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,
