Archive for December, 2011

What Makes Money: List, Traffic, and Offers

• December 10, 2011

Strategy: Do you want to know what you need when you're building a real business and making real money online?

A. Create an information product and a download area for people to get it after they buy
B. Make a sales letter that explains why it's so great
C. Get traffic to it and build a list of prospects and buyers

That's it. List, traffic, and offers -- this was true back in 1997 when all you needed was a website to get traffic, in 1999 when all you needed was an affiliate program to get traffic, in 2002 when all you needed was search engine listings to get traffic, in 2005 when all you needed was a list to get traffic, and even in 2007 and beyond when all you need are joint venture partners to get massive traffic.

Tactics: Do you want to know what doesn't work?

  1. Free for all link pages
  2. Doorway pages & search engine cloaking
  3. Safelists
  4. Email co-registration
  5. Traffic exchanges
  6. Paid leads
  7. Guaranteed optins
  8. Tell-a-friend
  9. JV giveaways
  10. Ad swaps
  11. Warrior special offers
  12. Auto-bloggers
  13. Traffic loopholes
  14. Social media
  15. "Traffic getting" software

What's funny is that even if you haven't heard of every single one of these so-called "business models" -- they're the same traffic technique (which doesn't work, or only works for a couple months) -- then a year later it comes back under a different name...

Funny, right?

I know it's easy to get distracted by all these fancy terms and techniques but this is what you REALLY need to do:

A. Make a Product & Put It In a Membership Site

  1. Run a 4-week webinar class (using GoToWebinar) solving a problem in your niche
  2. Put those recording into a membership site (using Wishlist Member) and get them transcribed into reports
  3. Create a piece of software (using WP Notepad) or buy resale rights (Master-Resale-Rights.com) that solves your problem in a "push button" way and add it to that site

B. Build a List & Send Them to Your Sales Letter

  1. Capture the buyers of your membership site into a mailing list using Aweber
  2. Pull out ONE module or ONE bonus of your paid course, give it away for free and create a landing page where people can sign up and upgrade to the paid version
  3. Email your list every day

C. Drive Traffic to Increase Your List Size

  1. Setup an affiliate program and link to it in your product and in your membership site to recruit your buyers into affiliates
  2. Make at least 1 forum post every day and post at least 1 article every day until you have 100 articles and 1,000 forum posts
  3. Pay for at least 1 source of paid advertising even if it's just an email solo ad or a banner ad on a blog

That's what works for me, now YOU tell me... what works for you? What was your biggest breakthrough when it came to making a product, building a list, getting traffic, and making money? Go ahead and tell me in the comments below.

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