloggers, you would probably be able to count on one hand the people who could clearly tell you what their mission is and what their goal is in terms of how they are being seen by their visitors.

That is good news for marketers who are wanting to make a splash in their market because it makes for easy pickings….bad news for all the rest who are mindlessly posting “me too” content though.

A strong USP will help you separate from others in your niche. Not everyone will like you but those who do will love you.

Bloggers typically don’t focus hard enough on small niches

Most bloggers will go in over their head in terms of competition. For instance, rather than even tone down their scope of content to a niche within a niche, they start very broad, thinking that the broader they go, the more traffic they will get. What they are actually giving themselves is much more competition and in a lot of cases, they go in way over their head, competing with websites and other blogs that have far more resources and money.

Couple this with no USP and that makes for just another “me too” blog in a sea of other “me too’s”…

The biggest problem with this strategy is that it lengthens the “sticking” process. Most bloggers suffer burnout long before they get to where they think they should be. The better option is to find a niche within a niche to dominate and slowly work yourself from inside out, building up traffic and credibility in a kiddie pool before you risk dipping your big toe in the deep end.

Example- Most bloggers who want to be in the fitness niche will focus on general fitness with general categories trying to appeal to everyone when they should instead be focusing in on a much smaller niche within the niche and specialize….instead of dieting tips, focus on the caveman or paleo diet.

~Visibility and Traffic~ Two different strategies and the reason why niche blogs produce better profits quicker…..

There is a caveat to the above statement. While it is true that niche websites will traditionally make more money quicker, a blogger has a better chance of actually increasing their revenue stream the more “known” they become. I will talk about that later.

Bloggers go about getting traffic in a completely different way than niche websites.

Most bloggers aren’t concerned about laser targeted visitors. Most simply want eyes on their page. Because of this, most bloggers will find themselves catering and hanging around other bloggers in their community, looking for a support system, that in most cases, doesn’t exist (unless they have a USP and personality).

They leech traffic via comments. Some of the smarter bloggers figure out that guest posting will help them. Some will hang in forums in their community. SEO is an after thought in most cases. Social traffic is their mainstay.

What you essentially get are bloggers giving each other (pardon my french) proverbial hand jobs that just feel good. You can see this happening by looking at comments like “wow, thanks alot for the great information” or “your blog is an inspiration to the [fill-in-the-blank] community.”

Compare this to the niche marketer, who will target certain keywords, rank them and then start to get a stream of traffic from people that are looking for exactly what the niche website has to offer because there is no question that the visitor is looking for specific information.

So does that mean that niche marketing is better? Not at all. Easier maybe…but better? No way….

But, if I was going to place a blogger in the ring with a niche marketer in a loser leaves town steel cage match, I would bet the farm on the niche marketer as to who would make the first dollar.

It is simply not a contest.

• Niche Marketers are marketers
• Bloggers are…well, they are…bloggers.

Niche Marketers have no issue naming a page on their niche website “red widgets” because they aren’t necessarily depending on social traffic and frankly, they really don’t care about their visitor…..their only goal is to rank for red widgets

Alternatively, a blogger has been hit over the head that they need to create memorable headlines to draw in traffic.

A niche marketer will write a write a 400 word rehashed ezine article that says nothing but has just the right keywords in place in 7 minutes while a blogger will spend an entire day perfecting an article that will, in most cases, get them that “proverbial” hand job from other bloggers that simply want them to reciprocate.

Comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges, a blogger without even basic internet marketing principles stands little chance…..

Rather than search engine traffic, a blogger will usually depend more on funnel streams than niche marketers. They depend on random citations throughout the web from credible websites that get traffic as well. It becomes their life blood for traffic and helps to not only increase their visibility but also will help cement their credibility.

This rarely happens though.

The reason? Once again, it all goes back to unique content, personality and USP. If your peers don’t like you and aren’t willing to “cite” your site, you will go nowhere. And unlike search engines in which you can game and coax into giving you good enough rankings to get traffic, without your peers vouching for you, you are sunk.

Niche marketers usually don’t build links from credible sources because their content tends to be thin. When I say “thin”, I don’t mean blatantly bad, mind you. I simply mean that they don’t go out of their way to create good content…it just needs to be “good enough” to pass a manual check.

Your Marketing skills as a blogger IS the “X” Factor

Court has mentioned that the reason why blogging is such a tough road to making money online is because you have to continuously maintain your blog. You will see that a lot of blogging gurus will tell you that you need to write daily in order to do something.

In reality, you just need to write something good. That is a tough call but it is much easier to write something good once a week or twice a month that could have a chance to get cited than to regurgitate or echo what is already being said.

How scarce is your information? The scarcer the information you are giving, the more important or valuable you will be deemed. Most bloggers sacrifice scarcity for volume. If you are looking to build your own tribe, you better be able to either say something different than the crowd…or say the same thing….differently…

They tell you that connection is everything…

And it is!

But here is where a blogger who knows how to market can level the playing field…..by using the various tools out there to constantly connect with your audience. This can be a number of things….

• List building and permission marketing- Some say it is dead. My bank account would say otherwise…
• Twitter, Facebook and other web2.0 properties- I am not a fan of using these for internet marketing or make money online niches but they do work in other niches.
• RSS Feeds- Bloggers focus squarely on raw numbers….reach is a better indicator though

If you believe what I have written so far, should you even bother to try to make money blogging?

So, up to this point, you would think that I would say that blogging is a complete waste of time and that, if you were smart, you would run out and build hundreds of crappy thin websites and top them with adsense or point them to an affiliate product, right?

Actually, there are benefits of blogging for a living….if you can build it.

The most obvious benefit is your sway with your readers.

Let’s say that you have managed to build a blog over the period of a 6 months to a couple years, have a list in place, and your sphere of influence (ie. you are cited everywhere as the go-to person in your market) cements you as one of the top bloggers in your niche.

If you can get THERE….if your USP is unique enough or you managed to get into the niche early enough, then you will make more money than a hundred niche blogs doing less work and it will be more “fun” because it won’t feel like work.

I am saying this and really shouldn’t because THAT is obvious.

A flagship blog will make sales more easily based on the reputation and credibility of the blog. And the sales could be market related, along with the verticals associated with that market……

…..And you also get to enjoy the fruits of success…one of the things no one really talks about….when you are successful, you will naturally become more successful….

Your Click Through Rates are higher and your conversion rates are through the roof. I have had promotions where my conversion rates were literally 50+% (I actually received a phone call from the president of a forex product I had promoted several years ago because my response rate eclipsed all the other affiliates).

You cut better deals, get insider offers and free stuff. You also get access to information that most in your market don’t get.

You are suddenly an insider…inside the good old boy’s club of your market.

You also aren’t at the whim of a search engine….YOU become your product. Only YOU can ruin it for yourself….

So **rosy**, right?

The problem, of course, is the journey. And most bloggers, unlike niche marketers (who take it one day at a time), have huge aspirations without the skills necessary to take them to that next level.

This is primarily the reason why you hear most niche marketers lambast blogging for money. It is because somewhere down the line, they tried it…it didn’t work…and because it didn’t work for them, it must not be the right road to riches.

I say that with a smirk, by the way.

If you don’t have the personality (***ahem*** E-G-O) or the writing skills and can’t clearly define what makes you different than everyone else in your niche, then niche marketing is the way to go.

Your Blog as an Extension of Yourself and Your Business

Marketers tend to use blogs as credibility posts. What I mean by that is that people like Yaro Starek began blogging with the bigger picture in mind. He would use his posts to increase credibility and to sell his own products to his readers and visitors.

Other marketers do it as an addition to what they are already doing. Frank Kern’s site isn’t SEO friendly and isn’t meant to rank but rather is meant to help him cement his credibility and draw in more “flies” by giving his fans a more intimate way to reach him.

Court’s blog is simply a satellite funnel (albeit internally) to sell you on the fact that he not only knows what he is talking about but also that he happens to have a membership site that will teach you how to make money online.

Timothy Ferris’ blog is a hodge podge of random posts that give the reader an escape from the drudgery of what most of us call “life” by watching him hang out with gun runners in Libya and eating exotic foods that would make Anthony Bourdain cringe at the thought of eating….oh….and by the way…he also happens to have a best selling book too….

So that is pretty much it. Both niche marketing and blogger have their ups and their downs. But Blogging for money is much harder than niche marketing simply because your peers, not you, decide on whether the information you are giving is valuable enough to merit citations and traffic.

Personally, I find blogging to be far more gratifying than niche marketing. But hey, I also wish that NBC would air the Chinese Table Tennis Championships……..to each their own I guess….

Alot of marketers automatically assume that in order to make money, they will need to outsource. Some make the assumption that the quicker they do it, the quicker they will make money and rush headlong blindly into paying people for things that won’t improve their bottom line.

It is kind of like buying those “magic bullet” tools….you know the kind….the software that is supposed to make life easier on you by getting you ranked…but instead act more like a money drain than an actual tool that will help you improve your business.

Typically, when I consider outsourcing, I ask myself these questions….

• Is the website already generating money?- As a general rule, I won’t start to outsource until I can leverage the money I am making on the site to go towards the costs of outsourcing. Most who first start to outsource view it as a way to eventually make money. I think that unless you know your averages and can prognosticate into the future with relative certainty that you will profit from outsourcing, then outsourcing is not something to take lightly. If you already have money coming into your online business, the losses you take won’t be coming directly from your pocket.
• If it isn’t generating money, can I build a timeline to know when it will pay for itself? In some cases, like outsourcing product development, you don’t know definitively what will happen (actually, you never do). In this case, I will look at similar products and the monetization model that they are following to get a better and broader view of roughly how long it will take to reach profit. If the timeline is long, I may reconsider….
• If I outsource, will I be able to free myself up to do other more important things and will it have a positive benefit for my business that warrants an additional “employee” for the costs? The biggest part of outsourcing is to free up your time. A outsourcing trap that you can find yourself stuck in is outsourcing things that really don’t matter in the grand scope of things.
• Am I at a point in my business where I can’t do it myself and it needs to be scaled up?Eventually, you will reach the point where you can’t do everything yourself. If you already are in profit, then you may need to hire additional temporary employees to handle the more mundane things in your business.

If I can answer yes to 2 of those 3 questions, then I will consider outsourcing. If the business isn’t generating money and/or I don’t have an accurate feel for what to expect (which I will explain later), then I won’t.

When you “outsource”, you are essentially hiring a part-time on demand employee

To realistically look at outsourcing, think of it like you would if you owned a small business like a quick check mart. If your business after expenses is making $100 a day profit, and assuming that you yourself are on the payroll, you could probably hire a cashier. It would eat into your profits but you would be able to free yourself up from the menial tasks of running the front and focus on another part of your business…..like improving your margins. This costs you over half of your profits at $65 a day. You still have a net of $35 though.

Let’s imagine that you have tightened your margins up, and placed high margin, high impulse products up closer to the point of sale, add some specialty items and as a result, you increase your profits by 25%. You also decide to test opening up an hour earlier and staying open an hour later and increase your profits another 2% after cost, breaking even after labor.

So, using this scenario, you will have accrued a cost of $65 but after everything was said and done, you have not only freed yourself up from the cash register but your business is still profiting by $60, allowing you to focus on other parts of your business.

After a few months, you decide to add a deli to your quick mart in which you will sell cold cut sandwiches, gyros, and other easy to make items. You also add a fountain machine and high margin items like chips and cookies, which you bake there. The total cost is $5,000 for the addition. It is open for business for 2 hours at lunch and 3 hours at dinner. You run that part of the business yourself at first. The deli increases your overall net to $80 a day in profit after food costs.

It takes you 6 months to for the deli to pay for itself. After that, you hire someone to manage the deli, costing you $40 a day.

So, using this example, you have OUTSOURCED the cashier…then OUTSOURCED the cost of renovations….and OUTSOURCED the deli operations.

You began with $100 in profit. You ended with $105 in profit. Next step…streamlining operations…..

You find a guy that can not only work the cashier, he can also make sandwiches. You drop the cashier you currently have and hire him on for $1.50 an hour more. You hire a part time weekend cashier as well. Suddenly, you have someone there that can work the cash register AND the deli throughout the day. You still help out during peak times but he can make sandwiches and operate the register during non-peak hours. The result is you pay an additional $15 a day but you make $50 extra a week.

Do you see the logic in outsourcing using this example? Outsourcing is very similar to having employees. Actually it is more like hiring a contractor to do your work for you.

But notice the reasoning why the example works.

1. The business was already profiting and had money coming in which also means that any losses won’t come directly from your pocket.
2. The reasoning behind “hiring” someone was to free yourself up to do the more important things, like increase ROI and tighten margins which justified you taking on the expense of hiring someone..
3. When you reach a point where you think the business needs to be scaled, then you add an “addition”.

Everything you do should be measurable….

If you have been told that it is all about building links and you think that outsourcing link building will help build the bottom line, but don’t have an accurate way to determine why building links will improve your bottom line AND don’t have figures to back up your suspicions, then you will either need to do the leg work to figure it out OR you don’t need to outsource the job.

This information can come from a variety of places. You can find reports on industry averages online for example. You can also guesstimate based on the emphasis that your competition places on the conversation. But frankly, nothing will be more definitive than your own experience.

Just to use myself as an example, I can pretty much tell you what I can count on if I build 100 pages on hubpages because I have done it. I can also give you an average conversion rate for some of my lists. I also know the average net profit that a publish article will bring in. And while I know that I know this comes from experience, if I didn’t sit down and track it, I would never had been able to formulate it to come up with something that can be measured accurately. This information is more important than you think.

If I know that I will average $1,200 a year (just an example figure..the average is actually higher) by creating 100 hubpages, I have a measureable way to understand what I can afford to use for outsourcing.

Since I know that 100 hubpages are worth $1,200 a year, I could invest ALL or part of my profits back into the business by outsourcing either the hub creation or the link building. Let’s say that I decide to go all out aggressive and try to scale it by outsourcing the content creation…

Let’s say that I have found someone willing for me to pay them $1,200 for 125 Hubpages on my behalf. By knowing my averages, I know that over the course of a year, I will likely double my potential earnings and cover my expenses within a 5-7 month window.

Now, I am simplifying this but I think you get the point….

I know about what to expect because I have personally experienced it. While past results may not be indicative of the future, I know that if I build 100 hubpages, a round about figure of what to expect.

Know Your Averages….Know Yourself….Know Your Business Model…

Probably the biggest key to knowing whether you need to outsource is to know what you are hoping to accomplish and what your website/business model is.

There are cases where outsourcing would actually not be prudent. Like the example below:

John Taylor, a main stay at the warrior forum, summed it up pretty well….

Let’s say you promote someone else’s product as an affiliate and
you earn a 50% commission on a product which sells for $67.00.

The sales conversion rate for the traffic that you are sending to
the merchants sales letter is converting at 3.6% and that translates
into an income of $1.20 for each visitor that you send to the site.
The equation is: ($67 x 50% x 3.60)/100= $1.206

Now, if you are using paid traffic, you know that to make a profit
you need to spend less than $1.20 per visitor.

Let’s say you are using an advertising network and you are paying
$13.50 per 1,000 impressions and you are getting a 1.3% click
through rate. Your actual cost per visitor is $1.04.
The maths: $13.50/(1,000 x 0.013)= $1.0385

Great! You are making a profit of $0.16 per visitor.

What would I outsource if I was to build an adsense empire?

Up to this point, I have focused on the reasons to outsource if you have your own product, are doing list management or affiliate marketing. But what about contextual ad networks like adsense?

Is there a way to outsource your work if you are building adsense sites?

The answer is yes but once again, you have to have a way to understand on average what each site is worth. Some of the things I would use would be CPM because this metric would help me understand about how much each visitor is worth and therefore how much each page on the whole is worth- this data could give me a broad view of how much I could aptly afford to spend before I have to start dipping into my own pocket to pay for it. It would also give me a round about “guess-ti-mation” of how long it would take me to get to profit if I was to outsource.

You can either gather this data from your own experience OR you can take a look at the business models of websites that are already doing this.

Example- WiseGeek, which is a very broad article private database, is monetized by adsense. They cover topics that range in spectrum, from remedies to flooring. In the past year, they have managed to build 40,000+ pages of unique content and rank for a variety of long tail keywords. Since they are private, you have to assume that they either have in house employees writing the content or they have found a cheap way to outsource their content generation.

Nonetheless, they are doing it and in all likelihood, paying for it. And if they are paying for it, chances are they are making a profit from it…

If I were going to base my model after their model, I would probably write them a long letter or call them telling them that I would like an interview and explaining that I was doing an exposé on business models that use adsense as their main source of income. I would ask if they would mind if I asked them a few questions.

The questions would be:

• What was their business plan and has it changed since the inception of their company
• How did they come up with their business model?
• What kind of challenges did they face and what challenges did they not expect to face?
• What and how much capital did they start with?
• What they would do different if they started afresh today.

There would be more questions, but I imagine the wheels in your head are turning. The point I am making is that if you want to learn how someone is doing something, in many cases, all you need to do is ask.

If a company is using employees, then chances are you can do the same by out sourcing. But you have to be smart about it. If it doesn’t improve your bottom line and there is no way to measure it, then out sourcing will be like shooting darts in the dark. Sometimes you will hit something but most of the time, you won’t.

Problems with Out sourcing that No one Talks About

There are problems that come with outsourcing. First of all, bear in mind that just like managing employees, you will be managing your outsourcers. What this means for you is that if you can’t give them clear, definitive guidelines of exactly what you want, then chances are you are going to be disappointed with the output.

And sometimes, even when you do give clear instructions, things can still be lost in translation. What I mean is that most of the time you are dealing with people who speak english as their second or third language. Sometimes managing them you have to spell everything out exactly as you want it and not take for granted that they get it.

Also, although sometimes you can find a diamond in the rough, so to speak, most of the time you will get what you pay for. In other words, if someone is offering to write at $1 an article, you will probably get a $1’s worth of quality. It isn’t always the case, but as a rule of thumb it is what you should expect.

A final thing to think about and then I’m done…..

Finding good outsourcer’s is hit and miss. You will find that you will spend a lot of time hiring and firing them. If they are new, don’t give them a big job…test them. If they come through, hire them for future projects. When you find the ones that are good to work with, pay them well and they will stick with you. Most out sourcers aren’t looking for one and done projects. They are looking for someone that will continuously pay them. Just something to think about.

It behooves you and your marketing endeavors to promote every single page you have out there that promotes your site.

-That means that if you are building links via commenting, that you should be promoting each and every page.

-That means that if you are doing the web 2.0 thing, you should be promoting each and ever page.

-That means that if you are using pages like hubpages, squidoo, weebly, wetpaint, ezinearticles, goarticles, knol, infobarrel or any of the thousands of properties that allow you to add a link pointing to your site, you should be promoting them.

You should stand on your stump and trumpet the funnels like you would trumpet your own sites.

If it is done through comment marketing, you should cite the sites as the next best thing since sliced cheese.

If it is a guest posting, you should rave about it like a maniac heretic raves about the second coming of Jesus…tomorrow…

You should encourage social interaction to those sites.

You should actively promote them.

The reason?

Simple. Common sense.

First of all, from an SEO standpoint the more visible you can make pages going to your site, the greater the chance of linking from other parties which will give that site valuable citations….which inadvertantly will give your site a boost.

From a straight up marketing sense, every chance you have to have eyeballs on your funnels makes for a chance (in some cases, a minuscule chance but a chance nonetheless) for a possible visit which could turn into a sale, a click or whatever it is you are trying to accomplish.

I understand why most don’t do it. Hell, I pick my spots when to promote something and when not to. But if I was smart, I would push every link that links to my site. This would include comments I made on other sites as well as my guest posts and even my social links.

We say we need targeted visitors. But the reality is the more eyes that you get on your property, the greater the chance of getting cited.

In a sense, promotion breeds more promotion…..

No-Follow/Do-Follow…Who Cares?

I have said this before but in the grand scheme of things, whether a link follows you or doesn’t follow doesn’t really matter. What matters is what kind of potential traffic you can leech from the link AND how the visitor coming through that link responds. Organic search advocates will say, well, it actually does matters since it helps your link acquisition and profile.

But, like I mentioned in Court’s Forum about a month back, if the link gives you visibility because it ranks in the search engines, what’s the difference? If throughout the course of a year, that one link brings in 100 extra visitors who are interested in your market from THAT page to YOUR site, who cares?

Alternatively, if the link exposes you to others within your niche (in a general sense) and in a sense “brands” your site in their minds, what’s the difference?

Citations breed more Citations….

The reality is that it is all about visibility…..

It doesn’t matter if your means to do this is organic search. It doesn’t matter if your means to do this is to inundate an article directory with hundreds of articles pointing to your site. It doesn’t matter if you are using web 2.0 properties, video, list exchanges, post exchanges, twitter, facebook or whatever.

If it makes you more visible to your market and brands you as an authority (or crazy cool) in your market, then you can sit back, pat yourself on the derrière and say to yourself, job well done. The money will follow…..

Promoting things that link to your links, your funnels, or your actually site just makes practical sense. It is kind of like having creating hundreds of virtual billboards across the net.

Promoting them, just gets more eyes on the billboards which could get more citations and even more eyeballs.

This isn’t for everyone though

Now what I am talking about here is 2nd party sites, not the sites that you create on your own. These are in some cases, (as in making comments) things you can do yourself, but ultimately what you want are the unsolicited links….those are the links that really funnel traffic.

Obviously, if your site is a 2 page site on how to make your facial scars go away with a product, then it doesn’t make much sense to promote this way.

Alternatively, if you site is something that you wouldn’t show to your best friend or your mama, then chances are good that you would do better with organic traffic (google doesn’t care about quality…they just care about backlinks).

But if you have a full fledged site that is general enough that a market could be interested in what you have to say (like the “go green” market or even the make money online market), then promoting pages and websites that link to you could capture a segment of the market that organic search quite frankly, won’t in most cases (to prove a point, when was the last time you googled “make money online or internet marketing?”…and no, doing keyword research doesn’t count…)

The X Factoid

The X factor, of course, is how crazy cool your site is.

It is how well you speak to your market.

It is whether you are viewed as just another blog like every other blog out there

It is how different you are than those around you.

It is about building a tribe of people who feel like they could sit at starbucks, have a cup of coffee and an actual worthwhile conversation with you.

This isn’t a new idea, by the way. Jack Humphries and all the social marketing cronies have been promoting like this all along. And while I don’t necessarily agree with everything that they say (twitter..for instance), the idea of inundating the web with links to your site for a general market, promoting those links to make them more visible thus giving you more chances to get visitors (what you do with them is up to you) and leveraging the potential traffic to build a list, make a sale or for the potential random citation does.

In the offline world, that would be called advertising….you know, like the crap you see on bus stop benches and in subway terminals, on billboards and in your junk mail.

….Dunno why us internet marketers don’t view it the same but whatever….

Now, I will always have my mini sites that will pimp out ways to get the girl, wart removal creams, fix your back problems and, by the way, I guarantee that with this proven system you can and will be able to blow up your bookie’s bank account (it my 5 star lock of the day).

I would also NOT show any of these sites to my mother either. In fact, I probably wouldn’t show off these sites to my friends (well, there is one who would get a kick out of my them…)

I DEFINITELY wouldn’t suggest most of the products I peddle to anyone off line….

The sites I am talking about are the larger, general market sites. The sites that I am proud of. The sites that my market would deem as a shining light to the community surrounding it. The sites that get links without me having to hunt them down….you get the point.

Now, maybe I am getting soft in my old age. Maybe I have found that I get more satisfaction out of building something REAL that means something to the market and isn’t simply a sales pitch for a shitty product that in all likelihood won’t work as advertised and is designed with heavy sales triggers to simply tug at the heartstrings of the consumer.

I do know this though. While the saying “if you build it, they will come” motto shouldn’t be anyone’s mantra other than the casual blogger who wants to daydream his way to success, if you build something actually worthwhile to your market and make it VISIBLE to those who would be interested in it, then it will be a raging success. The key is the visibility factor and the Connectivity of your message.

Selling to a market is not hard. It never has been. It is just about knowing what a market wants.

It is connecting with your market and being visible enough that your market even notices you in the first place. That is the sticking point.

I was talking with a reader recently who had a goal of making $3k with adsense within 3 months. He asked if it was possible and explained that currently, he was making roughly $5 a day currently.

To make $3,000 a month, he would effectively have to raise his daily earnings to roughly $100 a day.

Is is plausible within that short amount of time? It is. But how would you effectively know what is possible and what isn’t in terms of adsense? Your metrics would be one way. Determining the ceiling of your market would be another.

People who use adsense use the wrong metrics when judging how well they are doing…

There are only two metrics that mean anything in terms of adsense (or any other offer you list). Many adsense publishers tend to think in terms of volume of traffic. While it is important, there are two metrics will could help you lower the amount of traffic you think you need while raising the bar, so to speak, and increase their bottom line.

1. Click Through Rate
2. CPM (cost per 1,000)

The CTR is obvious. If you aren’t getting a good click through rate, chances are the adsense ads (or your offer) isn’t targeted enough to generate clicks. In the case of adsense, this could be a lack of advertisers for your conversation/keyword (in which case, you would get either those hated PSA’s or a vertical).

The problem with adsense, at least in this case, is that if the ads aren’t targeted enough, you won’t get click through’s and the click through’s themself won’t be worth much to you, the publisher.

Enter the CPM. The CPM will give you an overall view of how much Google (and those who advertise using adwords) considers your site, value wise.

Knowing your CPM combined with your CTR can give you an approximate value on how much traffic you need to attain your goals.

I will keep this simple. If your CPM is $25 and you are getting 1,000 visitors a day to your site, in order to make $100 a day, you would need 4,000 visitors.

Why would the CTR matter? Because if your click through rate is 4% and you raise it just 1% (through testing and tracking), you will effectively raise your CPM and therefore be able to lower the amount of traffic you need.

Makes sense, right? And yet, most publishers look at it from a dollar viewpoint without understanding knowing where the top of their market is.

Adsense is probably NOT the way to go in most cases

What? Is this possible? What the heck am I saying, right? Listen, you can make a ton of money with adsense. This is true. The problem with adsense is the CPM generally is so low, that monetizing with something else will almost always be better than simply mindlessly slapping down some code and taking whatever Google will give you.

Adsense is the easier way, sure. But in most cases, it isn’t the best. Let me explain….

Adwords advertisers play with real money. The purpose of them spending money on advertising is because they want to make money. These guys, provided they aren’t using the initial product as a loss leader, have to know things like ROI. That is an oversimplification but bear with me….

In other words, they usually have tracked their campaigns and figured out that X amount of clicks will happen before they make a sale. They also know that if they are paying $1 for a click and the product they are selling is $47, that they need at least one sale for every 47 clicks to break even. Makes sense so far, right?

Usually, a successful adwords campaign will start general with a plethora of keywords and then, over time, will pair down to keywords that actually convert. The reasoning is simple. Toss out the junk, non-converting keywords and stick with the tried and true converting keywords. Typically, these keywords will pay more to the adsense publisher BECAUSE they convert better for the advertiser.

If you search hard enough in your niche, you will start to see the same adwords advertisers over and over again, over the long haul. If you spot these, you know what is making money….after all, they wouldn’t incessantly just keep dumping money into google without the payoff.

So, if you have done your research for your market, watched what the advertisers are advertising and you find that 2 of the 5 ads in your niche “stick”, then it means that that advertiser is making money.

Their Ad Copy is working…..

Their landing page is working too….

Your next step? Cut out the middle man (in this case, Google)….

Check to see if the advertiser has an affiliate program. If they do, sign up. Now use their ad copy (which you have carefully watched) and place it on your site.

Now for the math….

You have a site with google adsense. Your CPM is $20 and your CTR is 4%. In other words, for every 1,000 visits, you are getting 40 Clicks making each click worth .50 cents.

The advertiser isn’t going to give you the conversion data but you can kind of figure it out on your own by looking at their campaigns. Let’s assume that you have watched their campaign using keyword spy or some other advertising monitoring device. And let’s assume that you have figured out that they have paired down their buy words over a period of time to a small grouping.

Let’s also assume that their affiliate program is paying $20 per sale.

Assuming that the product you selected was targeted for your niche, just 1 sale out of 1,000 people would match the value that google has assigned your site. If the offer is converting at 4%, that would mean that 1 in 25 people who viewed the offer would bite.

If your CTR is 5%, that would mean that your CPM for that offer would double the amount that Google paid you. (50 clicks = approx. 2 sales @ $20 per sale).

Sounds logical, right? So why don’t more people do this? Because they are lazy.

The big picture

Rather than cutting things down microscopically, I tend to like to think in terms of yearly differences. The reason is because a few pennies here and there tend to be discounted. For instance, if the effect of doing the work to increase your CTR by a percent, is only $20 per month, you may look at it and say why bother?

But if you look at it from a yearly perspective, you start to see the significance…..

What looks more pertinent?

• $20 a month extra?
• $240 a year extra?

So, math time once again and then I am done….

Your adsense CPM is $20. Each month, you average 3,000 uniques, which equate to $60 check each month.

Instead you do the leg work on your market, find the advertisers that are making the real money (based on longevity of the ad and its placement on the google network) and carefully select the ones that are proven.

Your ad CPM is $30. (going lower with the number) With 3,000 uniques a month, the company cuts you a check of $90 each month.

Let’s put it into a bigger perspective now….

Yearly, you could get $720 from Google……..

$1080 by cutting the middle man out of the mix….($340 dollar difference).

Now, you tell me….what is better and will generate a bigger return? Just something to chew on…..

If you have trouble with setting goals, an acquaintance of mine who runs a newsletter is giving out his “goal” e-book with worksheets. You don’t have to sign up for a list (although his newsletter is very good…and entertaining to boot if you like good reads). Just a heads up though.

To check it out, click here. It is Paul Myers for anyone wondering…and it’s free….

My Future Goals for Myself- My personal resolutions

1. Run 20 miles a week- I am almost ashamed to admit it but I have put on a little weight. Three years ago, I was running 2 miles in 12 minutes and was competitive in 5 and 10k’s. These days, the only things I would be competitive in is a pie eating contest. I am 6 feet tall and weigh around 200 pounds. I need to drop that by at least 25 pounds…..running will help me get there.
2. -Read two classics a month and put it into a marketing perspective- This is really for me to further improve my writing overall. If you want to learn how to write, the quick way is to read more. Building Stories and marketing go hand in hand. One thing I have noticed is that the best marketers out there are the ones who can tell the best stories. One of Claude Hopkin’s ads ran for over 70 years and it was little more than a narrative. Who knows? I may even build a site where I discuss some of the classics. Catcher in the Rye, anyone?
3. Go to Bed Earlier/ Get Up Earlier- I have been a night owl the better part of my life. There are very few days where I go to bed earlier than 1:30 and because of that, there are very few morning where I get up earlier than 9:30. I think that this messes with my productivity on the whole. In fact, there is a Chinese saying that goes like this:“No one who can rise before dawn 365 days a year fails to make his family rich.” I believe that there is some wisdom in those words.
4. I need to cut the fat, keep the lean AND maximize what is working- I talk about it all the time but unfortunately don’t do it as often as I should. Nearly 85% of my online income comes from 10% of the websites/traffic funnels I have in place. I suspect that those of you who have 100’s of sites would realize you are probably in the same boat. So, what do you do? Well, if you are like me, you continue to spit out site after site. Recently, I started thinking about this. What if, rather than constantly concentrating on new sites, I instead maximized my return on the websites that are generating real income? I could go into a 5,000 word dissertation on why we seem to like to sabotage our efforts by concentrating on things that don’t work but won’t. Instead, I will just resolve to do a better job…
5. I want to spend more time helping people and less time trying to FOOL them- 5 years ago, it was okay for me to write a completely fake review for a product in the effort to make money from. A year ago, it was okay to build a persona that was built for no other reason than to fool people into relating with my fake character who would, in turn, buy a product that I probably wouldn’t recommend to someone that I didn’t like. Blame it on having a kid, getting older, circumstances…whatever…but something tells me that there is more to life than making a pile of money and buying shit. People like Jay Abraham and Zig Ziglar preach about helping people as the way to not only more money but more happiness as well. Maybe they know something that the majority of the make money crowd doesn’t.
6. I am actually going to improve this site and make an effort to make it more visible- As much as I like the organic and home remedy markets, I really have grown to love this blog. Maybe it is because I have such a passion for it. Maybe it is because I can actually talk with people that love and do (or wish they do) what I do. I think 2010 I am going to really make a push to legitimize this website as a good source for information on internet marketing. I write on this blog whenever I feel like it. I haven’t tried to optimize this site, rank for anything or even publicize the site whatsoever. In essence, this site has been the red headed stepchild that I neglected. This year, I will pay more attention to it and may even (**gasp**) SEO it….finally…

That’s it for my resolutions. You can hold me accountable.

Do you have any resolutions for 2010?

Making blanket statements like they don’t rank so therefore they aren’t relevant is absolutely crazy. Organic listings can be an important strategy. But if they were the only strategy, people like Frank Kern (who is considered one of the top online copywriters today) would be broke rather than pulling in 7 and 8 figures. The reason why I mention this is because there is this prevailing attitude that organic search will play a vital role to making money online. It could make you money online. But make no bones about it….organic listings is just one method to funnel traffic to your site.

I am not going to argue the fact that organic listings will generate income. That is a known fact. End of discussion. If you have the discipline to “game” Google by generating links and lots of them, then you will rank for your keyword and hopefully, make money funneling traffic to your site via organic listings. But to state that it is the “best” way to generate income is to overlook so many other marketing models that work as well.

And, frankly, it is something that I would like to address….using social platforms to make money online…..

Why would you want to become social in the first place? After all, if organic search is where it’s at and building a thin affiliate site is easier than putting in the work of “socializing”, what would be the chief motivator?

Well, diversification would be the biggest reason…

One of these days, Google is going to devalue links to an extent and start adding other things into its algo (such as bounce rate, time spent on page, ect…) as it accumulates more and more data. Google’s mission is to give the searcher the most relevant information. Do you honestly believe that they will keep the current algo of “the one with the most ‘votes’ wins in place indefinitely?

Google hasn’t made a major change in about 10 years. For those of you who remember the last change, you can also remember the heartache that it caused. Many marketers and businesses went from making six and seven figures to nothing overnight.

Now the above scenario may or may not happen. But that said, do you really want to be THAT guy who’s eggs are all in the Google basket banking that backlinks will continue to be the reason why you rank?

Using social marketing can, in effect Google Proof your business, especially if your business is building your brand as an authority in your market.

But, let me make something clear here. The kind of social marketing I am talking about is not about getting worthless visits from Digg or the “I follow you, you follow me” twitter strategy that everyone seems to want to push. That stuff doesn’t work and will never work from a scalable point of view.

How to Make Money Online with Social Media…..

A decade or so ago, my first taste of internet marketing came in the form of social marketing. Back then, if you were interested in something and wanted to surrounded by others who were interested in the same thing, you went to forums.

If you said things that made sense and was an active member in the forum (or various forums in your niche), eventually people would follow you and respect you.

If you built a site based on the niche and “advertised” it via your signature link, you would get visitors and if you really knew what you were talking about, you would actually have people referencing you and your site for better information.

You give good information that people felt was valuable and you would get traffic. People would trust you and in turn, you would suggest things that would make you money. If the things you suggest help those you suggest them to, then your credibility is enhanced and your “brand” begins to grow.

Eventually, those that are the “tribe” leaders in your niche are forced to notice you (because of the number of times you are metioned), agree that you are a good source for information and you become a “tribe” leader.

Pretty simple AND it makes sense,right?

My first “social” site netted me 60k by accident (I didn’t know or understand what I was doing then) the first year using the strategy above…..

I also didn’t “rank” for any of the niche terms. In effect, all of my “business” came directly through referrals….No SEO because I didn’t understand it and didn’t know about its importance.

In fact, an acquaintance of mine e-mailed back then with a laundry list of things that I should do to become more visible. My title tags were ugly….my headers were off…I wasn’t using my meta tags (it was important back then)..no descriptions…ect…

…and yet I was stupidly just making money from it by simply being a part in a market that I was highly passionate about and actually liked….

By the way, this is a viable way to use forums to make money online and build your brand even today…..

Once again….

• Find where your market congregates
• Say things that make sense AND have value to your market….
• Gain Exposure through casual mentions (either by networking with other bloggers or through the forums) to increase credibility
• Sell things…casually….
• Happy customers = more credibility and repeat business
• More credibility = even more exposure & more sales

Busting the Social Marketing-is-Not-Targetted-So-Therefore-Does-Not-Make-Money Myth

A lot of organic search marketers will be quick to point out that people who do searches for “money” or “buy” keywords are looking for something specific to buy and that social mavens aren’t. They are right, you know…and then again,they aren’t.

The trick is to look at permission marketers to see how they set up their net….

You see, unlike organic/search marketing which can be a one and done kind of affair (someone has an issue-you provide them with the answer via contextual ads, your actual product or affiliate product-they purchase it or don’t), permission based marketing is not necessarily concerned with an immediate sale. Instead, they just kind of hang around, prove their value and ideally speaking, make repeated sales….

And the same thing applies with the so-called social blogs that catch air and fly. They get their “followers”….their followers “vouch” for them or think they are crazy cool in forums and their own web properties…people who visit think it is more believable to come from a third party source and check it out….they get more fans and so on and so forth….

But when do fans become buyers??

The answer is whenever you suggest something, provided you have enough sway. Think of it this way….if Grizzly, who is by and large an adsense guy, suddenly put out a post saying I really like so-and-so and think that it would be a good tool for people who are using my adsense system, how many people who really respect him would buy or in the very least strongly consider it? My guesstimate would be a lot. And it wouldn’t be those who arrive at his page via organic search either(although the amount of comments he would get and the ensuing discussion would surely help “proof” him).

Now that seems so elementary, right? Suggest stuff that someone in whatever market you are in may be interested in and sell them stuff because they trust and like you.

Now, I am sure that you are thinking at this very moment…..doesn’t every friggin’ blogger and newbie make money online person state these kinds of things?…the answer is yes…but they miss the one key element in the whole thing….

The Key is Value and Perception of “BRAND”

Value is the equation that most marketers (and bloggers) miss. You hear it thrown around like “value” is something that is clear cut and tangible. Make your stuff “valuable” and people will love it. Pass value to your customers. But what exactly is value?

The reality is that value is determined by the visitor right? Some reading this right now will get absolutely no value out of what I am saying. Others will get some…maybe one will think that this makes perfect sense and will be the reason why they go out and take action today. Hopefully, others will get pissed at it and write something on their site about how wrong I am (..and link to me….after all, in the world of google, there is nothing wrong with a little bad press here and there).

Oprah Winfrey is valuable to millions of women who watch her…hence, why anytime she mentions a book, it is an automatic bestseller.

Frank Kern, Mike Filsaime, Dan Kennedy is valuable to thousands of internet marketers…hence, why their seminars sell out in minutes despite the fact that they cost $1,000’s of dollars to attend…

Darren Rouse (love him or hate him) is valuable to the photography world…hence, why he is on pace for a $100,000 dollar month…

None of these guys are “product specific” like organic search marketers would shoot for. Instead, they are Market Specific. Oprah Winfrey can turn a book into a bestseller one day and have everyone making a mad rush for the organic grocery store for a certain type of B vitamin the next.

Frank Kern freely admits that he knows nothing about SEO. He doesn’t have to. He knows his market. He knows what moves his market. And he understands the verticals associated with his market…..and the final piece?…….

His market trusts hims, likes him, and as a consequence, buys stuff from him….

No SEO required……

The “value” you give must be unique OR your brand needs to be strong…

All those mentioned above have something that most of us don’t…they have all managed to become a brand all to themselves. Those are extreme cases though. Chances are you will never reach the ranks of the Oprah’s in terms of brand acknowledgement. But that is not to say that you can’t brand your name in smaller markets.

Remember me mentioning my 60k in the first year accident? Well, that was due largely to the fact that my name (in this case, it was my forum handle) became branded to the market I was in. I wasn’t at the top of the market either….more like the middle. But if you had been in that particular market 10 years ago, chances are good you would have heard of me and visited my site…hell, you may have even talked with me personally.

Some Key Concerns…the greater the ‘Ambition’, the harder it is to get there and the more value you need….

Competition in certain markets are fierce. They are fierce not only in trying to gain a foothold via social marketing…they are also fierce in terms of ranking for it in the search engines as well.

Case in point…the make money online niche…..

And if you have entertained or even built a blog in this lucrative niche (it has a very hungry, albeit naive market), you have probably figured out that it is one thing to build it and another thing altogether to gain a following. And it is even harder to get casual mentions (largely because the MMO and internet marketing niches like to keep who they link to close to their chest..who wants to give up a sale, right?)

The reason why most Make Money Online Bloggers fail isn’t about persevering….while it is true that the “dip” (as Seth Godin calls it) is much deeper making getting to the proverbial garden of eden (or “A-list) much, much harder…the reality is that most don’t have a unique selling position. In effect, they can’t sell themselves. And the reason is because the…here-comes-that-word-again…value that they are giving isn’t really valuable at all……

How to know if you aren’t valuable-

If your content is being peddled on 1,000’s of other websites, you can pretty much bet that your “value” is very close to nothing. If you are delivering this kind of content, one of two things will happen:

• Your Readership will eventually “outgrow” you.
• You will never develop a readership in the first place

Who Wants Readers again?

Thinking that readers are a waste of time is a lot like thinking that no one makes money with adsense because YOU don’t make money with adsense. Readers, in and of themselves won’t make you money. That’s true. But, what you have when it comes to “readers” (provided the readers aren’t simply bloggers looking to use your site as a bathroom with their comments in a vane attempt to leech traffic), they are still a community of like minded individuals with common goals, directives, wants and desires.

That’s important to realize because IF that reader values you and IF that reader believes what you are saying and IF that reader feels enlightened or smarter when they read your junk, THEN you may make indirect sales through passing products that will help with their common goals, wants, directives or desires.

And IF you meet the above criteria, it is all about the marketing model. Adsense won’t work that well with this model because frankly, it is too impersonal. Affiliate programs do work though. So does selling your own stuff.

Bonus points if you are smart enough to build a list and use the list as another way to pass value and entertainment (and stuff) to your readership.

The more competitive the niche, the more value you have to give. Value can be entertainment (like Allen Gardyne’s Video Blog) or it can be actually informative OR the best case scenario is it has both (nickycakes).

The value equation is also the primary reason why so many marketers opt for adsense and thin affiliate sites. After all, it is much easier to throw down some crappy rewritten (or spun) article, toss some links to it and rank for a long tail keyword. If you can get top listings organically, who cares about value or uniqueness, right?

It is much easier to say the same thing that everyone else is saying and simply opt for “gaming” google by generating links than it is to create your own “tribe” of folks who trust you, believe what you say, are willing to talk about you online, and buy from you or your brand.

Building a brand, making yourself an authority and connecting to your readership (or list) may be harder but it insulates you from the funny permutations and fickleness of the search engines because you aren’t relying on it for your income. It is a long term strategy. And the only variable that can mess it up is you….not google…..not any other search engine….

….You become Google-Proof…..

Smart Marketers Build Lists

I will probably keep this section short as I intend to really get into list building techniques at a later date (and no, it won’t be the usual paint-by-numbers bullshit you are used to seeing) but if you have a website and are looking to really “connect” with your audience, permission marketing will by and far give you another means to…well, be “connected”.

That is the secret of the marketing gurus who don’t focus on SEO. It really is as easy as that. But once again, where most marketers get it all wrong is their list is all about “them” and not really about the person they are sending it to.

In a nutshell, the “blueprint” looks almost identical to social marketing:

• Build a landing page with an over-the-top offer OR a website with a ton of value for the market you are courting…
• Collect e-mail addresses
• Send your list content that is considered valuable
• Sell them stuff that they are interested in
• They buy stuff because they respect you, like you and believe that you are going to give them value no matter what…

Reading that makes you feel like you have seen it before,right? A little deja vu in action….

And once again, I am not hosing ranking organically…I am just trying to give a different perspective on ways to build an online business. It is too easy to place one marketing method above the rest as the “best”. It is easy to make blanket assumptions like so-and-so doesn’t make money because they don’t rank. It isn’t the case. And thank goodness for that. If it were true, there would be a lot of businesses and brands out there today that would be broke.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays Everyone….

Here’s the deal:

He is giving 2 DVD’s away for free (minus the proverbial shipping and handling costs). The first one I have no idea about but it looks interesting….

how to find other traffic sources other than Google…I recently mentioned that Google wasn’t the only place to get traffic and apparently, right on cue, some guy goes off and does a $4,000 per head seminar on other places that you can get traffic. Go figure.

The second one I do have an idea about-

Frank Kern’s Core Influence presentation which is absolutely awesome and comes highly recommended to anyone, beginner or advanced, who is looking to build a business online. I own a copy already (paid for it) and I will vouch that it is good.

For those of you who don’t know who Frank Kern is, he teaches practical internet marketing and comes with a direct response pedigree. I could go on and on about direct mail advertisers and how most of the internet marketing sales techniques have been stolen from direct response advertisements but I would bore you to tears.

His stuff is very good and is usually not cheap which means that most aren’t able to afford it (the last thing I bought from him was in the $2,000 range). He is in the same league as Jay Abraham, Dan Kennedy and Yanik Silver and most of the time, you won’t find him peddling the typical e-book internet marketing bullshit that is nothing more than rehashed garbage.

Anyway, the S&H is $9.00 if you live in the U.S. and $22.00 if you live outside of the U.S. and it comes with no strings attached….no funny hidden continuity model..he doesn’t even try to upsell you.

You can check it out here. Frank Kern’s Free Deal.…

And once again….I get absolutely nothing by promoting it…..

I doubt that many who are reading this have experienced a $100 day, never mind a $1,000+ day. Most haven’t even experienced a $100 month.

What if what you believe will make you money online is….wrong???

Why brick and mortar businesses have it right and most internet marketers don’t get “IT”…..

I am going to use a real world example here so bear with me and then YOU tell me how building a business online is different……

Let’s say that you make the best cookies in {insert your city here}. Your family & friends all tell you that you should build a cookie making business. After a lot of thought, you take your nest egg and invest into materials that you will need to create your “dream”.

You find a street a little off the beaten path and open up your storefront. At this point, no one other than your friends and family and those who just happen down the street know you exist. You, in effect, may as not exist to the rest of the city because they don’t know you are there….but the ones that do love your cookies….

You talk with your landlord and he agrees to give you a sign on the street to help with visibility. Your sign helps with your “brand” but still, the only folks that know you exist are the ones that go down the street.

You don’t have enough money for advertising in the paper or on TV so you decide to do it cheaply. You hire a couple school kids, print up some flyers with a coupon and send them to work placing your flyers in doors and on cars in the area.

Because of this, your immediate area, in the very least, knows you exist. You start to get traffic into your store from people who are either curious about what your store or want to buy cookies. And in essence, you start to sell cookies.

The only problem is you are barely making rent. More traffic would mean more to your bottom line. However, you don’t have a budget for advertising…in short, you are struggling. The people who do come to your store love you. Some actually talk about you and suggest you. But it isn’t enough to really ramp up production.

You have hit a wall.

You decide that you need to advertise in more communities. There is a major street two blocks up and you decide to go out in your off time and stuff cars around a local supermarket. You do a one day only sale in which anyone who comes in can “buy one & get one free”.

As a result, you get more traffic. From that traffic, a handful become “regulars” and buy cookies on a regular basis. They also become “mavens” professing how addictive your cookies are.

Chalk one up for the team, right?

You learn of a charity event in town that is going to be dessert based. People will pay $50 to get into the place and get to “taste” desserts from various vendors. You decide to donate your time (and cookies) to the event. As a result, more people know about you. You get lucky….a local news station covering the event decides to interview you. You are suddenly on the map. Although it doesn’t help your business outright, people now know you exist.

I am going to stop right there as I could go on and on in terms of strategies to get seen and stay visible….

Your Cookie business = your labor of love…what you are ’selling’ to your market (could be content..could be an opt-in form…could be actual e-commerce)
Your storefront = Your website….
Your signs and flyers = funnels for your traffic to get there…
The charity event = places where your potential leads will discover you…

Can you spot any difference between this offline cookie business and an online business?

What if you were selling yourself? Any difference?

While some may argue that start up costs would be the difference I would have to disagree.

It doesn’t matter what business you are in. In the end, when everything is whittled down to its simplest common denominator, the bottom line is that every business is searching for leads.

• A restaurant’s leads would be those that eat with them
• A grocery stores leads would be those that buy groceries from them
• A hair stylist would get leads through walk-ins (if the salon is known) and word of mouth
• Wall-mart gets it leads from its strong brand

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that generating leads online is pretty much the same. You generate leads through word of mouth. You generate leads through association. You generate leads through pay-per-click. You generate leads through organic listings. You generate leads from being a stalwart in your market….

Those with the ability to get the most leads make the most money.

Whether it is online or offline is irrelevant.

And I know some of you will probably realize that leads is just another word for traffic. It is and it isn’t. You see, traffic can be untargeted. Leads are targeted. Leads become regular buyers. They talk about your product…whether this is simply content on a page or an actual product doesn’t matter. There is a huge difference between traffic and leads….

Adsense? You may not be gunning for leads yourself but you are advertising those who are. You are hoping that your visitors are targeted enough to click on a link. The advertiser is hoping that the visitor you sent them is interested in their product. If they are smart, they have a system in place that will help them retain the lead.

How do businesses get leads? Once again, the medium is irrelevant. Offline, this could be through conventional advertising or word of mouth. Online, this could be through conventional advertising (CCM brokers, contextual ads, banner ads on sites in the same markets), SEO advertising (through Search engine optimization), or…you guessed it, word of mouth.

Fact- All leads will cost you something. Everyone is looking for free traffic. In fact, so many people are looking for free traffic that most don’t bother looking for anything but. For whatever reason, we all want to believe that the internet = free….or cheaper in the very least.

Those that sell you on SEO for traffic are the most guilty of this. Free traffic, they say. And who doesn’t want something for free, especially if the potential for making money is so high from that traffic.

But once you start to factor in the time spent building up external links, paying for link services and ‘optimizing’ your site, you will realize that free has very little to do with SEO.

If it is going to cost you hundreds of hours in time and thousands of dollars in links to rank for a competitive keyword, then it is hardly free.

And let’s not even talk about the cost of retaining the ranking….

And what about the long tails that will get you a smattering of traffic here and there? Are they the answer? The reality is that while the long tails will get you traffic, they still have to be maintained. If they aren’t maintained, 9 times out of 10, they will lose rank. And if you are maintaining your 900 properties to make $100 a day, how much work is that? Does the work measure up to the costs?

…so much for FREE….

The ones that do the biggest disservice for the make money online “dreamers” are the ones who offer “proof” of their skills. The Shoemoney’s of the world that hold up the 100k check or the sites that show “proof” of their clickbank sales or adsense earnings.

The masses eat it up. However, they don’t factor in the actual “costs”. These marketers show them the gross, not the net. I have said this once and I will say it again…

A 100k check will look a lot less impressive if it cost you 90k to make it, right?- And in all likelihood, there was a cost that wasn’t factored into the equation…..

And yet so many marketers choose to believe what they want to believe. They don’t think in real business terms and don’t take into account the actual cost of their marketing plan.

Just something to chew on though.

A buddy of mine who wants to start a music business (he sells “sounds” for people interested in techno music and who need sound effects) online asked me for advice on how to build and promote his start up.

Easy, I told him. You build a adwords campaign to test the waters to see if there is interest. Then, once you discover the keywords (or conversations) that converts, you have to figure out an average percentage of buyers as opposed to clicks (cost) and determine if the product in and of itself has enough margin to make it worth it….

…if it doesn’t, then you either figure out a way to raise the margin (either through backsells, continuity or generate a way to keep buyers buying) or you decide to do something else….

It REALLY is as simple as that. And yet, most of us are more concerned with tips, tricks and crazy strategies that are good for the moment. And don’t get me wrong…I have been down more than a few rabbit trails in my online career…

The only point I am making is that I believe that 95% of all internet marketing wanna-be’s have it all wrong. They haven’t deduced what it is they are doing down to its most simplistic component and because of that, they can’t create the appropriate strategies to make money online.

Instead, they chase the “dreamer” strategies. The real world don’t work that way. Why would you think it would be any different online?

Just my opinion though…and you know what they say about opinions.