We are nearing the end of 2014 – getting ready to ramp things up with big plans into 2015 across our various online business properties.
As part of an exercise sharing some of what we learned through 2014 about generating traffic and sales to our online businesses inside Information Marketer’s Zone – thought it may be useful for all of you to see a snapshot of our highest valued traffic sources and sales generation techniques.
Keep in mind that our web businesses primarily generate traffic through sales of our own products and services (~ 70% of sales this year have come from our own information products and services across 3 key markets – personal improvement, health and fitness and online business coaching)
2014 marked an interesting trend where our personal development plus health and fitness sites played an even larger role in our overall income and traffic generation achievements.
Suppose this is not completely surprising given that we work hardest on these properties, our sites helping other with online business activities are primarily driven by the successes and learnings from our core web businesses as well as things we learn through teaching others in their vast array of other businesses.
Summary Of 2014 Traffic Generation And Income Split So Far In 2014
1.Info Products & Affiliate Partners
We still earn the vast majority from our own products driven largely by partner and affiliate promotions. With ebooks, ebook packages and training courses in the areas of self-improvement, health and fitness and online business our affiliate partners drive more than 50% of our leads and well over 50% of our sales. For some of these products we use Clickbank, others we host on E-Junkie.
In 2014 we moved our main online business coaching membership site off of one payment processor onto Clickbank, mainly to consolidate for our partners. For several of our ebooks and info product bundles we moved off of 1ShoppingCart (who continued to raise their prices without demonstrable value from our perspective) to E-Junkie which has been a great e-commerce platform for our various info product offers
What is interesting for those of you involved in affiliate marketing (that is marketing other people’s products) is that we get very large returns and great conversions on our affiliate offers BECAUSE we lead with our own products and then, over time, offer valuable affiliate products based on our own use and recommendations.
I highlight this technique mainly because pure affiliate marketing is getting tougher and tougher to do based on the challenges of both getting traffic (SEO is more competitive than ever and paid ads are more expensive than ever) and achieving profitable conversions in the face of immense competition
I would go so far as to say that if you have your eye set on affiliate marketing as your main source of income, you want to produce some of your own offerings to front-end that business so you can leverage affiliates/partners, build stronger ROI (as you see your front end product to offset ad or SEO costs) and dramatically improve your conversions having established trust and credibility through the sale of your front-end product.
2. SEO/Content
Producing content and relying on SEO works (always has been relatively low conversion rates) – the key here is to be highly effective at funneling traffic into very related front-end offers (either give-away’s or even low-cost, front-end products – mind-maps, work sheets, reports, mini video trainings, etc…) I have had recent success improving conversions from high traffic blogs to both email subscribers and buyers – more than in the past for sure, but it has taken a LOT of testing and work – I just couldn’t ignore the low conversion rates anymore spending most of this year focused on improving these with good success (will continue on this into next year)
Much of the effort this year, and payoff in terms of tripling our opt-in from our blogs and content sites, was spent on producing high-value, specific training exercises packaged as either reports or video courses (Ex See the blog over at http://www.peak-personal-development.com/blog/) and including links to those courses inside content-specific posts, as well as below the header and below related posts.
We also send traffic to this simple, but highly effective landing page (We used Optimize Press 2 to put together that landing page as well as several other squeeze pages and sales pages – love that tool!)
3. Paid Ads
FB Ads to specific offers – we ran some Facebook dark post ads with positive results this year, actually very pleased with the conversions – you really have to know your numbers here and have a good sales funnel in place to ensure you are not just paying for leads, but that you are converting them into sales for positive ROI. So far we have mainly used FB ads for our own products where ROI is proven, then we can “back-end” affiliate offers to customers with established trust.
To date, we have only spent in the neighborhood of $265 in paid ads mainly over the last few months and have generated nearly $400 in sales from those initial ads plus the fact that we have 200+ new, highly targeted leads for one of our high-margin online businesses.
Based on these results, additional paid advertising is in our plans for the first quarter 2015.
4. Social –
We continue to build on Twitter and Facebook to the point of seeing some return this year, key here is engaging rather than just tweeting – really not many people are doing this STILL even after everyone has been told this is the key to social. See sales and leads coming through this year, so things are very encouraging, we are on the right track for sure. We have found that when you put in ~ 75% of your posts publishing content and engaging in conversations (through @ replies on Twitter or FB comments for example), the promotional posts towards lead-gen work best
Final Thoughts
So 2014 will see about 50% higher sales and about the same in growth of overall lead-generation this year which is completely AWESOME since we were focused mainly on growing some fairly well established businesses and spent significant time incubating some new businesses.
The ongoing process of finding opportunities in our different markets, bringing valuable offers and content toward those markets, being smart about recruiting partners and making our products and services easy to offer toward our market has paid off in 2014. What we have learned in 2014 will be expanded in 2015 paving the way for tremendous growth.
Watch our blog regularly (even better, subscribe and make sure you are notified of new posts) and if you are ready to fast-track your online business, for a very low cost, you can tap into the “Insider” trainings we post inside Information Marketer’sZone that will help you see inside our ongoing web business building and profit growth.
