Sweet Night, Rough Day

Today was rough. Zonelabs hijacked my internet connection saying that the free trial for ZoneAlarm (that I had paid for) was up. They demanded that I produce a license key so I dug through my computer stuff and found everything but the key. Then I read in the manual that you had to register to get the key, it wasn't something that was written in the box like with most software. I try to register and get the key but the internet connection doesn't work because they have taken it hostage.......

Anyway, I'm tired of writing about this already so we will just say I had to run around town all afternoon and couldn't do any business work.

That was the rough day. The sweet night was last night. Burke and I met on AIM and discussed list monetization. Worlds collided and great ideas were developed. Incredible stuff!

PPC2 Facelift

The reconstruction of PPC2 is nearly complete. I just need to:

Reconfigure the contact form.
Add the autoresponder messages.
Redirect the Adwords ads.

I'm glad this one is nearly finished because out of the sites I'm focusing on, this one has the least potential for recurring income. This site really doesn't have anything related that could be promoted to the list.

This brings up a good point. In the future I will ONLY promote a niche that is a niche, not a product. The exception maybe something with at payout of over $100. Then and probably only then would I go through the trouble and expense of promoting a one-shot income producer.

As I contemplate my strategy, the power of what I have been missing becomes apparent. Not just apparent but it essentially punches me in the nose. With a list of people interested in a niche, you can promote ANYTHING related to that niche. Each new item will hit a different sector of your list that may not have bought the last 2 or 3 products you pushed but may really want the newest offer you promote. There are so many monetization tactics once you have a list it isn't even funny.

Once you have a REALLY REALLY good newsletter, you may even be able to charge people to be on your list... A $3 per month subscription fee may not seem like much but if you build a list of 2,000 or more then that instant, reliable income starts to add up.

This is Rough!

Going back to the old sites is a bit rough. I see how poorly some of them were thrown together and abandoned. This week is the week for PPC2. It is getting a complete renovation and looks 10 times better than it did before. I plan to have a seperate autoresponder setup for each product. Each of those will hit people 7 times in 7 days to get them to buy. If they don't buy after that, it pretty much means they don't want it. At least this is true for the merchandise promoted with PPC2.

The newest market that I decided to test before going back to the old sites just met its fate. Not only did it not make a single sale before expenses exceeded commissions, the merchant changed the pay structure without notice. No email or warning on the site. Nothing. If I hadn't looked at Clickbank just to find other similar ebooks, I would never have found out. Good thing is that not having to work on that site will give me more free time for the others.

Evaluating the current sites, it became clear to me that the Biz would easily clear $1k/month net once I get things clicking. That is even with only .5 sales/day from my product and less than $200 in Adsense revenue.

Wish me luck.

Product List Rework

Yeah, I'm reworking my messages for my list. I spent most of the day going through my messages and coming up with methods for monetizing them and building the site. Originally, I would just send people to an interesting article and that would be that. People received content and they were happy. Now I am setting up what could be called middleman pages. These pages give a little detail on the article in question while offering affiliate products related to the topic at hand.

While having only one of the pages was not effective before the way I have set things up now may change that. People on the list are constantly asking about where they can get the items mentioned in the articles. Now I am telling them on the page before the article. We will see how it goes.

After the amount of work it took to create the template for the middleman pages, I'm having serious doubts about my current strategy to go back and revitalize the old sites. I think I may have to limit the number of old sites to 2 or 3 a month and focus on those rather than cycling through all of them one week at a time. There is just too much to do and hitting a site once every 5-6 weeks just won't cut it.

I will start implementing the revitalization this week. It starts with PPC 2, followed by HTAR the next week.

Revelations Pt. 4 & Going Deep

Here's a bit of an explanation of my new philosophy.

Each site will become more than just a website with affiliate links, Adsense, and products. I view each now as a profit stream. With the exception of only one of my sites, each profit stream will have multiple income streams of its own. The sites will use PPC and SEO to get the traffic. Each page will be dedicated to a single desired action. No Adsense on affiliate pages, no affiliate links on newsletter sign up pages, etc.

Collecting the names and email addresses of as many visitors as possible is key. Once the name and email address is collected, I have control of where I direct the person. The person joins the flock and I direct the flock to where I want them to graze. As the flock grows, ROI increases because theywill be told to graze at one pasture after another without incurring additional costs to send them there.

I currently have 9 profit streams that I'm going to focus on until at least June 30, 2008. No new markets until I have maximized each profit stream. Of the 9, only 3 look like they may only be able to pump cash from a visitor once. I think that with some creative thinking 2 of those will be able to pull some thing off.

Adwords Editor

It's JonnyQ coming to you for the first time from a coffee shop. Sitting here, smelling the coffee and listening to the Monkees, I have decided that the lifestyle of an Internet marketer is definitely for me. Not that there was any doubt about that before but being in this relaxed atmosphere and entirely in control of what I do just reinforced everything.

Anyway, down to business.

I should have known this much, much earlier but I can be slow on the uptake sometimes. If you use Adwords, you need to get the Adwords Editor. I just downloaded it (it's free) and loaded hundreds of ADGROUPS by in minutes rather than hours. Get it!

Next week I go back to HTAR and start the revitalization.

Namesqueeze vs. Pop-In

I'm testing out using a pop-in to collect names and email addresses rather than the namesqueeze page. The reason being that the more people who see the salesletter, the more sales you make. If you have a 13% sign up rate at the namesqueeze, then only 13 out 100 see the salesletter. With the popin 100 out of 100 see it. I like those numbers better.

I'm hoping that the same number of people who were interested in the newsletter before will still sign up for it. We will see. I have my doubts though. A full webpage can do so much more convincing than a 400px by 400px box.

That's it for now. I will load my keywords and ads into Adwords for the new market I had planned to test. Everything was pretty much ready to go for it before the Revelations began. I'm going to go ahead with it and see where it takes me.

Revelations Pt. 3

I've started developing the plan to hit the old sites. Call it the JonnyQ Revitalization Project. Starting next week, I will devote a week to each site. I will build autoresponders, Adsense pages, affiliate product pages, forums, PPC, SEO, etc. I will also evaluate each site and see if a product is a viable option. I'm hoping to find at least additional 2 sites that would work for products and launch them.

This is Phase 1.
Completion Time: August 31, 2007

Phase 2 is devoted entirely to building an affiliate base and creating joint venture partnerships. While those will take place in Phase 1 for my first product site, it gets ramped up in Phase 2. During this period, I will create a site dedicated to training my affiliates and helping them become more productive.

Time Period: September 1, 2007 - December 31, 2007

I do have monetary goals for each phase but I'm keeping them to myself for the moment.

Revelations Pt. 2

I was at work and thinking about my goals for this year. I started creating a spreadsheet with my goals and how I would go about achieving them when began to think about what Jean-Rene said. He recommended going deep into a niche.

Suddenly I realized that I have a lot of prime real estate holdings right now. I just need to cultivate and monetize them. Out of all of my sites, the majority really lent themselves to product creation and newsletters. Those and the others could also be built up using forums. I think that rather than running off and testing a bunch of new markets, I will focus on where I already am. I mean, I created those sites because they were viable markets, I just didn't know how to monetize things effectively.

It's two years later and I have learned a lot. I think I can make the old sites work.

This is not to say that I won't be testing new markets. I will definitely be doing that but not nearly on the scale that I had been considering before.

Even Buggy Tracking Helps

If you've been reading for awhile, you know that I have been using Stuffed Tracker to track activity on my product site. Well, looking back at the history of my sales I noticed something.

*My test on email course vs newsletter was skewed and needs to be redone. However, the email course appeared to have higher productivity. I need to test it again.

*More sales came from viewing the sales page once than I had expected. I need to get a percentage for you. Give me a sec...

Ok...

One Time Views: 40% of sales
2 Times: 40%
3 - 5: 20%

Another thing it showed me was that NO ONE who was offered the discounted price for the video bought it. This does not just apply to the one-time offer itself but the product as a whole. If they saw the page with the discounted price, they never bought the video. My sample size is a little small for ensure that this is accurate but it is interesting. I'll probably let the OTO run for another week before I pull it just to get more data.

The problem with these stats is that the sample size is too small because the software hasn't been running the whole time the product has been out and it is buggy. Also, I have not been tracking the level of responsiveness to my newsletter until recently. Anyway, this information can give me an idea of where to focus my efforts.

Refund
Had my first one yesterday. The woman who purchased the product thought that it was a physical thing. When I offered to send her one, she decided she just wanted her money back. In talking to her though, I did find that she was interested in a specific area of the niche. There is another person out there with an ebook that covers just that. I think I may try this $7 report stuff out and offer the other guy's ebook as a backend. After generating a little money for him, he may be receptive to a JV.

Off From Work to Do Some Work

My car is in the shop for some repair so I decided to stay home from work today. I plan to have my first new market test up and running today.

I am also going to brainstorm monetization of my current list and possibly start list creation for HTAR.

So help me out. To monetize my list, I can:
1. Create a new full fledged product
2. Create a $7 report - Thanks, Burke
3. Offer affiliate e-products
4. Offer affiliate physical products
5. Create Adsense pages

What else?

Revelations

This morning, after thinking about last night's post, I came to the realization that I need to increase my subscribe rate. I know that seems obvious but the importance of doing so didn't really hit me until this morning. I guess sometimes you have to talk/write out things out before you can figure out what the real problem is.

Yes, I have been split testing my namesqueeze page but not as vigorously as I need to. I need that namesqueeze page to be a mini-salesletter that makes people feel that they HAVE to be a subscriber. I need to SELL them on becoming a free subscriber.

Integration Marketing

The question was asked, why go into more markets rather than going deep into the one I am already in. Basically the reason I want to get into more markets as an affiliate is so that I know which ones are profitable for my own products in the future. I am tired of having to go to work everyday so I need a stable, diversified income to make "retirement" come true. It is completely doable in a few years time but not with the level of success that I have been having.

Second, I am at a loss as to what to do with my current market now. You can find all kinds of information about starting things out but keeping the momentum is a problem. My model my be flawed. I average 100+ people to the site a day but only 13% sign up for the newsletter. Since I am using a namesqueeze page, that means only 13 people see my salesletter. Even at a conversion rate of 1%, I can see now why sales are sporadic. 1% of 13 people isn't much. I tested sending people directly to the sales page for a while but most of my conversions come from promotions in the newsletter and not the actual salesletter. I need to have a method of converting more of the original 100+ people into buyers. Any suggestions?

One thing about having a product, integration marketing is possible. There is a particular item that my niche needs after buying my product. This item happens to be something that I signed up to be an affiliate last January but only made one sale. You can imagine my surprise when I logged in today to find that I have made 3 sales this year and 2 of those in the past 3 days. These were from people on my list who had purchased the product and asked me for recommendations on where to get the necessary item. They bought from the merchant because they trusted me and liked MY product.

I will be adding an affiliate link to this merchant on my thank you page and adding an autoresponder message promoting them to those who bought my product. The purchases these people have been making at the merchant have been anywhere from $30 to $110. So I'm getting decent commissions without the extra labor of finding new prospects for the merchant.

What Else is New??

I'm behind. I don't know if I will meet my goal of testing 3 markets this month or not. I was able to get the ebook I plan to test first but it is over 100 pages long. It will take me a little while to get through it and make a review.

I have retooled the salesletter for my product. Split testing showed that the original sales letter converted slightly better. Now I have changed some of the images on that salesletter and I'm testing again.

I also made some changes to the Namesqueeze page after split testing it so the new trials begin there as well.

Actually, with those items taken care of I can focus on testing the new markets. I will start the integration marketing for my product later.

Market Research

I started doing some market research tonight. The plan is to get to basics as I should have done 2 years ago.

I had recently passed the two year mark for being in this game and I came to the conclusion that I have obviously been doing something wrong. With minor successes here and there, I haven't achieved nearly the level I think I should be at by now. The problem, I decided, was simple. I have not been:

Finding markets, testing markets, and eliminating markets.

If I had spent the past 2 years doing that, I would be in a much better position. Instead I got caught up in SEO, then trying to make Adsense only sites, then spending months and hundreds on a single market, and other nonsense.

I had been on the right track with the PPC site concept but there elements missing that prevented that from working as well as it could have.

Now I know what to do. I've written down my goal. I've written down my criteria for a "successful" market. Now I need to execute this process that has been 2 years in the making. Execute it ruthlessly.

Back from Out of Town

I'm back. I didn't do much over the weekend so I'm going to try to make up for it now. Last night I worked mostly on the one-time-offer page to get it to convert. It hasn't yet so I'm sure that it is the salescopy.

I noticed a reoccuring theme. My salescopy doesn't sell. I bought Yanik Silver's Instant Sales Letters last night so that I can see if that will turn things around. I REALLY hope that it does because I know my product is a good one. Everyone who has looked at it, customers and friends, has said so. I just need good copy to convince people that they really want it.

The turnaround. Jean-Rene asked what I did differently to start making sales again after the drought. There were a couple things, some you will believe, some you might not.

First thing I did was I sent out a pre-sale soft sale letter of sorts. It was mostly content on what beginners need to succeed in this niche. The letter only mentioned my product in one sentence and the rest of the letter was content. Then a couple days later I sent out an email to the entire list telling the purchasers that their bonus booklet was finally finished and to email me to get it. In that letter I hit them with the hard sell and told them all about the 8 week money back guarantee.

The second thing you may or may not agree with. Just before the drought, I was diving my money like I do at the beginning of every month. Some money goes to emergency savings, some goes toward investments, some for play money, and some I give to the church. Well I usually give 10% of what I make but at the beginning of last month I decided that I didn't want to give that much. Not for any particular reason other than I was feeling a bit greedy. Sales immediately dried up. I sent out broadcasts, tuned sales letters, etc. and nothing helped. Then I decided to give the rest of the 10% I usually donate. Only then did the sales start to roll in.

You may or may not believe this and to be honest, I don't really care=) What I know is that when I was greedy, money ran from me. When finally felt like giving again, not because I wasn't making sales but because I knew I hadn't given out of greed, money came to me.

Lesson learned.