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Making A Buck From Your Website - It's A Numbers Game...Hi again and welcome to coaching lesson number 22. Today we're going to look at website traffic and talk about why it takes so many visitors for your site to make any real money for you. People email me all the time and ask questions along the lines of - "I've got 60/100/200 website visitors a day but I'm not making any money yet, what's wrong with my site?" To which I answer, "You need a lot more traffic than that to make a decent income from your site...in fact you need a lot more traffic than you think." Let's go through the numbers. We'll assume you have a site that promotes either affiliate products or you use your SBI site to generate leads for another website or an offline business you have. We'll also leave Adsense revenue out for now, because every click on an Adsense ad takes away one chance you have for selling your 'real' product or service. On average, for every 100 visitors who arrive at your site, only one or two will click on one of your affiliate links or click through to your main site where you sell your product or service. And then depending on how good your sales copy is (or the sales letter of the affiliate merchant) only 1% or 2% will make a purchase there as well. So, looking at these numbers, and taking a 1% response rate as pretty normal, you have to get 10,000 visitors to your website to generate 1 sale (100x100 visitors=1 sale)... Now if your site is getting 60 visitors a day, and they are reading on average 3 pages before they surf off to somewhere else, it's going to take you on average 55 days to make each sale. If the product you sell is a 30 dollar ebook with 15 dollars commission, you've set yourself up to make 99 bucks a year from your site... Pretty dismal isn't it. Now obviously, the more pages your visitors read, the higher the product value they buy, and the higher your conversion rates are, the better. You could double or triple this number, or more. The point is, you need a LOT of traffic and/or big ticket items to sell to make the average site earn you a respectable living. So, here are some tips for increasing your website's potential revenue and breaking into the big league of online entrepreneurs... 1) Do some research and find several big ticket items you can promote It doesn't matter what niche you're in, you can find things like seminars, big box home study courses, membership sites and the like to promote to your visitors. Sure you can promote $20 ebooks, but the big money is in making $200, $400 or a grand each time somebody buys something through your site. It's a lot easier to earn a hundred grand a year online by making a few large ticket sales than by selling 6,000+ ebooks that make you 15 bucks each. To find big ticket items in your niche, go to Google.com and use these search strings (change the keyword dog to something related to your niche market) allinurl:dog $2000 allintitle:dog $2000 allinurl:dog home study allintitle:dog home study allinurl:dog membership site allintitle:dog membership site allinurl:dog seminar allintitle:dog seminar You get the idea. These searches look for your keyword in the page title or page URL of sites in Google's search database. You may find the perfect bit ticket product related to and applicable to your niche market by doing this. Of course, the promoter may not have an affiliate program, but you could ask them about setting one up or do an offline joint venture with them and receive a percentage of their sales like Nori does with her real estate agent friend on Anguilla (see how Nori does this here using Form Build It) Do an allintitle: and allinurl: search for anything you can think of that relates to a big ticket item for your niche. Heck, change the $2000 in the first one to $5000 and see what happens :-) I hope you have fun with this one... 2) Find a way to incorporate travel and real estate referrals into your site like Nori Evoy has done You could offer travel to seminars, conventions and trade shows in your niche (hey, you could probably get a commission on ticket sales as well). Build pages related to popular holiday or gathering places that people in your niche frequent and offer accommodation and travel packages in those areas for when your readers visit. Remember, Nori has Ken as her mentor for these things...model what she is doing with her site in your own niche and you can really cash in with your SBI site. Read through her site and study what she is doing - it's a great education on how to build long term value on the web. Here's the link to Nori's site - take a good look through and see how many monetization models she is using already...and she's only just begun! To give you an example, I am building optimized pages around lifestyle real estate, farms for sale and acreage property for our Hobby and Lifestyle site based on the area of Australia in which we live. Once the traffic starts to flow to these pages, I've set up an offline joint venture with an honest and reliable real estate agent (yes I actually found one...her name is Wendy) who will pay me a referral fee for each property enquiry that turns into a sale. The average sale price in our area is between $250,000 for a house and up to $4 million for a large farm, and I'll receive a percentage of the sale price, so this could turn out to be a very lucrative partnership...better than selling 30 dollar ebooks and getting 15 bucks a pop anyway :-) And the best part is, I own the traffic. If the number of enquiries gets too much for Wendy, I can switch to a second or even a third agent and keep on building. Then I'm going to do the same thing with the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast near where I live and create pages for those areas as well. It will all be in our upcoming Lifestyle Property section of the site... How can you take this idea and apply it to your website? You can use affiliate programs and offline Joint Ventures to set up referral arrangements with reliable merchants in all sorts of areas. You can do this too, and you are only limited by your imagination in putting the deals together... 3) Build a list If you have your visitors' names and email addresses, you can send the same people back to your site (where they are exposed to your affiliate, Joint Venture and product links) again and again instead of just once. This gives you a multiplier effect and can exponentially increase every visitors' value to you. You can use the Solo Build It newsletter module for your list, but I prefer Aweber because it can send out your autoresponder messages in the exact order you want your readers to receive them. The main thing is that you get to work on building your list as soon as you can... That's 3 things you can do straight away to get started on increasing your traffic and making more from each visitor who passes through your website. For more ideas, go through Jimmy Brown's latest audio updates at his List and Traffic site. I get great new ideas every time I listen to him. Ok, that's enough for today. I hope you have enjoyed reading this lesson. Don't miss next weeks issue where I'll share two sources of great ideas on writing compelling sales copy for your website that are absolutely free to model and profit from. Until then, Warmly,
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