Anyone with a decent effort, a few hours each week and a basic understanding of online marketing (something like the 6 Week Information Profit Course inside InfoMarketer’sZone) can get to $500/month within 1-2 months either selling affiliate products or marketing your own products.
The challenge then is how to ramp up those sales from “nice” to “make a living” type figures.Â
The good news is that when you reach $500/month (or even a couple hundred dollars each month) you have reached results that 90% of internet marketers never achieve.Â
Typically this means you have your own website, perhaps have a blog, have identified a market and product to sell to that market and have a good understanding of conversion rates – even if they are low, at least you have inside knowledge that can act as a starting point.
So, what does it take to move from $500 to $5000 then?
1. Acceptable conversions. It all starts with having a firm grasp on your conversion rates. What this means is that you are able to consistently (with a few seasonal exceptions) turn somewhere around 2-3 visitors to your site into customers. If you are below 1 customer per 100 visitors, then you have some work to do and that needs to be your primary focus. If you are at or above 2 customers per 100 visitors then you can move to steps 2 and 3 while continuing to monitor and improve your conversions as you go.Â
So how do you go about improving the conversion rate of your webpage?
Conversion is all about
1) Identifying and focusing on a clear target market, including a strong profile of your optimal buyer within that target market
2) Understanding the fundamental desired outcome held by the majority of your target market
3) Knowing how the buyers within your niche market express their desired outcome so you know what they are looking for and HOW they are looking for it.
4) Doing a good job of connecting with your market to convince them that you have the solution they want to achieve their desired outcome.Â
It starts with getting to know your customres, you can do that by
- learning what they say and how they talk on discussion forums, blogs, social networks Â
- watching how your competition target them Â
- knowing their buying behavior and reverse engineering their existing buying habitsÂ
- testing and experimenting
Understanding exactly what your market wants and why will ALWAYS help you to better target your visitors and convert them into paying champion customers.Â
2. Next, you want to leverage the effort and authority of others within your marketplace – that can be done through your affiliate progream. As you improve your conversions and prove your product or service, you can now begin to locate well-aligned affiliates and approach them as long-term partners where they will begin to recommend your product to their loyal followers. Typically conversion rates for these promotions will be 1.5 to 3 times higher than your regular conversion rates. So imagine that your typical conversion rate is 2%, but for partners they can earn commission in 4 out of every 100 referrals they make to your site, don’t you think that would interest them?Â
Inside InfoMarketer’sZone we go through a very effective method of locating and then locking up high-authority affiliates in your marketplace…with just a few affiliates you can easily improve your sales by a factor of 5 to 10 times what you can accomplish on your own.
3. Ramp up traffic. Once you stabalize your conversions at around the 2% market, new traffic generation models make economic sense. If you pay $500 for 1500 visitors that result in 30 sales with a profit of $35 then you have just found an automated way of making $500 PROFIT for each $500 invested in generating traffic. Obviously the numbers can look even better with any combination of higher conversion rate, higher profit margin on your product or increased traffic.Â
To get traffic you can pay for Pay-per-click ads, advertise on specific web properties, pay to have content generated that results in more traffic and sales, or any combination.Â
If you have an internet marketing business that is currently making money (from $100-$500/month), then you want to first focus on getting decent conversion, then it becomes an exercise in how to flood your website with traffic — at that point $5000/month will simply be one milestone as you blow past and build your own online business to greater heights.
