So as we touched on in our last post, all things that relate to monetization in the online business world start with Traffic. It is the river flowing towards your online business. Feel free to let me know if I am getting too metaphysical sounding.

Anywho, once we have this traffic flowing towards us, it is our job to funnel it through some sort of conversion piece. The purpose of this conversion piece is to catch a certain percentage of the traffic flowing towards us and to convert them into some actionable event, such as a sale.

If you are sending traffic from an email list to a specific landing page on one of your e-commerce sites that sells a single product, or a single product with multiple variations, then in theory your conversion rate could get as high as 5%

(more…)

In our last post we discussed calculating value-per-visitor. This calculation is fairly straightforward when it comes to “front end” money to your website. However, when you start dealing with “back end” money, such as revenue from your opt-in email list, things get a touch more tricky.

Essential to this discussion is the concept of “discounting the future”. It’s an economic concept based on the idea that a dollar in your pocket today is worth more than a dollar you might receive a year from now, due to inflation.

(more…)

The following post about extra ways to make money online was submitted by Marsello Oentoro. 

During tough financial times, like the recession we currently find ourselves in, many of people try to find creative ways to make some extra income.  Some take part time jobs bagging groceries or working at Target, but is that the most efficient way to make extra money? 

I’ve been guilty of such short sightedness myself, committing my time to a mundane translating job at a law firm.  Even though the money was pretty good, the gruesome hours I put into that job finally took its toll in the form of sleep depravation, which ultimately affected my full time job.

(more…)

For a small business owner, there is no better feeling than waking up after a good night’s sleep to discover ecommerce, affiliate, or advertising income that was not in your account when you went to bed. The problem is that when you are just starting out is that at times, you can go days without making a cent.

This lack of income can make it feel as if all your hard work is for nothing, like the wheels are spinning but you haven’t moved an inch. The solution is to focus on building equity instead of income.

In the early stages of online business, equity is almost always easier to build than income. Before we get into specifics about how to build online equity let’s start by defining what online equity is. I would define online equity as any measurable statistic, associated with your online business that increases your leverage for making money online.

Let me give you some examples… Gaining 100 new followers for your email newsletter would count as an increase in online equity. In addition adding 10 new pages of content to your website would most likely count as an increase in online equity. Gaining 500 new friends, all interested in your businesses niche, on a social networking site like Facebook would count as an increase in online equity as well.

Let’s take a closer look at our Facebook example. If your particular niche is affiliate marketing, you could search on Facebook for groups that have already been created around the subject of affiliate marketing. Once you have found the groups that you would like to target you can work through the member’s of these groups systematically. For instance you could add 500 Facebook users as “friends” on your profile in a single evening.

Within a 24 hour period, even if only 10% of these users decided to reciprocate (by adding you as a friend), you would still have gained an additional 50 friends by the end of the next evening. If you gain 50 friends in one day then while you sleep the first 20 or so of these followers might have added you as friends. This example is just one way that you can build online equity while you sleep.

The next time that you decide to promote through your Facebook profile, your audience will now be 50 profiles larger than it one before. The larger your following on a particular social networking site, the larger your sphere of influence and as your influence grows so does your leverage to make money online.

What other methods can you think of for building your online equity?

The following post on Internet Marketing Essentials was submitted by Marsello Oentoro.

For those out there who are not yet familiar with the subject of Internet Marketing, trying to understand the subject can seem quite daunting. Recently I’ve received lots of questions about what Internet Marketing is all about and how someone without any knowledge or experience should start. I would suggest that you start by studying some of the basic elements of internet marketing.

1. Content – this could consist of an article, blog post, video, or audio which you’ve developed or paid someone to create for you.
2. Traffic – amount of visitors who frequent your site during a given time period.
3. Brand – your reputation as an expert in your field and the degree in which people trust your advice.
4. Affiliates – affiliate promote other people’s products usually on a per-sale commission bases.
5. Opt-In Email Newsletter Subscribers – if you collect emails from visitors and have a mailing list, this could be the most valuable asset you have in terms of creating a following and distributing your message.
6. Incoming links – are a major “off page” factor in determining your site’s rank in various search engines such as Google and Yahoo. These ranking effect the amount of traffic your site receives from these engines.
7. Split Testing – helps you compare alternative content or designs to determine which option is more effective. For example you might split test the placement of Google AdSense ads on your site to determine which layout produces the most income.

The above list was designed to provide a basic introduction to some of the core concepts of Internet Marketing. For more of the basics of internet marketing feel free to check out the articles available on the left hand side of this site. If you have any questions feel free to ask us here at Feedback Secrets either by leaving a comment or sending us an email.

If you want to get rich you should seriously consider studying unconventional business models. Simply put, if everyone is doing it, it is probably not that profitable. By studying those in our field that are not following the crowd we can begin to gain inspiration for our own revolutionary ideas.

I realize some people may not want a “revolutionary idea” because such ideas carry with them a large deal of risk. However as marketing expert Seth Godin puts it in his wildly popular book Purple Cow, “Being safe is risky.” Taking risks whether they be in marketing or designing a business model can result in facial ticks, nervous tremors, sweaty palms and occasionally angina. These risks will not make your life more convenient in any way shape or form, but as we like to say here at Feedback Secrets, “convenience is expensive”.

So since we are a site that is interested in internet marketing, one of the best ways for us to get un-convenient is to study those in our industry who are using unorthodox business models of their own. The inspiration for this post comes from fellow internet marketer Michael Conquest. Michael informed me of a technique for making money with eBay that I had not heard of previously.

The technique revolves around making money as an eBay affiliate. The eBay affiliate network was previously maintained by a site called Commission Junction, however over the last few months eBay has been in the process of switching to its own in-house affiliate network. eBay’s new network is now online and working and you can find it here.

Obviously there’s more than one way to drive traffic as an eBay affiliate, but the method which was suggested to me was to search Craigslist.com for people looking to buy specific items. After compiling a list of potential buyers you could email them with the link to an eBay auction for the item they were looking for in hopes of collecting the affiliate commission. Of course you could also use this method to promote your own eBay auctions.

I am not suggesting that this method is a path to riches, or even that you should try such a method. What I am saying is that this is an excellent example of “thinking outside the box” when it comes to an eBay based business model. That is to say, when people think, “how could I make money on eBay” this strategy is probably not the first thing that comes to mind.

Seek out wacky and unorthodox businesses models and study them, the practice may well lead the creation of your own million dollar idea. For more information on Michael Conquest you can check out his site, ConquestEmpires.com.

Tags: eBay, Internet Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, eBay Affiliate Program, Craigslist, Unorthodox eBay

We have just posted an article on the subject of affilate marketing to check it out feel free to click here.

Two posts ago we spoke about “The Four Horsemen of Web Traffic,” namely Paid Advertising, Organic Search, Social Networking, and Viral Marketing. In that post we hinted at a “Hidden Source of Web Traffic“. So what could this source possibly be, and what benefit could it be to your online business? Let’s start with the benefits.

Imagine for a moment that you have just invested serious time and money developing a first class ebook. Regardless of your chosen niche, you face an enormous problem when it comes to monetizing your product. In this day and age of file sharing services, websites, bit-torrent, and so forth, ebooks are especially susceptible to being copied illicitly. Given the nature of this technological disadvantage inherent to ebooks it would be extremely valuable to drive large amounts of targeted web-traffic to a specific conversion piece, the moment your product is released. If you assume that eventually your work will be pirated, it makes sense to sell as many copies “out of the gate” as possible.

Let’s say that you have just invented the world’s greatest course for making money with Blogs, AdSense, Mini-Sites, Affiliate Marketing, whatever. It would help to be able to make some sort of outrageous claim as a hook for the Sales Letter. For example “Discover how I made $10,000, in one Month with [Fill in the Blank].” Of course people will be skeptical of your claim so you will want screen shots to prove your earnings over a one month period. If you are the type that has no reservations about glossing over some the inherent advantages you had in accomplishing this feet, you may want to drive some instant traffic to your money making site in order to increase sales.

Business is of a time sensitive nature and a product that is a hit today, may well have turned out as a flop if brought to market a year later. If you have a product to bring to market and you just don’t have time to wait for traffic to trickle in order to test various versions of your sales letter, what should you do? Once again it would be great to be able to send a thousand or so unique visitors to each version of your letter to drastically increase the speed of your testing process.
The “Hidden Source of Web Traffic” that might allow you to duplicate the above mentioned feats of marketing magic, is a well crafted email list. We mentioned in our post “Lead Me to It” about the incredible value of a list of pre-qualified physical addresses. Building an email list of targeted leads is yet another way to fabricate your own gold mine. Indeed a large and well built list can mean instant traffic, however building such a list is not an overnight assignment. In some cases it could take years to build such a list, and even after the list is built, constant maintenance is required to keep your leads from dropping out or losing interest in your promotions.
Email lists are not a cure-all for your online business, they have there own pitfalls and dangers like any other online business technique. So I wouldn’t swear by them, but I would suggest you check them out.

If you liked this post, chances are that you’ll enjoy our post on monetizing web traffic.